Resources as your population cap

[:1]I hate hovels!



Why am I building hovels? Shouldn't my peasants be worrying about that?



I get really tired of having to deal with an artificial population cap in strategy games. Admittedly this has been less prevalent recently, particularly in future-themed offerings such as Supreme Commander; however the construction of dwellings for the lowliest of your minions still seems to be a mainstay in the fantasy-strategy genre.



Obviously a population cap needs to be imposed for technical reasons, but rather than wasting time messing around building "houses" or "farms" to increase an artificial population cap, I would like to see Kings and Castles take an approach similar to that seen in sandbox games (or the lesser known Warrior Kings), and have resource consumption limit population growth.



In simpler terms: Units provide their own housing. Units eat food/gold. If you run out of food/gold, units die/desert.



Spinning off on a tangent here, it would be interesting if units could desert and become bandits, with AI having them target peasents and run away from military forces.



Using this mechanic has some very interesting strategic implications. You can choose to stockpile a large amount of food in preparation for briefly fielding a large army, but at the same time you run the risk of being overrun by a more aggressive enemy.



Additionally, if you are going to allow your players to strategically manage food production and consumption, I would like to see management of food scarcity as a strategic element as well. In the event that you run out of food, a food distribution slider should appear allowing you to choose how the available food and gold is distributed between your peasants and your military.



Wait! We love the hovels!



In one of my other suggestion threads I talk about visual detail; while I am not at all keen on having to manually integrate peasant hovels into my city grid, I think that the hovels do contribute important visual details and clutter for your kingdom. So why not have shacks spring up automatically around your city in proportion to your population size? The king doesn't have to worry about zoning regulations (or occupancy for that matter), so if you want to raze a hundred pitiful hovels to the ground to build a royal banquet hall just drop the building on top of them and have the hovels spring up elsewhere automatically.|||I've actually been thinking of something similar, using resources as a unit cap.



Say your "hovels", houses, or any building generates a certain amount of gold per second. building units costs gold, and when built, they will continue to use gold at a certain rate. Hence, the number of buildings/hovels you have directly affects the amount of units you can have.



i.e. hovels generate +10 gold. infantry use -1 gold maintenance/pay. you can then build 10 infantry before your net income is zero. That is not necessarily bad, you could have 100'000 gold in storage, which could allow you to build several dozen more units before your supplies reach zero.



at that point i'd suggest the units build AFTER net zero income loose effectiveness, sort of stunned with 50% speed, hp, damage, etc.|||re1wind|||Actually population limits with farms and houses and stuff is like an extra resource already. It is for example part of your BO - you have to build x storage before you can build that many units.



Not to say that your idea sucks or anything, I think it could be good, but stop thinking about it as a stupid meaningless thing.|||This relates to a idea I posted a while ago. However, I sort of took the opposite approach.



I use "settlements" as resource production sites that need to be occupied/owned/captured/etc. They would develop automatically, but could be encouraged to grow quicker. As they grew, the resource flow from them would increase and additional people and structures would be added to the settlement. You'd never need to build houses and create villagers, but they would both be visually presented within the game. This also enables larger armies as the game goes on, and provides critical locations to attack and defend, since if a settlement is destroyed your population cap would be lowered.



This idea could be exported to castles as well, depending on how they function within the game.|||So basically upkeep costs like in the Total War series. If you don't know what I'm talking about, let's take Empire : Total War as an example.
A regiment of Line Infantry (120 men) costs about 250 florins in upkeep per turn. It all feeds in to a few big numbers ((Tax Income + Trade Income) - (Navy Upkeep + Army Upkeep)) = Income per turn. If the drain exceeds you revenue, the way Empire handles it is that it "kills" off people in a unit - that regiment of Line Infantry might get cut down to 60 men, which costs only half the upkeep. (The game never specifies exactly if they disband, desert, or if you retire the soldiers you can't pay - I guess it doesn't really matter. )|||I like where this is going. I agree with Webbie and Vechs. This method helps keep the genre in its "time period" so to speak.|||i like springing up hovels for working class which can be turned into soldiers
so theres a balance and some tactical implications and i would look good for once to have organic growth of houses instead of th big block you put somewhere safe just to have the pop out of them gives a more realistic look and feel to your base|||Webbie|||Just to keep this train of thought going, I agree with the "upkeep" strategy, and the fact that it directly limits how many units die or desert your army. To tie it into the period better, and make it more accessible to players, give castles/towns and armies "supply lines" or "stockpiles".
While keeping the system as simple and dumbed-down as possible so as not to add too many micromanagement mechanics, the success of a medieval army is 100% dependent on its ability to feed and arm itself (in the simplest of terms). Give castles stockpiles to hold these supplies in preparation for a siege, or to send the supplies out with an army. Castles and armies both must have established "supply lines" in order to get more of these "supplies" (they can be whatever, iron, grain, etc.). Maybe just a wagon train, or a road, or a underground tunnel to move goods?
Do armies get basecamps, or some similar form of temporary storage or defense? I guess it depends on how complex a system you would want to build for resources. Again, my guess is that this is going to be a pretty action oriented RTS, so
For what it's worth...|||What if you do things other way around?
Say, what if the buildings are not free, but armies are.
Once you build a camp (factories). it will continue to spam unit up to a set cap (you pick a combination of unit for it to "infinite queue"). so instead of the need to increase the cap by building farms ect ect, you build farms and ect ect and units themselves are free. The fewer unit is already associated with a production building, the faster it spams.
This obviously does not work on experimental units, there should be some point for players to take care of those |||It might be interesting to have some sort of reinforcement structure that simply spawns specific units that will join your army, Demigod portal style, but these units are controllable.|||Original post reminds me of the Cossacks. +1.
as a further idea, maybe have fixed positions on the map, like with the mass extractors, to make your gold mines, and make a modifier in the menu, so you can still artificially change the technical unit capacity..