Population Mechanic

[ⒺⒹⒾⓃ]

Remember back in good old days when people were the most important resource? The cities grew as its population grew...The more people you have the more taxes they pay...If you dont have enough people, you cant even recruit massive armies....It was so much better than now...

[Amroth]

Now you can lose your whole army and spam recruit as much as you like.
Or suffer a defeat and your army magically replenishes on its own :P

[Berserk Breton]

I'd support population being more of a thing in this setting. Armies were small and although they weren't necessarily constrained by population as the main/only factor, it should be a consideration.

[Mile pro Libertate]

Originally posted by ⒺⒹⒾⓃ:

Remember back in good old days when people were the most important resource? The cities grew as its population grew...The more people you have the more taxes they pay...If you dont have enough people, you cant even recruit massive armies....It was so much better than now...

Two problems I had with the old, Med 2 style system:

- Town size was limited by population alone, which historically wasn't the case.
Just because you have extra people doesn't mean you can just magically make the city walls bigger. Historically, expanding the city walls was a Herculean effort even for states such as the Byzantine Empire, not to mention small duchies and counties. Most medieval towns used the walls built centuries earlier, and this defned to a huge extent how large they could actually grow.

- Unlimited population growth is a recent thing.
We take for granted that populations steadily grow nowadays: until the late 18th century this simply wasn't the case.

When population grew too large it began to outstrip available food and space back in the day, and as a result a population level beyond what subsistence economy could comfortably bear was always followed with decreased per capita incomes and then a curtailing of the growth and return back to lower population levels.

In Med 2, population could just keep growing without limit, and without any decrease in per capita incomes (your taxes got higher with increased population in game; historically, it worked this way only to a point, then you'd actually see a flatlining, followed by a decrease, in taxes).

Putting all the emphasis on growing your population, so as to increase your economy, was anachronistic for the Medieval Age, and I hope that they actually don't repeat that approach.

[Amroth]

Good points.

CA should bring back population but make it so the city size limits the max amount of population and the lack of food further decreases the population count. And you'd need to hit the max population to upgrade your city, which would be expensive as hell. Tadaa. Just fixed it for ya.

[Aluminum Elite Master]

Really, I think the population mechanic went to the wayside for a very simple reason:

it was messy.

Like the one person wrote above, population in some eras CA touched upon was complicated... disease, birth rates, famine, climate, and the local infrastructure played large parts in why people were born, died, moved, etc.

Med 2 indeed was a very big mess with population... why should each city just infinitely grow so long as you do relatively simple stuff to keep it growing? With so many factors (again, climate, disease, sanitation, etc.), there should be a lot of effort required to maintain population in some cases, let alone grow it. But if you made things more realistic, then you have to make it so town size is based off of something else... or is affected by population but not totally controlled by it.



One thing I will say, though: a basic military manpower mechanic would be fun. A pool that replenishes like in Paradox games might be a nice touch in these more-focused 'sagas'.

What drives me insane with Attila, R2, Shogun 2, etc., is that I can take Rome, Byzantium, or any enemy capitol, and it doesn't really do anything to the enemy but reduce income. There's no impact to enemy recruitment power aside from if they only had their best recruitment buildings in that city.

It's a problem that even extends into TW:W, where I can take all of Sylvania and if the VCs have a sprinkling of other cities, they just continue to raise dead (basically recruit mercenaries) like nothing happened. I can take Altdorf and the Empire shrugs at me and continues buying more-or-less the same low and mid tier units from buildings it can pop up anew in a couple turns if it needs to.

Having some sort of factor like manpower would make it so that taking important cities would be... er... important? Just tie manpower to each settlement, and away you go... might slow down the CPU processing a bit with all those extra checks, but the ME campaign in TW:W already shows people can love a campaign with 30+ second turn-end calculations.

Right now, the biggest drive in the historical games for taking big cities is because the player knows what the city ought to represent... even though it doesn't do it mechanics-wise in the game. R2 is the most hilariously stupid example in this way. Take Roma, and the Romans won't even try to get it back most of the time. They'll basically ignore it, and go on fighting Parthia or Gaul or whatever. Most illogical. Yet at the same time, all they really lost from losing Roma is the income... and from that standpoint, maybe it really is worth ignoring when other areas, entire provinces, could also fold from enemy pressure.

[ⒺⒹⒾⓃ]

Originally posted by Aluminum Elite Master:

Really, I think the population mechanic went to the wayside for a very simple reason:

it was messy.

Like the one person wrote above, population in some eras CA touched upon was complicated... disease, birth rates, famine, climate, and the local infrastructure played large parts in why people were born, died, moved, etc.

Med 2 indeed was a very big mess with population... why should each city just infinitely grow so long as you do relatively simple stuff to keep it growing? With so many factors (again, climate, disease, sanitation, etc.), there should be a lot of effort required to maintain population in some cases, let alone grow it. But if you made things more realistic, then you have to make it so town size is based off of something else... or is affected by population but not totally controlled by it.



One thing I will say, though: a basic military manpower mechanic would be fun. A pool that replenishes like in Paradox games might be a nice touch in these more-focused 'sagas'.

What drives me insane with Attila, R2, Shogun 2, etc., is that I can take Rome, Byzantium, or any enemy capitol, and it doesn't really do anything to the enemy but reduce income. There's no impact to enemy recruitment power aside from if they only had their best recruitment buildings in that city.

It's a problem that even extends into TW:W, where I can take all of Sylvania and if the VCs have a sprinkling of other cities, they just continue to raise dead (basically recruit mercenaries) like nothing happened. I can take Altdorf and the Empire shrugs at me and continues buying more-or-less the same low and mid tier units from buildings it can pop up anew in a couple turns if it needs to.

Having some sort of factor like manpower would make it so that taking important cities would be... er... important? Just tie manpower to each settlement, and away you go... might slow down the CPU processing a bit with all those extra checks, but the ME campaign in TW:W already shows people can love a campaign with 30+ second turn-end calculations.

Right now, the biggest drive in the historical games for taking big cities is because the player knows what the city ought to represent... even though it doesn't do it mechanics-wise in the game. R2 is the most hilariously stupid example in this way. Take Roma, and the Romans won't even try to get it back most of the time. They'll basically ignore it, and go on fighting Parthia or Gaul or whatever. Most illogical. Yet at the same time, all they really lost from losing Roma is the income... and from that standpoint, maybe it really is worth ignoring when other areas, entire provinces, could also fold from enemy pressure.

I never said "each city just infinitely grow" or anything like that....I just dont like the current unlimited bodies...it is all so dumbed down, it makess everything BORING.....armies taking serious casulties make no difference at all, because magically human bodies will replenish your army in the next 2 turns....NO....that is BAD.

I am supposed to CARE about my soldiers and people...when my soldier dies for ME on the battlefield I am supposed to care...he is supposed to be valuable

[Aluminum Elite Master]

What I was saying was that the fact that you could pretty much infinitely grow a city in Med 2 was an issue in itself. And that was just trying to support the claim I made, which was that CA did away with population because it was only a half-implemented mechanic. For the time in which the game was made, it was acceptable I guess, but going forward they probably knew they either had to improve that mechanic or just get rid of it entirely.

But I think you and I agree... like I wrote in what you quoted, population of cities is an issue but one I don't care *too much* about. What I dislike is that there's no such thing as manpower in these games. It makes taking the great historical cities into anti-climax after anti-climax when Rome can replenish and recruit without any impact at all while I hold Roma, and so on.

[Mile pro Libertate]

Originally posted by Aluminum Elite Master:

What I was saying was that the fact that you could pretty much infinitely grow a city in Med 2 was an issue in itself. And that was just trying to support the claim I made, which was that CA did away with population because it was only a half-implemented mechanic. For the time in which the game was made, it was acceptable I guess, but going forward they probably knew they either had to improve that mechanic or just get rid of it entirely.

But I think you and I agree... like I wrote in what you quoted, population of cities is an issue but one I don't care *too much* about. What I dislike is that there's no such thing as manpower in these games. It makes taking the great historical cities into anti-climax after anti-climax when Rome can replenish and recruit without any impact at all while I hold Roma, and so on.

I enjoyed both your last posts.

The main point I was trying to hit on is not so much that population should be difficult to grow or maintain in anew system for TW, although that is definitely a part of my critique of the old games, but that **growing population shouldn't necessarily be a good thing to begin with.**

We have our modern world view, and we are, most of us anyway, in the West. Whether conscious of it or not, we therefore have a prevailing idea that growth in population = (or should equal) growth in economy.

But this is a very recent development in the human story.

You don't actualy see this till the emergence of capitalism in the 15th and 16th centuries, and then only in portions of Europe; it doesn't become widespread in Europe till the 17th and 18th centuries, and even then the old population dynamic holds in many areas (notably, Tsarist Russia as late as the 1917 revolution); it doesn't start becoming widespread around the world till after 1800; and it doesn't become the "rule" till about 1950, and once again, there are large exceptions even today (huge portions of Africa, for example, still live ensnared within the "Malthusian Trap").

We automatically think of population increase = wealth/economic growth because we take for granted a market system using monetary exchange, capital goods, labor pools, investments, startups, stock markets, assembly line manufacture, world trade, pasteurization, canned food, etc.

But throughout the vast majority of human time, the per capita wealth of a population or region would diminish if the population size went beyond an optimal level, i.e. the level that the region could sustain with food. Excess people beyond a certain, optimal threshold for a region simply meant more mouths to feed and more competition for available resources, not more productivity, and certainly not more wealth for the ruler or government of the region.

With too many farmers, you have less surplus crop, which translates to less tax. With less surplus food, the price of food also increased: this meant townsmen might not be able to make a living because they could not distribute enough craft goods or sell enough of their services to purchase adequate food; adding to this was the medieval system of guilds, or their ancestor, the apprenticeship orders/clans. These institutions limited how many journeymen there would be for a given trade as one of their main objectives, so having a bunch of extra guys running around didn't help if there were only so many open slots at being an apprentice or neophyte.

Initially, landlords might see an increase to their productivity and wealth from all this, as townsmen left and sought tenancy on estates; but eventually they would reach their optimal levels for their "manor economy" as well.

So you have less taxable income in a direct sense, in both fields and town, and on top of that, you add other, social factors, which indirectly reduced tax incomes.

For example, with food priced more dearly and in less surplus, people would also be more reluctant to pay the taxman, even if what was asked for was reduced in burden. The tendency for the king's/lord's officers to skim, to setup private deals with subjects, etc. would increase. Tax farming was often resorted to, to offset the skimming and insider dealing in an environment of reluctance to pay, but tax farming is wasteful because the tax farmer can pocket so much.

With "surplus members of the population" who are without food or vocations, you also have increased likelihood of highwaymen and bandit groups forming; this can stem trade and add to the cycle of the decreased productivity of the towns. It also took up lords' resources, having to post more men to patrol roads, guard toll booths, etc.

So growing your population to increase wealth was not something that was thought of in the Medieval Age, at least beyond what the landscape could naturally bear.

Even today, this concept would be strange to people in say, Mali. If you went to the state there and said, "oh you guys are poor...you could start changing that by growing your population," they would look at you bewildered and probably say, "We have too many people already! Every extra girl is a baby factory, and every extra boy is fodder for the jihadists' and warlords' armies!"

In the Medieval Age, there were basically four ways to increase incomes, at least for rulers:

- Make more effective use of existing land
- Bring more land into possession
- Tribute from other realms
- Tolls and tarriffs on traffic, trade goods, pilgrammage trails, etc.

The first one doesn't really matter for TW so much, because new ways of maximzing land or resource yields were slow in coming. Owing to a variety of cultural, technological, and ecological factors, something like three field farming or using horses as plow beasts instead of oxen, took hundreds of years to happen. If we are playing at around 55 year timeframes, or even 100+ year ones in ToB, the game is over before radical changes in land/resource use come into play.

That leaves taking more land into possession, tributary deals, and tolls and tarriffs.

I really hope tribute is a big thing in ToB, because in this era and location on the earth, it definitely was.

The Norse of the Great Heathen Army grew infinitely richer exacting gold and silver tributes in a few years time from England than they ever would've if they just stuck to farming and 'grew their population' for ten times the time length. And of course, the Norse people more generally grew rich through widespread trading.

In Ireland, minted money itself was more or less absent, and cattle were used as the exchange medium. Tribute in cattle was thus a huge part of their social fabric and economy. Brian Boru even earned his nomen from this: he was born Brian Mac Cennetig, and became "the Boru" because of the 'boruma,' or cattle tribute, which was synonymous with him being the most powerful man on the island, and a functionally true High King, not simply a symbolic one.

In this time period, kings and other headmen were usually land rich, or rich in retainers and men owing fealty, but monetarily poor; monies they did have came from tributes, raids, or ransoms.

I hope CA tries to factor this in with ToB, by placing less emphasis on a "Treasury" and tax money than they have with their previous games, as well as ditching the "grow your population to increase tax" dynamic, and instead go with a more historical approach that measures faction wealth and recruitment/construction power on gathering retainers, vassals, and tributes.

PS: And I almost forgot to add, one of the weird things that could happen in the old days, with growing population, is that you could actually increase the power or resiliency of your rivals.

If too many people were on the landscape, many of them would eventually decide to leave and become townsmen, or seek out tenancy on new manors, and if the native region was filled up in these aspects, people weren't beyond moving to other regions to live in the towns or on the manors there.

In the Medieval Age, there wasn't nationalism, at least not tied to a specific geographic territory or state, again, another thing we take for granted nowadays as a "fact of life."

But in the Medieval era, people weren't beyond simply moving to another country where prospects might be better, and more importantly, the rulers in that other country did not have aversion to having them, so long as they weren't coming as raiders or religious zealots or something.

So, you could easily have a situation, where county/duchy A has too many people, and county/duchy B has not reached an optimal population size; if some of the excess moved from A to become tenants, townsmen, hired guns, etc. in B, county/duchy B has now moved closer to optimums and is "richer," more resilient in war and against ecological catastrophe.

So realm A could actually see their next-door rival, B, become more resilient because A had too many people.

[Noblehunter]

All interesting points and hopefully they are being or have been considered for the next game.

Another change I would like to see is a return to a drop in veterancy as more troops are needed to replenish a unit after battle. It just doesnt seem right that for instance a rank 9 unit stays at rank 9 despite having say 2/3 of the unit killed in battle. For me the more recruits brought into a unit the less experienced it should be as a result.

[ⒺⒹⒾⓃ]

Originally posted by Noblehunter:

All interesting points and hopefully they are being or have been considered for the next game.

Another change I would like to see is a return to a drop in veterancy as more troops are needed to replenish a unit after battle. It just doesnt seem right that for instance a rank 9 unit stays at rank 9 despite having say 2/3 of the unit killed in battle. For me the more recruits brought into a unit the less experienced it should be as a result.

I agree with this point too...This would make you consider when you throw into battle these more valuable troops....