So, in 4X games there are several ways to use food besides feeding and growing your population.

1. Some games allow you to use food to help produce settlers, others just cut off all extra food, and still others just make the population drop by 1 when you build a settler. What should Humankind use?

2. Endless Space 2 had a cool system where a percentage of food would go towards "manpower", a resource needed to defend your systems and man your ships. Will this make a return? Perhaps just give units a food maintenence cost that will be paid by either their home city or the nearest city?

3. Will there be a population cap like in ES2 or a soft housing cap like in Civ 6, or will it function more like Endless Legend where you can go as high as you can keep happy?

4. I know needing to build a new district whenever population goes up by 2 in EL was annoying, will this be a little more automated or quicker to do in this game? Perhaps whenever pop boes up high enough it will automatically let you place a new district that can be upgraded to a special one later for production?

5. Can you stockpile/spend food to accelerate healing certain units (or for that matter production for other units)? 

6. Could you start a "feast" in a city that boosts happiness but makes everyone eat more food? It could even have multiple levels as the game goes on, and would be a really good limiting factor for growth; having a higher standard of living requires spending more food, but if you don't do it you can have a higher population but will still grow  even unhappier due to rising population levels.

7. Could certain techs/cultures allow you to draft the cheapest possible unit for a population in exchange for a temporary happiness/stability penalty?

8. Can you trade food somehow?

What do you all think?

You packed a lot of different subjects into one post, which is going to make it difficult to reach a satisfactory conclusion.

My quick take is that while there are many features that would be realistic, most of them shouldn't be in an initial release. You could make game mechanics to reflect droughts/pestilence, desertification from overfarming, selective breeding, overcrowding, suburbanization, health and disease. Most would be interesting to include in mods, but would probably be too complex if added together.

Food and city growth

1. "Settler" units should be paid for with gold. Settling in Western culture was mostly a state/corporate venture where people were paid to live in a new land. People who leave an area due to overcrowding or famine are refugees, and they go to existing places with food; not undeveloped territories.

3. Happiness is the way to go, but housing (or health more broadly) should be a part of happiness. Also consider the impact of prosperity and education on population and birth rates.

4. I like the idea of a new district for passing certain pop levels. I'm not a fan of specialized districts like in Civ 6, but EL handled it well. Buildings are city specific, not district specific

6. Feasts may be present as events, probably not as a policy choice.

Food and military/diplomacy

2. I do like the manpower mechanic in ES2, and there should be a logistics feature in HK. Maybe not a food cost, but certainly manpower, gold, and special resources (fuel oil) should be considered.

5. Food shouldn't be important when healing or producing units. It's always about the money for new recruits, equipment, and weapons.

7. EL has this in militia units. I think the idea of levies or militias could be expanded, but it is unrelated to food.

8. As much as I would like this to be a feature, trade is difficult to get right. Every 4X game I know of let's every player/AI be self-sufficient for food, so there is no need for food trade.

This is a great topic. One thing that I think the Endless games do much better than other similar 4X titles is giving importance to your population. I particularly hope many of the population mechanics from Endless Space 2 such as Manpower and having various unique pops with different specialties and political aims make it into Humankind in some form.

As for your first point about Settlers, I think it has been revealed that there won't be "Settler units" in the traditional sense in HK. Rather cities will gradually form from scouting or trade outposts you have previously set around the map. (Please correct me if I'm wrong about this). I could see a food sharing system similar to Endless Space 2 where if you decide to develop one of your outposts into a city you would have to divert some resources toward it for a certain number of turns.

Speaking of food sharing, I really love how Age of Wonders: Planetfall handled this aspect of their economy. Any city can be set to one of 3 settings: prevent deficit, take food, or share food. All cities which are sharing food send their excess into an empire-wide pool, and that pool is redistributed to any cities taking food. However, there is a food tax which represents the cost of logistics of moving the food to new cities. As you progress through the game you can create buildings or policies that reduce this food tax and make your food sharing more efficient. Would love to see an elegant system like this implemented in HK.

When it comes to districts, I actually prefer the more specialized approach of Civ 6 to the generic adjacency bonuses of Endless Legend. We also know from screenshots and comments by the devs that there will be a higher level of district specialization in HK, which I'm glad to hear.

It's obvious that Civ 6 copied (or was HEAVILY inspired by) the ideas of unstacked cities and adjacency bonuses in EL. In fact, they turned it up to 11 and I believe most people would agree those are THE defining features of the game. Therefore, I think Humankind's district system needs to go a different direction entirely to make it feel fresh again. My idea for this is more customizable districts.

Rather than deciding "I will place a Science District here." in a very deterministic way, I'd rather have a sort of mix-and-match style. Say each district starts out as a kind of generic neighborhood like in Endless Legend. Then the district could have 3 available "building slots". After the district is placed, then the player could decide to build a library, workshop, harbor, market, or any other combination of buildings. And each combination would create different synergies and bonuses. So I would have the choice to create a full-on science district with 3 science related buildings, or I could take a more generalist approach and put a workshop, market and recreation area.

The last thing I'd really like to see relating to population is a sort of pop experience system. This would tie in directly to how you manage individual pops in your FIDSI system. For example, for every pop I currently have working an Industry slot, I also gain some 'Industry experience". Then I can choose to spend this experience to receive free upgrades, one-time resource boosts or other benefits that represent your people's expertise they have gained in that particular field.

Whichever direction the devs decide to go, I hope that they will keep the focus on the people within your civilization. I don't think the majority of your empire's FIDSI should come from mere buildings or adjacency bonuses (although those should be factors). I think it's more realistic and interesting to place the bulk of your empire's potential on your citizens. If I have the world's largest factory, but nobody to work in it, doesn't do me much good. Or if I have a bustling trade hub with the rarest luxury goods, but my people are unhappy and revolting, then my economy will suffer the consequences. These are the type of situations I hope we can manage as we write our own story of history in Humankind.

Zugg_zug wrote:

The last thing I'd really like to see relating to population is a sort of pop experience system. This would tie in directly to how you manage individual pops in your FIDSI system. For example, for every pop I currently have working an Industry slot, I also gain some 'Industry experience". Then I can choose to spend this experience to receive free upgrades, one-time resource boosts or other benefits that represent your people's expertise they have gained in that particular field.

I like this idea. Heck, maybe that's how different populations develop. When you level up maybe one of your citizens will become a "specialist" that gets certain bonuses and a political opinion. Perhaps when you level up a certain number of your citizens will become known for coming from that region/city and basically become a new "species"/race/ethnicity that have their own bonuses and penalties that can emigrate to other regions and become minorities there.

Aye_Avast wrote:

1. "Settler" units should be paid for with gold. Settling in Western culture was mostly a state/corporate venture where people were paid to live in a new land. People who leave an area due to overcrowding or famine are refugees, and they go to existing places with food; not undeveloped territories.

This makes some sense. It would certainly be a new experience, although there is the fact that settlers would need to bring food with them oftentimes to last until they could either learn to hunt the local game or begin to grow crops. Also, the new outpost system may connect with this, I know in ES2 one of the options with outposts was to pay money or influence to encourage people and food to move there faster.

City specialization:

I could get behind the idea of giving each city tile a number of slots for player building choice. I just want to avoid the Civ scenario where a college and library supposedly take up the same amount of space as a city. The scale and perspective of districts is already a bit far-fetched in Civ, but it was more reasonable in EL.

Pop Experience:

I'd prefer not to have this feature, and handle it in a different way.

Civ handled it with specialists that produce a building's yield and Great Person Points (GPP). This is pretty elegant on its own, and worked well along side the government/policy card system (so a military government could chose a card where armories added science).

All told, I'd prefer to hear more details about how the dev team wants to handle progression in this sense.

As for 8, trading food

I think it could be cool to have some control over the yields from trade routes. Trade routes could have a bonus yield the player picks for trade between allies, which would be commercial goods, which yield extra gold, luxury goods, which yield happiness, or crops, which yield food. Luxuries would only be available as a bonus if the destination city has an improved luxury good, and crops would only be available if the destination city has a food surplus.

The bonus yield for trading with an ally would encourage making allies trading partners as well as diplomatic partners. Missing out on bonus yields with allies would also be a kind of penalty for war mongering. The food and happiness would also make trading centers some of the most prosperous cities, and the yields could complement each other well. Have enough happiness? Grow your city with food. Too many people? Help keep em happy.

This would also make sense historically. "Breadbasket" regions of the world, like Egypt in the classical Mediterranean or the middle colonies during the colonial era, were vital in sharing their food surpluses through trade, while of course luxury goods traveled far and wide over trade routes.