Visual: outside of urban

[colonyan]

  Now we have very nice river element in game which affect both in visual and game play, actual physical land scape
  alternation, how about complement this with visual agricultural area?

  Imagine rivers, farm lands, crowd shadow and variety of ground objects. (We already have 2!)
  They will greatly embellish the area surrounding the urban area. It can also help building distinct difference of
  atmosphere between city area and out of city area.

  Mechanics

  Lets spread some "village house" tile all around the map.
  They might prefer settle near population center,forest, lower altitude and near river.
  They will consist of 1x1 tile with 1 or two house graphic.
  Farm tile will sprout slowly around the those village houses.
  New village houses can appear as existing village house been removed or as population increase.

  Most of farm tiles will be static, only changes graphic onece or twice a year.
  Maybe three variations. Vegetable, grain and cattle.

  No farm tile as game starts, they spread as time goes.
  They should cost 1 unit remove cost.(1000c as default)(or maybe less)

  Relation with cities

  To restrict farm land spread, cap the max farm tile to be proportional to total map population.
  Ideally, quarter of smallest map (64 X 64) 1000 tile should feed several hundred thousand to half million.
 
  Ideal would be population expansion limited to available farm tile limit for simulation purpose.
  Since this is mainly visual enhancement, in case space runs out, population can exceed farm land proportion.
  May be making population growth slows down when exceeding available farm tile limit will balance game play
  overall in my current opinion.
 
  Another balance element
  As extra element, tile number of forest and river tile can limit the number of allowed farm land to simulate
  the natural richness of the map. Thus we can give meaning to forest tile and can give tool to balance
  the map coverage of fores/farm/city tiles. This setting should be variable for each map to ensure play variation.

  Few points to complement
  Of course no pass/mail/good traffic will be created from those farm tiles and village houses.(for now)
 
  Possible new game behavior
  1.How about village houses upgrade to conventional town/city given some condition? Such as
  fast growth happening in nearby city? Villages grow in to new bed town.
  Or new factories out of city limit gives new town where village house exist?
 
  2.How about public player build road connection to nearby village houses? It will give natural looking
     spider nest like road spread. Plus in the case village house upgraded in to new town, the road can serve as
     main road.
 
  Final note
  To start with, most simple ones, population capped farm tile spread around village houses is good to start with.
  In case map runs out of space, population should still increase regardless of number of farm tile. Maybe
  non linear slower growth can be good.

  P.S. Thanks for reading all this long. Feel free to criticize possible problems.
  P.S.S. I can help with graphics.
 

[vilvoh]

In relation to agricultural elements (farms, village houses, farm tiles, animals, etc..) It's already possible to carry this out with the current implementation, coding those elements as ground objects like the small lakes or flocks of sheeps you can see in maps in latest versions. They can be coded only for specific climates, and they don't generate any mail, passengers or traffic. You can also specify the distribution weight to make them appear more often or hardly ever. IMHO, It's a possible solution.

[VS]

The single issue I would have with using groundobj is, fields. They should cluster around farm, not randomly pop up anywhere. Otherwise I really like that part.

[jamespetts]

One could just make the farms much bigger (in terms of fields), without changing their productivity. After all,  in reality, farms are not the size of large factories, but have much larger fields.

[VS]

I think this is a misunderstanding. Both I and Vilvoh didn't talk about industrial fields as possible now.