Sun Sep 14, 2008 11:12 pm
Another thing that I found annoying in all the Paradox titles was that population movement was not well simulated. Instead of the clumsy colonization method used in EUII, or the opaque system in Vicky, I think that the best thing to do is to have a matrix with all land areas rated for the likeliehood of their people to move to all other land areas (to reduce the amount of memory use you could use super-regions like US states). Each intersection would have a rating, either 0 (no contact), to + or - a few percent a year of population moving one direction or another. Variables would be the relationship between the two countries (easiest if it is the same country, of course), the economic strength of each place, the cultural similarity between the donor country and at least some portion of the population of the recipient area, technological conditions simulating ease of travel, infrastructure levels of each area, event-driven conditions simulating things like gold rushes, and political considerations related to governmental policies, encouragement of immigration, pogroms, slave trade, etc. You check once a year (doesn't have to soak up processor time every day) and people move realistically. Otherwise you end up like I frequently did in Vicky with Alaska being the most populous state in the USA and Chicago being a tiny village. Or some German areas in the 1850's losing huge percentages of their population while neighboring ones were not losing any at all.