Great stuff.  Let me try to add to all this:

1. Perhaps we should make food production more like in the original design. That is, food becomes a global resource.

2. Housing is NOT going to go away. For one thing, it's "boring" right now because it's largely just a required step for every city.  It's not housing itself. It's anythign that doesn't really provide the player a choice is something that should be eliminated.

3. Another reason housing isn't going to go away is that in the graphical mode of the game, which you don't have yet, housing really helps make your cities visually interesting and lively.

4. But the main reason housing isn't going to go away is that it provides a means for players to decide which cities they want as their big population cities WITHOUT monkeying with sliders (there will be no sliders in Elemental thank you very much).

I think if we move food to be a global resource then housing matters a lot more because it's how you decide where that food is going to be distributed.

What do you think about my idea of an unlimited population (but food would still limit your overall population in your kingdom), but houses would limit the "educated" or "well-living" citizens. And the excedent citizens would create some nasty things in your cities (because they have nowhere to live) ? It still works with a global food resource.

At the moment housing is just boring and there's no real choice to do. Only houses (and apartments) or mansions. But why would you build something that would appeal the citizens if you don't have enough place for them ?

" - Yeah with my mansion I can attract 30 citizens per turn !

- But you have space for only 100."

Maybe instead of a food limit, a ratio of food/citizens that would be on a city-basis.

A city with 100 food and 50 citizens have a ratio of 2 food/citizen. So they are happy, they build faster, resist disease, get better this or that. If you go below 0.5 food/citizen in  a city then your population can start some riots. Some of them can die of starving. If there's too many mansions in a city that starves, then the poor attack the rich ones. You would have to think where you put your population and what to do to make them live a happy life. You wouldn't have to change anythiong, just add good/bad events due to starvation/overfood. And add the kind of citizen and you're with an system that force you to make some choices.

Idea <Kind of citizens> : In each city you have rich/ordinary/poor people. the interesting thing is that the number of rich people is limited with mansions, ordinary is limited with houses, but poor people aren't limited. you can get how many you want. But they can create bad events (and if you have a city with a lot of rich and poor you surely will have some riots)

Maybe a governor could add an option in the city UI : "immigration philosphy" : you set it to "allow/don't allow new citizens". So you could build some cities with only rich ones, or cities of poor, with very few rich ones avoiding problems, getting cheap units. Maybe "intellectual" buildings like schools or the like could be limited by the available educated people (rich + ordinary). Few elite ? Your libraries won't be as efficient as they could be.

Choices, choices, that's what we want.

You're right. And I tried to keep my idea as simpel as possible

In fact having just a global food resource would lower the choices we need to make. At the moment the roads you build are vital to your food distribution. And there's at the moment one flaw : if A and B are connected and B and C are connected then automatically A and C are connected. Only cities that are directly connected should create caravans (or if you build a road between A and C).

I don't think anyone wants to get rid of housing. I think most just want to make it more "fun". I think people find housing boring right now because its either tedious or not engaging enough. This might be due to the fact the beta is not suppose to be fun, and not everything is working as intended right now.

1. I wouldn't mind if food is a global or fungible. Perhaps make the the food fungible only to cities that the food source is connected to via roads. I would like to see some sort of a distance modifer, something that can be fiddled with better tech, roads, buildings, faction/race traits.

2. I think one of the main choices a player should make is the function of the city. Is it going to be a farming settlement or a megalopolis city that does everything. Or something a bit more focuse. Right now all cities seem to go the same direction, which I see can be due to not everything working as intended.

3. I agree, actual house strutures should be in the game. Aesthetics is crucial and shouldn't be underestimated.

4. I just don't like housing being the main factor for population. I admit this might just be totally personal preference. However, I agree with others that there seems to be too many things factoring into population cap/growth. We got both food and housing working equally to determine cap, and then prestige acting as growth rate.  I personally would like prestige act as the main factor for both population cap/growth. Food then determines the percentage of that population cap/growth. Once enough food achieves 100% of the prestige determined cap/rate, the excess food goes to the other cities. At this point, we can either build the houses to accomodate the population, or as I and others have suggested build residential zones where houses will pop up automatically once population is there (mainly to notify the player that house is being used). Not having enought houses produces shanty towns outside of town or/and some sort of civil unrest. I feel like Im just retyping my previous posts so I'll stop here...

(One more thing, in real world terms, prestige acting as the main factor for pop cap/growth makes better sense. New York isn't a big city because someone built alot housing there. Nor would building a ton of apartments will ever make Omaha, Nebraska a huge metropolitan center. Something attracted people there and keeps them there, and prestige is a perfect representation of that).

Frankly, I don't see housing as tedious, but simply unengaging. I feel we need more thing to do in our city to tweak it a bit and personalize, but Im sure you guys have something planned that the rest of us simply haven't played with yet.

@Outlaw, while I agree that your case for prestige is interesting, Housing should definitely be the main factor for pop-caps.

However, housing does just that, pop caps. It doesnt mean that citizens will live there. You need some level of prestige for that to happen. If you have lots of food, and lots of housing, then your people may be prone to migrating to better cities belonging to a rival nation. As in, if Omaha had alot of houses, and alot of people lived there for a time, but then New York had the same amount of housing, and 100x the prestige, then most of Omaha's population would migrate to New York if given the chance.

Meaning, if you have 100 people, and housing for 100 people, and new york had 100 people, and housing for 200 people, then the citizens of Omaha would migrate to New York, and Omaha(you) would have 20 people, and New York would have 180 people (an abstraction, but I hope it would relay my point).

If however, prestige were to act as you are talking, then housing wouldn't be very meaningful, and people could cheaply powergame by Building nothing but prestige and no actual housing. By doing so, they could build only 1 house in the capital and have most of the population go there. It wouldn't make sense, because without a housing cap the system could easily be broken.

Well people don't move to cities because there is a free house just waiting for them to live in. They go to cities because thats where the oppurtunity and action is at (prestige). However since all of this is a big abstraction anyway, we can really call it however we want.

In the system im talking about, if you were to build up prestige and no housing, you would have a huge population. A population that you first need to feed (the food has to come from somwhere) and since you have focused on prestige, it must come from other cities. With no adequete housing, the people would be forced to build shanty towns all around the city (and perhaps just outside of it too). Remember population determines housing in this system. With no real housing (either actual buildings or residential zones) this would be a crap load of shany towns. This would lower the citys prestige (lowering population in the long run) and perhaps start spawning bandits and thieves as I mentioned earlier. IT would be super inefficient, as you would be importing all this food to support one big crime cease pool. Plus a lot of the prestige making buildings are high end housing anyway.

These are called "refugees". Lots of crime among them. They don't contribute to the society they're in, etc..

Okay, I'm trying to distill the ideas presented here.

So here's what I'm seeing:

1. NET food becomes a global resource. That is, I build a farm and it provides 50 food into my global food resource.
2. When I build a house, it consumes food. So a hut may require 1 food to build.
3. City population thus becomes decoupled from local food making housing interesting and fun.
4. If for some reason (farming outpost gets conquered or something) and your global food resource goes negative, then your cities start to ration food. A negative production penalty = to the negative food amount is enforced (If Kingdom has a net food deficit of -9 per turn then my kingdom's productivity takes a 9% hit).

What about bad things ? If you get on a negative food then not only do you get a hit on your productivity but also a chance that you get "negative" quests (bring back the food or we revolt !).

For instance : you have 50 food and need 60. Your at -10 on 60 it's a 15,666% So each turn you get a 15,66666% to get a bad event. Bad events (or bad quests) could have a "weight" : searching for food (killing something ? Diplomacy ?) or building something that would let your citizens happy for a time (We want a pub ! or we revolt !) wouldn't be on par.

Anyway I like your overall idea. Intuitive, easy, and choices. Hummm choices.

Cikomyr - We're going to do both.

We're going to have pioneers units that can go out and harvest resources (ala asteroids in galciv2) except the resources go into the global pool.

Of course, they're pretty vulnerable if they're not protected by a city but it's one of those "interesting" choices.

So you will actually allow pioneers to go Conquering the Wild West Food plains of Kharek Tar?

I gotta buy this game..

By the way, does this imply that food can be traded with other Kingdoms?  I really hope so, as that would be a very cool facet to it all.

With the current 1G tech tree, you will need to wait near 20 turns before being able to build huts: first searching the farming tech, then building a farm.