Resources XX: Old Makes Way for the New

Not all resources can be extracted more efficiently or in greater quantities as local population increases.

In particular, raw agricultural resources will be pushed out of the way by the city.

Hence, I need a signal to indicate when a good is inversely proportional to local population (or infrastructure, or population density, etc).

I'll call this "Type A."

Type A goods, so far, are just those which require physical land to function, which is agricultural resources. Of course, we can think of cases where, say, a strip mine grows in area, but since this is only a single type of mine, we'll leave it alone for now.

The Type A goods (in the system so far) are:

commodity

wood

wheat

maize

oats

barley

cassava

rice

Inverting these numbers requires knowing (or guessing) the highest infrastructure. Although the infrastructure can rise quite a bit (the maximum I have so far is 2742), anything higher than 400 represents a fully settled hex. And indeed, there are considerations here that I might explore later: as the amount of available area grows, so does the number of hands necessary to farm that land. So there is inevitably a trade-off in how much you are able to produce.

All of the Type A goods are also Tech-6 (T-6). This means that only a single point of infrastructure is necessary to begin producing them. I think the best system as a first approximation is that of diminishing returns. A T-7 or T-8 hex may have more hands available, but each additional level reduces the efficiency of production. This is an easy way to account for the reduced amount of farmland or harvestable forest. If we consider that the production per person $p$ drops as the infrastructure $I$ increases $1\to400$, we then see that $p$ is related to base production $p_0$ by \[p = {p_0 \over 399}\left(400 - I\right)\]. I'll have to run some more tests and see how this actually works in practice, but I feel it's a reasonable start.