Stardock & Civ: Design differences

With the recent Civ V announcement, a few threads have been comparing GC2/EWOM to the Civ series. Let me first say that I've pre-ordered E:WOM and will get Civ V so I don't see this as an either/or. But here's my observation:

In Civ, people are not abstracted. If I have a city with nine people, I can have 6 workers, 2 scientists, and a merchant. Or whatever. I actually have nine people that I can order around.

In Civ, places are abstracted. London may have a library and market and monument and The Oracle, but they don't take up space on the map. Those things don't have physical locations, beyond being "somewhere in London". Sure mines and farms exist in space, but the things that really give your civilization character don't.

In GalCiv, people are abstracted. Each planet has a population, but it's just a number. I can't assign people to do anything.

In GalCiv, places are not abstracted. Planetary improvements occupy specific tiles. When I'm out of tiles, I'm done building new improvements.

E:WOM, based on the last beta I played, will be in the GalCiv camp. Cities have people, but population is just a number. The people aren't resources for the player to manage. But places are real. Temples and houses and blacksmiths and whatever else you build will have a specific location on the map. What Civ V will do I can't be sure, but probably it will follow in the footsteps of the rest of the series.

Obviously there are other differences. But I highlight these two because I've always wanted to play an empire-builder with the same degree of polish and quality that Civ/GalCiv have that had both people and places instead of abstracting one or the other out. I guess maybe that would be too much to deal with in one game, but I'd like to try.

P.S. I've never played Dominions 3; can someone who has talk about how it handles these two questions?

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The two questions are people and places?

Dom3 has no city building, so 'places' are relegated to special sites you find, and building the odd temple (which some nations should spam everywhere) lab (which you only need where you plan to stockpile mages) and forts (which you nominally build anywhere you build a lab, or in specific territories of special interest).

Dom3 also has no 'people' in the sense of the other 2 games. In dom3 each territory (and a map is made up of 30-200 territories depending on how many players are in the game, or what ratio you want) has a population and a resources (I think, been a while) which control the income and production values of the territory. Also each territory has a specific number of unit types which may be built there, which cannot be changed during the game, other than by building a fort allowing each nation to build a subset of their specific national units. Forts also increase the tax and resource values by a % (well this depends on the fort type your nation builds, but you don't get to pick it, it's fixed by nation).

Dom3 really is a very different system from both Civ and GC.

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Dom 3, all is abstracted from your viewpoint. The map is divided into provinces and you move from province to province, if you are in the province and the enemy is you automatically fight. Provinces can have two types of "building", those you can construct (Fortress, Lab and Temple) and those you find via searching (these give benefits, usually gem income, sometimes recruitables, sometime other stuff). These buildings don't take up space, they are abstract. Pop goes up and down but you don't control this beyond choosing you domain (life vs death) or blasting out the odd spell that changes population. Pop affects stuff but because you don't do much to directly affect it after you design your god you just play the game and use what is there. But there is strategy in going Life or Death, some civs can handle their population slowly reducing, others can't.

Compared with Civ and GalCiv, Dom 3 is much more micromanagement orientated, which grants advantages and disadvantages. I think its fun.

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In Elemental, people are necessary for your army. You can't raise an army without the population to do so. So in that sense, I think people are much more important than in Civ.

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