So I'm working on some ideas related to how you would handle culture in a Civilization style game. Each tile will have its own population rather than there being a central city managing the tiles in its radius. I will group the tiles by province for some things but basically it will be based on tiles. So there will be farm tiles, suburb tiles, etc.... Now here is the thing, not all tiles will have the same density. So a farm might have 3 population and a town might have 20.

So I guess that i can't really show people on the map. I want each population point to have three distinct culture slots. So I was thinking that people would display their culture by wearing colored garments. One person might have blue pants and a blue shirt and and orange hat. Another might have a blue hat and a blue shirt but orange pants. Both populations would have 2/3 of their loyalty to the blue culture, and 1/3 to the orange culture, but in different ways. I was also thinking that I could depict this using tricolored flags. The reason that I want three distrinct slots is it works with my cultural diffusion/evolution model.

So any ideas? My idea seems almost unworkable from a UI perspective. I would be willing (happy?) to go to a system where there is one population point per tile, but then I get problems of density. It also makes the growth and migration model trickier.

If you say that you can't show people on the map, then clothing won't work. Flags would be a better choice in this case. But will cutlure really vary so drastically between tiles, that one slot may be completely different between tiles, and perfectly homogenous within tiles? I don't know how you're going to use culture, so this may or may not be an issue.

Another question is, does the player need the culture of each tile to be readily apparent on the map at all times? If not, then I might add an overlay feature that displays culture on demand. In that case, you can use any representation you'd like, from a popup window showing the individual people in the tile, to flags, or even a colored layer over all tiles.

In the case of the latter, you could have three seperate overlays for each cultural component, or code it so that the colors mix to show the combined culture of the tiles. This would also make it easier to have gradients between tiles, rather than really sharp divisions from one to the next. This would be my preferred solution (for how I would envision using culture, at least), but as I said, I don't know how you're planning to use culture in your game.

Thank you. I think that your ideas have helped me. The key is that I don't have to show everything in every view, nor do I have to hide everything in an inaccessible window. Here is what I am currently thinking:

On the main map each tile will have something to indicate its dominant culture, either a colored border, layer, or something. Perhaps it will be simply a "team color" as in an RTS: all of the little details will be that color. If no culture is dominant then no team color will be shown, instead it will be gray or whatever. Realistically most places will have a dominant culture with a splash of something else, there will also be recently conquered areas and border areas. These regions will be obvious to the player simply because he will remember conquering the Purples or whatever.

If you want to bring up more cultural information you will be able to bring up a series of maps. Maybe there will be a way to select a person and it will show you a map of all of the people who have the same culture. Then when you click on a tile it will show you all of the people and their cultural traits. This will be either colored garments, flags, or whatever.