I'm falling in love with simple grace of entity-component design, although I still have issues breaking from MVC and OOP practices. Some of my game entities have membership relationships with each other (ex: a player is a member of a city, a city is a member of a nation), and I am unsure on the best way to implement it.

My initial reaction is to have a a MemberOfCity component that points to the appropriate city component, but components are suppose to have no references to each other. My other option is to have a System do it, but that would require the system to persist data outside of a component.

Is there a clean way to do this in an entity-component design, or am I trying to use a hammer on a screw and should use a hybrid/another approach?