I feel this is an important thing to the game. Usually in 4X games you just spam cities where-ever you can fit them and reap the benefits. Now, Civ4 and Galciv2 both had some mechanics that tried to hamper this, but they were still a bit insufficient and wouldn't work well in Elemental(or at least my picture of the game).
Think about any fantasy setting. Now, in how many of them do cities spring up all the time? In very few. Usually the cities are unique(having some aspects that give a feeling of personality to the city) and at specific places, with the surrounding area filled with towns and villages. I would like this to happen in Elemental too. Usually in games the cities are very bland and differ very little from each other. This is mainly because you can always build everything in any given city. An interesting concept would be that you can/must specialize a city toward a single line, which would affect what units and buildings the city can produce. Let's say you tune the city to be a religious one. You could build the Cathedral(highest level of religious building) but you can't build an Academy(highest military building). This in turn would affect the troops you can build there and gives a small semblance of uniqueness. The idea as it is now isn't very interesting, however. Perhaps it could be spiced up with the following:
Like in Civ4(and to a lesser extent in Galciv2), you would have special resources all over the terrain that give special bonuses to the city that was built nearby, however, these resources should be even more varied and significant, giving unique and interesting benefits to the city near it's radius. Let's say there's an old ruined temple near the city. Now, this temple would still have a semblance of it's ancient power and thus the city(and only that city) would gain a special benefit of having a protective magical field around it, having a chance of cancelling all spells directed at it. Or perhaps a magical river flows through the city, giving strength and health to all living there, not only increasing the production of the city, but also the power of the soldiers produced there.
To an extent, part of the problem is caused with the assumption that you can and should build every building available in every city. Perhaps this should be impossible, due to long construction times or such, making the idea of specializing a city more pleasing. If you build both a wizard tower and a cathedral to the city, you really wouldn't have time to produce any units because of the long build times, so you should only build one, and at that you should only build it at perhaps one or two of your cities that build mage-like-units, because you'll need the lesser mages in addition to high mages.
So, all in all, less cities, but ones that are more unique, and a countryside that matters but not too much.
Also, an idea springs to my mind, one of specific troops. Now, as far as I know the game won't really have too much "in-house-content"(especially concerning the empires in the game) but rather but is rather leaning toward the modding of the game, so perhaps this idea won't work too well.
Anyway, the idea is that even such things as races of fantasy creatures are represented by resources. You can see in the map that there is a tribe of orcs or elves or whathaveyou near the river. Should you build a city there, that city(and only that city) can build units that come from the ranks of this race. In addition to normal swordsmen, you could build orcish swordsmen that have different(not necessarily better) stats, or perhaps you would like elven mages instead of your human mages. This most certainly would bring a sense of uniqueness to the city in question.
Any thoughts?
I think some of the concepts listed here are excellent ideas. I loved the appearance of strategic resources in Civ throughout the game with the discovery of certain technologies. Finding great indy magic sites in Dominions is similar in helping each game feel unique and providing the thrill of making a cool discovery.
On cities, I expressed some of my ideas in the Importance of Tradeoffs thread but basically would really enjoy having unique and specialized cities. And not necessarily ones where you simply choose to build all "Factories" vs all "Farms" but ones where what you build excludes other options, forcing you to commit to a path.
Given that we have two races each broken down into six seperate civilizations (for a total of twelve), I don't know where you're getting you're info
Good idea, and I think the devs thought about it before : you'll be able to expand existing cities when they grow. So you you'll probably won't need as much cities as you can hold.
Good ideas. I'll try to summarize and respond:1) Prevent Massive City Spam- I don't know what they're doing about this, but having a setting that controls how far away from an existing city a new city has to be would help. Or have "settlement sites" that are the only places a new city can be built, but I'm not too fond of that one.2) Prevent every city from having everything- They're doing something pretty interesting about this; from https://forums.elementalgame.com/329219 :
Really? That's excellent news, I must've missed that.
I thought there'd be only 2(or three?) races and that's that. Good thing I was wrong then.
Actually, I think one of the devs had to make a special post in the journal forum JUST because of that particular mix-up.
Since you have to A) channel 'mana' into creating cities (or to make them habitable or soemthing similar) so that you can EITHER have lots of cities, OR be the uber-bad-ass caster we all know we want to be, and have to build them on / near certain special kinds of tiles, I'd say they're doing quite a bit to control city sprawl!
Ron,
Yes, I later saw the dev comment about "fertile land" spots being required for new cities and that they could be either found naturally (and they're limited) or created by spending "essence" (which is costly). So it's an improved form of the "settlement sites" solution which is sufficiently improved that I like it
Thanks,
Keith
Have limited cities, but it would be weird if our kingdom was made up of only cities.
Where will our towns and villages be? Maybe that can be used to help promote expansion.
Imagine, you're always worried about your villages along the border with faction D.
Towns could be specialised in which they export raw materials or something. Much better than a random mine building on a resource tile. Especially if that tile isn't near a city.
I think that including different levels of population is a great idea, although really most of the difference between cities, towns and villages can be summarized by size. Perhaps allow settlements away from specific "fertile land" tiles, but limit their size substantially.
I figrue because of the fertile land system, we would have to somehow grow our own "wilderness" to populate. I suspect that also means that the density of the towns directly relates to what kind of channeler you are.
personally, I think this is a fabulous idea and would love to see it implemented. One would only have few cities ( unless one goes all out and spends an untenable amount of mana on building many cities), but one could develop hamlets and villages near important resources to mine them. Anytyhing from precious metals, to particularly fertile areas(pop growth), specific game (increase in health), etc, etc. One would obviously have to secure any along troublesome borders and an eye would have to be kept on the others (i.e to prevent sabotage, etc). Or will anything within a kingdom's boundaries be automatically accessible?
What about trade routes? As the caravans will be automated but vulnerable to attack, will we have the option of creating a "highway patrol" that will similarly be automated and reduce the chance of attack or will we actually have to build up armies to patrol these trade routes ourselvles?
What i want to know is how will the buildings in a tile effect eachother.
Will massing acadamies on one tile be a good idea?
Or will trying to but a full supply chain(refinery, armory, and acadamy or whatever the buildings are) on one be better?
I like the idea of specializing Cities (such as the city/castle in Medieval Total War 2) but city-tile management is diffrent.
I do as well. I assumed this would already be an inherent thing given what Frogboy has stated thus far.
One of the troppe of the game, is that to create a new city, you need to pay with your personal essence meaning a weaker Avatar. So cities will rather be limited in number at least in beginning and middle game.
In additions there will be places where you can build a city without investing in Essence those places could be monsters infested settlements or places spared by the ravage of the cataclysm. It's obvious that getting those spots can give a serious advantage in early game.
For specialisation of cities, i stated the idea of doctrine/quirck for nation that could be extended to cities.
Here the concept :
If a city have 6-7 farms AND farms represent +66% of the building that city get the farmers specialisation and thus a food production bonus. We an even create thresholds the more specialized and stronger the bonus.
Repeat for research city, religious city and so on...
Questions for dev :
Is Essence ineeded to expand a city ?
How many buiding per tile ?
Both answers will affect the pace of expension cities.
Hmmm, I just read this over in frogboy's latest dev journal, and this seems like the best place to discuss it:
I really hope there will be a way to utilize resources besides building a whole city on top of them. I would much rather something along the lines of hiddenranbir's suggestion:
First of all it would be neat and immersive to have a number of small villages spread out around your territory, and not just huge cities separated by total wilderness. Secondly, I think it's a creative mechanic for utilizing resources that aren't in the immediate vicinity of a city (or if a city can't be built close to a resource, like an ore vein in a mountain).
There are a number of ways this could be implemented. You could be able to settle a village on/adjacent to any resource tile by default, with a severe population limit. Or, maybe your channeler can imbue the land with varying amounts of essence - imbue a lot to make a tile completely fertile, allowing a thriving city to grow, or imbue a tiny amount, enough so that a small village or hamlet can survive.
Either way the villages shouldn't be able to do anything besides gather and export raw resources; they shouldn't have any production or income generation capabilities, and should require pretty much no time from the player once they're started. The only time you should ever have to interact with your villages is if you want to improve its resource gathering infrastructure (better mining equipment, or larger stables, etc).
Edit: I don't know why the first quote isn't working right... No clue how to fix it.
Edit: Fixed. Thanks Vieuxchat
Re-read carefully It's [/quote] not [/qoute]
I very much agree that fewer, more individualized cities seem like a great idea. They would both add the kind of Important Choices DC mentioned in his tradeoffs thread and help make each game more like its own story. I particularly hope that Elemental is as 'strat-proofed' as possible so that we never see anything as crudely mechanistic as the GC2 All-X stuff. I eventually got sucked into Metaverse nonsense over there, but I'll never do an All-X anything because my inner role-player will always trump my inner zero-sum wargamer.
Re cities "covering" resources vs. using them, the talk about trade caravans makes me think that Elemental might not be limitied to the old Civ pattern of cities being able to use only resources within Frame X of them on the map. It might even be possible to mix in the villages notion pigeonpigeon mentions with a caravan-based resource use system--linking a resource tile to a city establishes a basic garrison, and from that point you have decisions to make about whether it stays barebones, acquires some permanent camp followers, becomes a small village that can help support the local garrison, or eventually grows to become a new city in its own right.
If we are to expect a realistic Medieval gameplay format, cities start out as the Sole Spire, created from essence of the Channeler. As was the case in Medieval times the City, towns and Farms configuration worked on the Center with wheel and spokes theory.
The Spire was the Center/Hub with everything else radiating outwards from it in a wheel and spoke relationship. Everything will be linked, by the rule of adjacency as noted in the Dev Diary, and all flow of goods within a wheel goes from Outside to the center, and then from there, any and all redistribution of goods happens by caravan.
Given that as a premise form with which to work, it seems that how many Cities you create and grow depends on how much Essence it takes to build the inital Spire, and or re-invigorate and area to make it build friendly etc etc.
So my guess might be that you won't run simply out at game start and Plop down 5 City Spires, or if that is actually doable, it won't leave your Channeler with enough Essence left to help enhance all of those early areas enough to allow for the growth required to incease things such as Population growth or the aquisition of new "tiles" for placement around those 5 new Spires to ensure they all get new growth potential.
Which leads me to believe that Shards will be areas with immediately viable lands surrounding them on which you may place a new Spire, "Eessence Free Zones" EFZ's so to speak, and those Shards will be spread thin enough across the maps to make capturing a whole bunch of them quickly, without providing each area with adequate Support infrastructure, would simply make them easy fodder for the enemy.
Stardock devs have confirmed what you just said a number of times, John Hughes. Settling many cities, especially early on, will significantly drain your channeler's essence to the point where it'll take a long time for him to recover, meaning your large empire will be spread pretty thin for a while. They have also said that there will be some "essence free zones" but they will be very rare. Personally I hope that it's actually difficult to found a city close to shards, not easy. Finding a shard should be a huge deal just from the extra power it grants your channeler; they shouldn't need the extra bonus of giving you an essence-free city.
While I like that idea overall, I know that the majority of my nations wouldn't -want- to incorporate other races into their society (or genepool), nor do we believe in slavery. So how would you suggest keeping this system, without forcing these nations to basicly cripple themselves by not taking advantage of an available resource?
Screw your insular xenophobic nations! They deserve to burn! tee hee hee ... or on a more serious game mechanic oriented note, maybe you could have an option at faction selection where you can select whether your faction is open minded enough to include other races amongst its forces, if they're not they get some other compensatory bonus instead?
Oh that's alright then... I don't know HOW I could have made such a mistake, it all seems so reasonable now you explain it
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