Building housing is no fun. Even if it auto-advances as the city levels up. I suggest we move houses outside the city walls and automate them. Let the Sovereign influence population through prestige and have the population grow dynamically. This way we could specialize cities as military centers (more production less population) and great cities with high prestige, a large population, and increased trade income.
If the houses are automated and dynamic a large population would be graphically evident. Also if those houses were vunerable to attack, a defender would be forced to sally forth or take a hit to their city's population. The more reasons we have to fight outside the city walls the better. Constant seiges are no fun.
What are your thoughts?
Good to hear that.
And about "bad" quests to complete if you don't have enough food ?
Sounds good!
1G is long gone internally.
In our build, we can build gardens on turn 1.
Long gone huh? Meh... I want to play the internal build...
1G?
I guess it's something somebody who plays the beta would know...
So.. what happens if housings gets destroyed and you don't have ennough for your population?
I'm liking this mechanic. Perhaps soldiers might also have a food requirement or is that a little too much?
The other thing about why we still need houses is because we need a way to control population in a city. Eliminating player control over housing turns the game into more a simulation game than a strategy game (because then we would be dealing with a black box we don't have direct control over.)
The limiting factor in the game to empire size under the new "food is fungible" design would be essence, and time (pick two). Being able to generate our own food means we can buff up cities and have more of them so long as we keep the food income growing, which requires us to have farming settlements. Farming settlements require essence (or time, as the "livable" land increases) to get, so this should keep a player from expanding too quickly, or paying the price in magical power for fast expansion early.
We could also surrender most of our speciality buildings to have a lot of farmspace for a basically agrarian society with good production but low research.
I think that will work fine. Look forward to testing it out.
Not wildly in love with existing housing system. If it isn't totally re-done, how about at least giving at least one more housing type. "huts" -> "houses" -> things I haven't seen yet, like "apartments", etc. (Lots of things may exist that I haven't gotten to before the game crashes).
Also not a fan of the fixed number of slots to build on -- at least not unless we get a better way to make a city upgrade and increase the limit. I think the practical limits on how big a city should be: 1: research & tech tree -- what you know how to build 2: time 3: money 4: total kingdom food.
The town hall to upgrade idea above sounds interesting.
And if the limit on number of slots to build in doesn't go away, at least minimize the impact by making lots of new building types be just upgrades-in-place without taking a new slot. Like shrine -> temples -> parthenons -> cathedrals in Master of Magic.
Agree with lots of bits & pieces from prior posts, including....
"How food production is generated also needs tweaking, imo. It relies too heavily on fertile land, and other food tiles. Each individual revived land should produce food, and fertile land and other food tiles simply add a food bonus to it"
"Maybe the following would be enough : fewer buildable tiles but no house to build. You just ask for prestige or vast houses and the game automatically build them. You just concentrate on the real interesting things : what "special" buildings will you build ?"
"Every time I have to do something in a game, it should be about making a choice. I shouldn't be clicking something just to get to the next part, where my click doesn't matter because there is only one choice, one right selection."
"Housing is built dynamically with population growth. If population shrinks, the houses are also removed. Population grows as a function of food available from the transport network, and prestige / buildings. Eg. a hamlet never grows to a village without a town hall (this is how we keep our farming villages small and shipping food), and a village doesn't go to city without either a palace or some other high level (and expensive) government structure."
I like it too. Only thing I would modify would be the way negative food affects production. You might want to consider brackets (e.g. even a rating of 1 negative food might give a 10% production penalty), since nobody might even notice a 1% production penalty but everyone should notice a negative food value, or asymptotic values, e.g. -10 food might be 15% production penalty, but -20 food a 35% penalty and -50 food a 80% penalty.
I also think that food might need to be transported from city to city (automatically of course) via transport caravans that need protection resources to ensure safety and which can be sabatoged or destroyed or captured and sold in war. That would also be fun, and somewhat realistic. Keeping food supply up should be fairly important.
And let's not forget magic. Maybe a spellcaster could be able to boost an area's (city's? kingdom's?) net food value with certain nature-like spells if their water and earth magic is high enough. (I am assuming there will also be cross-path spells, e.g. spells that require knowledge of at least two elemental paths, just like I hope that there will be tech breakthroughs requiring at least two of the 5 tech paths.)
Double post
Indeed. Having caravarn moving the food around is primordial. If your empire is mini-maxed, then you need a lot of goods movement, including food. Making everything vulnerable to raids.
When the map can be XXXL, the situation above seems overly unrealistic. It essentially means teleportation of food for free. Food source and the metro can be really far away.
I can understand the beauty of simplicity in your design and other concerns. But how about the following modification?
First, use your system, but food is not a global resource. Food is available only to cities connected to food production (farm), as long as caravans can travel thorough it. Distance is unlimited & the number of cities connected on this route is unlimited, i.e. Farm - City - C - F - C - C - F is considered as functional route and the route can also branches out.
When this "formal" food caravan route (i.e. the road) is controlled by your enemy or destroyed by flood or a volcano spell, food stops delivering to the far end of the route. Local food shortage will cause local productivity penalty.
This system unfortunately implies there "maybe" a need of local food storage. If you think local food storage is too much hassle for this game, maybe any excess will be wasted.
I scanned but may have missed this. If food is a global resource, how will roads interact with this?
I suggest that an unconnected city receive food at .50 or .75 the rate of an otherwise connected city. Also farm cities that are unconnected can send off only half of their food (things spoil with slow travel). This allows I think for a modest expansion but still allows roads to be a strategic factor. It would matter if cities are connected and protecting roads or attaching roads may make an impact on play -but not bring it to a grinding halt.
I like the direction this is going.
Are sieges included in the game?Under siege, a city would loose it's access to the "global food net" and start to have penalties, be they population decrease, efficiency decrease, something else or some of all.In the road thread the concept of fortifications came up. I could see using fortifications to help protect these pioneer units as well as caravans, provided the caravans aren't abstracted.
that would be a nice implementation..
Food as a global ressource is definetly the way to go, with cities under siege taking heavy penalties to food distribution.
Why not have food as both bonus resources to be individually caravan transported and as a global resource? This way you offer some reward to the micromanaging players for creating and running an extremely efficient empire without making it a requirement for players who just want to play the game. Designing the game this way could also allow the AI to be more competitive without (hopefully) dumping more valuable company resources into better AI. Traditonally AI players in games like Civ have held an advantage by being able to quickly make small changes and tweaks on a level that a human player cannot unless he's a micomanaging nut like me.
I like for good AI, on a similar level to the AI player ... but as we all know, an AI on equal level of a human would be annoying on "base" difficulty. I'd like for harder difficulty levels to be better "skill" ... and not just skill at running the game overall.
Make some AIs really good at questing, some really good at magic, and others really good at empire building. And the higher you go on difficulty, they begin to Excell in their area of expertise, and make slight gains in the other areas of play as well.
I want it to be competitive but not Stat-sheet boring. I like for the human player's personality to affect how he wins the game. A win really needs some personality to be memorable. Its not really the systems that are at work, but the memory itself. Sometimes the systems can seem to be the cause, but often they are just the flashing lights that keep the player distracted.
Its the internalization of a fond memory that brings players to enjoy the game ... its more of an emotional process than a rational one.
I wanted to second these concerns and add that making food global would really significantly downplay the strategic element of city placing. I like how placing a city next to food, or crystals, etcetere is important right and wouldn't want to throw that in the garbage just to remove a very small amount of tedium from city buidling.
Personally I'm in favor of automatic housing development or "housing zones". If you don't plan for housing your people, you'll see in cities around the world (Rio, Mexico City, Jerusalem etc) that people just find a way and build them anyways.
Also I might add that Elemental is in pseudo-medieval setting where there wasn't refrigeration or automotive transport. Transporting much food without spoiling is unrealistic and in ancient times the great cities developed where there was plentiful food (Nile River valley, Indus River Valley, Yellow River Valley, Tigris & Euphrates). Building a super huge city in an arctic wasteland... is just ridiculous to me.
Building a Super Huge city in an Arctic Wasteland is perfectly believable ... if it happened to be the intersection where all nations/cities did trade.
An artic wasteland is essentially an eternally cold desert, a desert without sun. Some of the biggest Metropolis's have been out in the desert .... although I'll admit that most large cities had some sort of river nearby.
Im fairly certain that a LARGE percentage of Rome's food (like 30-60%) came from the colonies along the outer mediteranean, and not Italy herself.
In Elemental, you cannot build cities in remote Wasteland, only revived earth. I think its a silly point of realism to make Global Food only available to Cities that are built along a river/ in a river valley.
One possibly interesting approach is that each Food resource has a three tier Radius. Any cities within 15 tile radius can use maximum food, any cities within a 30 tile radius can use 70% food. Any Cities within a 50 tile radius can use 30% food.
This wouldn't make using food less efficient if its farther away ... merely changes where the Global Food is available.
I would call this style "Mapable Food" as opposed to Global food. Say your in third tier and can only use 3 food. So you build a city in tier 3 of Food Source X (which has 10 food) and you build 3 houses (which use 1 food each). Then ... the global food available in that region is lowered, however all tiers are lowered in that amount, as its transported directly from the source.
What I mean is, if 3 food is used in tier 3, then 4 food would be still available in tier 2 (instead of 7), and 7 food would be available in Tier 1 (instead of 10).
Another example, would be two food sources of 10 food each, and their tier 3's intersect. The food is subtracted in a round robin, starting with the nearest city (if equal space, one is assigned as the primary city in the RNG). So where the tier 3's intersect 6 food is available, otherwise its 3 food, and tier 2 is 7 food, and tier 1 is 10 food. If the city used 3 food, then 2 food would be reduced from all of City Prime's tiers, and 1 food would be reduced from all of City Secondary's tiers.
However, Tiers and Rivers is all bollox to me. I'd much prefer a simply system of global food ... but here is my idea for you purists (and for you River purists out there, any city along a river would have access to ALL food, in a round robin as if it was in a criss-cross of all the food sources tier 1) ... meaning that a River city using 5 food, if there are 5 food sources ... is using 1 food from each food source.
However, again as I have said ... all terrain in Elemental is (currently) essentially the same, and all the in-game cases I have seen will have much more believable applications than "giant city in the tundra" .... and honestly I would LOVE to see a giant city in the tundra ... Avatar:Air Bender (water tribe), and FFH Doviello or Illians would probably love to see that. It IS a fantasy game after all.
I really like the idea of making food global, so long as it’s on the trade network.
It would also make food fairly simple to trade with other players if need be (ill give you 10 food a turn for 20g a turn etc)
As for medieval arctic metropolises being ridiculous, remember this is a fantasy game. Massive towns in unrealistic (fantastic) places help give character. If I want to roleplay an Ice Wizard and plan to have my main city “Icetopia” in the north pole I can do that, I can even colour my buildings white . The downside being my food sources may be vulnerable to capture if my main army lives in Icetopia.
Out of interest will this system be in 1Z? It’ll be interesting to try it out.
What about foraging for food in times of starvation? If the land is fertile then there must be something out there that's edible.
I think something very important is being overlooked. People do not move to cities, or populations do not grow in cities, for no reason. Yes, prestige is mentioned. We can build houses for populations, but that is nothing more than "squatting." People go to where there are jobs. I think it's important that that game mechanics do not reward just blindly building houses. We need workshops, mines, factories, orchards that need personnel to field and work. Without that, mirroring life, there is no purpose moving to a city if all there is housing. It doesn't mirror reality.
Brad, I think the game will all the more benefit from a balanced approach where the game mechanics/AI require certain needs to be met before a city starts flourishing. This may also help stop spamming a la GalCivII re: "All Factory/Research" strategies which is completely unrealistic to how a civilization/world/city functions.
Name 1 large historical city in the desert away from large food production (and I'm waiting for misconceptions about ancient cities in the Middle East). People simply don't stick around in a city when the words "food shortage" occur, you don't have to starve.
Maybe in terms of the diversity of food afforded by the Rome's wealthy. The average Roman's diet consisted of nothing but bread (Hence the phrase passed down since those times of "Bread & Circus") and was grown and baked locally.
Besides the realism and suspension of disbelief factor, I just don't consider dumbing down the strategic city placement of the game to this level to be "fun". Where exactly is the fun supposed to be in this?
I think the production hit should start small (as a percentage of the deficit) and then build over time. So if your city is cut-off from a food supply production doesn't stop dead, it instead gradually grinds to a halt (as food stores are used up). And if you mismanage your city into a -1 food rating, you can address it without having too hard a hit, but after five/a dozen turns your city would be suffering.
You could also implement a sort of starvation "hangover". So that production growth lags for a period (relative to how long and how deep the food shortage was) after food supplies have been restored.
I think the same mechanism could be used for other "perishables". (An example from in Civ 4, if you lost access to horses you immediately could no longer build mounted units. But it really should take a few turns before the supply of horses is drained, and those turns could be used to restore or create a different source.)
Can't speak to whether building houses is boring, haven't had a chance to play the beta yet. I like the idea of population booms and busts being driven by "prestige". (Seems like you could have a choice between free-enterprise where people go where they're most attracted and communism where people go where you make room for them -- or some combination of both.)
Food SHOULD be global, but like Tasunke was saying, its value should decrease the further away the destination is from the source. If you capture one city in enemy territory, that is completely surrounded by enemies, it should not be recieving receive full food from your farming megacity on the other side of the map.
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