As many people have pointed out the current food & housing system is a bit odd and not well liked. The reason I think is because you use food to build houses which doesn't make sense as those houses could be empty. And once the houses are built you can proceed to lose your food production and while it will become negative there is no real penalty. Also once a city has reach the desired level there is no incentive to maintain the current population. You can simply demolish the houses in favor of putting up production facilities. The same goes for the Prestige buildings as once you have reached the max amount of people needed the buildings become useless and ripe for demolish in favor of better buildings.
That being said what I propose is a real shift on how these things are looked at and used in the game. The objective of these changes is to makes sure they make sense from a strategic point of view and that they stay important throughout all stages of the game. Also since this is more concept then hard numbers I'll try to stay clear of using actual figures as that falls under balancing which can be worked out later. Anyway down to business.
Food
Obviously food should be used to feed the people. So the question is how to go about doing this. Well since the economy is global with all resources treated to one giant pool it stands to reason that food should be the same way. Though it's not just resources but also population that shows up on your global resources.
This provides a bit of a unique opertunity as we can use the global population to determine the food consumption as it also includes your army units. Thus if you build a large army it could end up eating most of your food. This way late game players won't be able to simply withdraw large numbers of their population into their army as a way of avoiding having to feed them.
It seems obvious that while food is in surplus the population should grow. The real question is what happens when there is a food shortage. Well a couple things can happen, first the most obvious is some of your people die from starvation and second your military units become less effective either from some penalty of maybe some HP loss. The exact amounts and figures to be determined during a balancing phase.
The question on how to manage a shortage can be handled several different ways.
1) The player has not control over which villages starve.
2) The player can assign priority on a sort of resource priority page which simply list the order in which towns should be given resources in case of shortages.
3) Similar to 2 only the player could choose to spread the shortage evenly thus no one city takes a major hit. Including possibly a mix with a High/Med/Low priority setup.
4) If a military penalty aspect is in play for food shortage then the player can choose which gets priority the military or the civilians. This would work best if the military actually takes an HP hit and can't heal until food comes in surplus again. After all if the player is damaging his resource gather base by starving out then the other option should also be damaging beyond simply a weaker atk/def for a single round. As in both cases the losses can be naturally recovered once food supplies are restored.
This also allows for the option of sieges that cut off food supply since as the mechanics for a starving population will already be in place.
Prestige
Prestige I think is ment to represent how popular and atractive a city is to potential citizens. While right now it serves as little more then a counter for how many people move in each turn. I think a much better approach would be to use prestige as a more dynamic tool that is sort of another cap to population as well as housing.
What I mean by this is the higher the prestige the more people move in just like now but at the same time the more people that are in your city the slower it grows. After all as the city fills up it becomes more crowded and less atractive to new citizens. Unless you continue to improve it with things that will draw people's attention like inns, pubs, theaters, and town halls.
So it becomes a bit of an uphill battle as the more population you get the slower the city grows which means you need more prestige to help make it grow faster. And of course there will be some point at which having too low of a prestige will mean that people actually start moving out of your city. This means that you will need to maintain a decent amount of prestige to keep your citizens happy and staying in your city. It will also make many of the currently useless prestige buildings serve a purpose.
Housing
Obviously given the change to food the houses shouldn't require them anymore. But given the changes to Prestige I think most of the housing buildings should give some prestige. Though I also think huts, housing, and Villas shouldn't be auto upgrade. As the higher ones should give more prestige and cost more as well as giving more population cap like they do now. The option to upgrade without having to demolish the old building and building a new one should be implemented as this would be a good feature in general since many modders will likely want to have building upgrades that are not automatic.
This new setup could make houses with high prestige such as estates more worth the investment. Along with even more potential to make the slums matter as a choice. Several people have already noted the slums need either more population support or less food usage. Under this setup though the food isn't really an issue though it probably would need a larger population cap. But overall it does open up some possibilities which would need to be worked out in balancing issues but the basic concept is there. As it's a trade off with faster population growth of high prestige but lower housing cap vs a higher housing capacity with slower growth. So it'll be kinda like it is now except growth slows down as the city gets closer to being full and you need to maintain a curtain amount of prestige to keep your citizens.
Final thoughts and other ideas
This setup makes it so in a way you have 3 things determining your population capacity but each one has a different effect so it's a bit of a balancing game. As food not only applies to your citizens but also your military there is the need for large amounts of food. While prestige has more of a morale effect on cities by not only effecting how fast they grow but also how much over crowding they will tolerate. And lastly the housing is of course the population cap for the city but also allows more types of bonuses to be applied to different housing effects in not only prestige but also possible other things like gold for "taxes".
While the proposed system includes some changes to all 3 areas they are not really dependent on one another. Like the food change could be made but the prestige could remain the same or have a completely different approach. And like I said before this is mainly an exercise in concept rather then specific numbers and balance. So things like how much food a farm should produce of how many people 1 food should support and all that stuff can be addressed at a later date. Even the figures currently in use on food, housing, and prestige haven't gone through any balancing so don't rely on them as a basis of comparison when it comes to numbers but rather compare how their mechanics work.
Before I wrap it up I'd like to close by covering another problem that exist under the current system, which is population only matters for leveling up the city. Once a city has reached level 5 there is no real reason to keep the population around. The city will not de-level even if you demolish all of the housing/prestige buildings. This quite frankly is not a good thing as you should want a player to need to keep that level 5's city at or above 1000 people to really get it's benefit.
I think the easiest method to make players want to keep the city's population up after reaching that level is by having a modifier of something like (Current Population/Required Population for Level) apply to the output of buildings in the city, it would max out at 1 so you'd need to put a cap on it since it's only meant as a penalty if they go under. Thus a level 4 city which requires 500 people to reach with only 400 people in it would only produce at 80% efficiency. This combined with level multiplier I've read about mention would really make a huge difference.
I only recently read about the multiplier and didn't really notice it in the beta so not sure if it's in, was planned but then scraped as some post in forums are old so this next part could be off. But supposedly a level 4 city has it's buildings produce at 4 times the amount thus a market with 1 gold is actually producing 4 gold. Well under the suggested modifier above a level 3 city with a base produce of 10 would produce 30 goods. While a level 4 city would produce 40 but because the level 4 has a higher multiplier it could drop to 75% of the needed 500 population before it's production was less then that of the level 3 city.
Of course that is a very basic setup which is easy for the player to understand. A much more complicated one with the population production penalty more closely matching the curve from level 3 to level 4 population vs bonus given could be down but then you'd probably also need to take into account the increased number in building slots and such. But that seems like more of a headache. Especially when the goal is quite simply have the player keep their population above the level required by the city's level.
Anyway I'd like to know what you think of my proposal. Questions, comments, and etc. let me know.
I don't mind the current system, but i would like to limit population with food. It won't require any more micromanagement, but you will have to insure that you have enough food to support your population and armies. I think the current plans account for some of this. Come to think of it, it is very similar to "supply" mechanics in some wargames. How I see it working is:
- cities that don't have adequate food are impacted as Frogboy had in his post
- Armies that don't have adequate food, lose combat effectiveness. On a players turn, they could disband units or maybe buy food from another kingdom, whatever... to fix the issue. One intuitive and simple way to implement this would be that cities use food first, then armies. Units that are closest to the capitol city are fed first. Any units that don't get fed take their effectiveness hit. I would make it significant too like 30-50%
Benefits of this approach would be
1. Food production becomes more important and adds strategic depth to where you produce food and how you might starve an opponent.
2. no additional micromanagment
3. With "monsters" in your army, they can consume more food. This would be a way to temper someone from wanting an all dragon army
4. It provides a very lite "supply" mechanic. Since your expeditionary forces are the ones most at risk, a defender could use offensive raids to weaken invaders. I think this adds depth to the conquest system.
@ Pyro ... I'm not saying that a level 5 city should be *alot* more costly than a level 1 city.
What I'm saying is that having 9 cities will be ALOT more costly than having 4 cities ... and the HIDDEN cost here is scarcity of food. Meaning that if you want your cities to ALL be level 5 (which is very possible) ... then maybe only ONE will have enough food within its walls to be self-sustainable. Meaning, that the rarity of food should keep level 5s from being self sustainable (unless they have, like 3 farms or so) meaning that if you want all level 5 cities, you will be VERY vulnerable to pillaging, raiding, and sieges.
I am not against a nation being able to get all its cities to size 5, however it should require a lot of caravans and pioneers(especially pioneers)
See ... potentially you could get A LOT of food with enough investment in inter-city caravans and with extra city pioneers. Luckily for your opponents, those make very vulnerable targets ... so a large empire will need to protect their sources of food because (As Brad's post mentions) being without your food can lead to starvation (and cities shrinking).
So ... you might have all level 5s now, but with heavy enemy pillaging (and caravan killing) your cities are now shrinking to size 4, and a city under siege might eventually shrink to size 2.
Food currently isn't that hard to get in my opinion so it really doesn't present a choice as to why to make a city smaller or larger. From your point of view it just seems to make it increasingly harder to get each successive city to LV 5. As I already said I'm not a fan of the simple make it harder approach since it really doesn't add any strategy.
A) I don't think that is very intuitive or simple. Players tend to think bigger is better. And I can already see a bunch of bug reports in the forum, "I upgraded my city and suddenly my R&D decreased."
I don't really know how it would break down but I believe it could be a simple system. It might be counter intuitive on some levels but definitely not on the whole because bigger isn't always better. I'm sure some logical reasoning could drive why this would happen.
Not really, you don't typically see large metropolis cities having farms viceversa you don't typically see a small city with academies or other highly advanced buildings. So once again this would really be dependent on how it was implemented.
however see a higher administration expense on larger cities as the details on that expense aren't clear yet.
You missed the upkeep part Pyro. You could make upkeep simply gold or you could make it gold and resources. As for defying historical models since this isn't the real world that is irrelevant for the most part. The simplest way to describe this would be to make larger cities produce more of anything with a higher cost attached. Cost being a balance issue either gold, resources, or gold & resources obviously.
I have to disagree food is alright for the beta but I would hope that something more meaningful would be planned for the final version. This goes back to what I was saying about just making it harder and harder to get a large city rather than having the player make a choice. Essence definitely is a limiter on the total number of cities you can build perhaps they should expand upon that aspect of city building to make trying to build cities more meaningful. Right now a player only uses 5 essence to make a LV 1 city. Perhaps the final city level should be dependent on the amount of initial essence invested or to increase a city to the next level more essence is required to be spent. This would definitely require some refinement but I must admit the idea of having the city's size based on initial essence invested in the land seems very interesting. Founding a city would then become much more of a long, medium, or short term investment.
"My kook room is stacked with MREs and I can assure you, they don't last particularly long. "-ah Frogboy you burst my bubble; you need help, probably psychological but most definitely in home economics. Please I know you can afford fresh fruit, vegetables, dairy and meat. There must be a store somewhere there in Michigan that still carries those things? MRE's should only be used as an emergency measure and not as a permanent way of life. Tip for you-take the dairy creamer from the MRE and open it outside. Take a match or lighter, tilt the package out so that you get the powder coming out in lil stream or cloud and light. You should get some sort of flash effect. Be careful .
Well ran a city to L4 and managed to get it there before the game crashed. Don't get it managed to run a game 1251 turns in Z2 but even getting a game 300 turns in Z3 has been a heroic feat, But I digress.
I took me a total build to get to a city that could L5 with
Food = Farm, Wheat Farm, Granary, and 7 Gardens Total of 16 tiles
Housing = 3 huts at L1, 5 houses at L2, 10 houses at L3, and 13 Villa's and a slum at L4
Total tiles at L5 17
And at the end of L4 I had 15 Production tiles (By production I mean they could produce anything but housing or food).
Now assuming if the game hadn't crashed and I got to L5 I would have added another 16 tiles for a total production of 31 tiles in that city.
So Stable L5 City (Empire unto itself) would be
Food 16 Tiles
Housing 17 Tiles
Production 31 Tiles
How can you end up making an empire that cannot support itself? Yes half of your city spaces goes to the feeding and housing of you population. But even the most basic of long term thinking should easily alleviate that problem. And the worst part is that I was only growing a single city at this time which slowed me down. Had I been working two cities at once to after my first had hit L2. It would have been incrediably easy to maintain an extremely accelerated city growth curve. because Level 3 was a bit of a drag, to get past that stage all I could build was Houses and Gardens. but once past that stage the 16 tiles that opened up in L4 aloowed for production tiles again. and Had I made it to L5 it would have been pure production tiles.
And to expand on the previous post lets take total production at each level of city growth (I would assume a possible error of one or two tiles at most in the following which as you will see doesn't affect the numbers enough to shift the benefit)
A L1 city has a total of 8 Production tiles at a modifier of x1 for 8 Production. A L1 city needs no Food or housing tiles.
A L2 City needs 3 food and 3 House tiles minimum so you have 10 Production tiles left at a x2 modifier for 20 Production
A L3 City needs 5 food and 5 Housing Tiles for a total of 14 production tiles at a X3 modifier for a total of 42 Productuion
A L4 city needs a minimun of 20 total food and housing tiles leaving 28 production tiles at x4 for a total 112 production
and finally a L5 city needs 32 housing/food tiles for 32 production tiles at a x5 for 160 production.
As you can see from the numbers even a smaller specialized city could not compete with a L5 balanced city. and when you add in the affects of pop for recruiting and self feeding for seiges. It just makes no sense to make smaller specialized cities. even assuming a 2 tile error in against the L5 city and a two tile error for the L4 the L5 still comes out 30 production ahead at 120 to 150. And then when you factor in the seige and recruiting it wins by a wide margin.
I like how you use a city with TWO farms to show how food is not a limiting factor. I haven't yet played a map where I could get 2 farms in every city. I've had maybe 2-3 cities with 2 farms but it's curtainly not a regular thing. Also you only get 12 additional tiles when you go from L4 to L5 and not 16. Thus you'd only have 27 production tiles.
OH crunchy time. First off your numbers are incorrect. Not sure if you got them from an older build or something. Here are to correct values.
The number of map squares is just a figure so I know how tightly I can pack a city. But anyhow on to the number crunch. For ease I'll use your numbers even though several of the city sizes are off to help prove my point because it's the mechanics not the balance that are in question here.
First off a larger city is always going to produce more. That is a gaming fundamental that is very intuitive and players expect. The real issue is whether or not it's a good choice for the player to build a larger city. In your example above you claim it is but you are wrong. In your own example it is better for the player to have smaller cities and here is why.
A level 5 city need 1000 people and give you 160 production. But if you make 2 level 4 cities which each require 500 people they give you 112 production each. Thus the same 1000 people are now giving you 224 production. You could go down even further as 4 level 3 cities would give you 42 produce each for a total of 168 which is still better then the 1 level 5 city. On the level 3 city though it should have a total of 32 tiles not 24 so it's more like 66 each with a total of 264 making it better then 2 level 4 cities.
As you can see it is already actually better to have more smaller cities though level 1-2 not so much. But level 1 is basically free 16 tiles of production with no modifier, level 2 is easy to get as it doubles your production for a marginal food/housing amount. Right now the multiplier is not in which is even more reason to just have small cities.
The main limiting factor those once again comes back to the cost of making the cities which is essence. Because a player always wants to improve their empire and their economy. The player needs to always have an option to improve their empire otherwise the game becomes stagnant.
So the question comes down to this. A player wants to improve their economic infrastructure what options are available to them?
1) Level up a city (assuming all tiles are in use)
2) Build a new city
3) Build Pioneer Outpost
4) Conquer a city
Option 1 already has several penalties by the increase in food/population usage. Though it seems you want more so it's even less desirable? Option 3 is limited by what resources are around and eventually runs out as an option. Option 4 assumes you have the military might to take the city. And I saved Option 2 for last because it is the most problematic. In that it goes back to the essence limitation problem. More smaller cities are better but because it is so costly to setup new cities you can not expand and thus are forced to build upward instead of out. The inability to expand puts huge pressure on the mind set of the player that they must level up what little they have.
Rather then trying to put more penalties on trying to keep the players down from level 5 cities the players need more places to invest their time and resources. If they could build "settler" type units to make more cities this would help. If pioneer outpost could potentially be leveled up since they aren't attached to a city they won't benefit from the city level modifier I assume.
alright here I have to agree with you the two farms did definitely skew the numbers a bit and without those two farms i would have to make up 8 food in additional gardens.
Quoting XeronX, reply 56As you can see from the numbers even a smaller specialized city could not compete with a L5 balanced city. and when you add in the affects of pop for recruiting and self feeding for seiges. It just makes no sense to make smaller specialized cities. even assuming a 2 tile error in against the L5 city and a two tile error for the L4 the L5 still comes out 12 production ahead at 128 to 140. And then when you factor in the seige and recruiting it wins by a wide margin.OH crunchy time. First off your numbers are incorrect. Not sure if you got them from an older build or something. Here are to correct values.Level 1 City: Minimum Pop 0, Tiles 16, Map Squares 4Level 2 City: Minimum Pop 40, Tiles 24, Map Squares 6Level 3 City: Minimum Pop 250, Tiles 32, Map Squares 8Level 4 City: Minimum Pop 500, Tiles 48, Map Squares 12Level 5 City: Minimum Pop 1000, Tiles 60, Map Squares 15The number of map squares is just a figure so I know how tightly I can pack a city. But anyhow on to the number crunch. For ease I'll use your numbers even though several of the city sizes are off to help prove my point because it's the mechanics not the balance that are in question here.
As for the tile in a L5 city I had to make an assumption about what you got a L5 as I haven't been able to keep a game stable long enough to get there in this last patch. but in fairness even though I was wrong, a city growth of 16-8-8-16 would allow for a safe assumption of 16 instead of 12 following that.
Alright here is where I have an issue with this aurgument. Where as I easily concede on the prior two points, you are right I was wrong. In this aurgument the smaller city size assumes (at least from my reading of it) that there is a population cap that would make two 500 pop cities better because it would come down to two L4's or 1 L5. But since population seems to be an inexhaustable resource, and growth is handle currently by prestige as a flat rate. It make no sense to stop at L4 and stay there. It makes more sense least to me currently to keep the city growing all the way to L5. And when you factor in your essence aurgument it reinforces the fewer cities at a higher level.
I am not augruing in favor of either personally. It just seems they are trying to add a strategic depth of making it a choice between large or small cities of which I would greatly favor. And as such I am either trying to understand the math behind the choices if it is there. Or help illustrate that the choice isn't there currently and spur conversation on getting it there.
As for the math errors I apologize. My game unfortunately doesn't allow for me to post while playing and as such I have to take notes and translate when I get back the forums. and of course the more steps you add to the process the more likely errors will creep in. Especially when doing off the cuff math calculations.
Yea I'm not really sure why they did it that way as it's not that intuitive. A better setup I think would of been 12-12-12-12-12 because at L2, L4, and L5 turn out the same. And it's much simpler for the player knowing every level they get 12 more tiles instead of having to remember the changing amounts. The only difference otherwise is L1 is not quite as good and L3 is a little bit better.
You seem to have forgotten you need housing for those people. And currently housing requires food which means no food = no people. Thus if you only have enough food to build 17 houses then you can either put those in 1 L5 city or 2 L4 cities. Though in my suggestion the food is tied to the people instead of the houses. This way things like lots of empty houses don't hurt you in a siege. As well as letting you expand while waiting for the population to grow. Such as sometimes when I have a lot of cities I like to queue up the houses so I know the slots are full and used up, thus less to worry about. But since empty houses use up food I can't do this.
I'm a great multi-tasker so I can keep track of the fact that I over built knowing that fairly soon down the road I'll finish some granaries, orchards, farming improvement tech, or etc. before food shortage would become an issue. But I know some people can easily over look this which is why part of my suggestion was on a 2 possible displays of current food supply along with needed to supply fully housed cities.
That's okie I have the same problem with it not alt-tabbing, I also have the same problem with a few other games. Anyway I too take notes when in game though mostly bugs and suggestion ideas I think up on the fly. I wrote down the city level amounts for comparison as well as if I needed them for discussion purposes. It actually took me 5 crashes and 2 restarts to get the numbers cause lasting long enough to hit L5 was a pain. For some reason when I decided to do a check on the numbers it kept crashing as I got close to level 5 and corrupting the save file.
I think that could be resolved by looking to the real world: Water.Lack of access to water, particularly fresh water has been the key limiter historically.Right now, because the river system is being redone, the world doesn't have rivers in it. But it will in Beta 3 again.Thus, you could have some sort of sanitation system (Aqueducts, Wells, etc.) could be improvements that show up only for level 3 and higher cities and provide a % bonus to existing housing and they can only be placed on tiles that have access to water. No water, no Aqueduct. No Aqueduct, getting to higher populations much harder.
I do want that whether a city reaches L5 depends on geography, but probably not entirely limited by water as this is not a real world game. For some fractions, likely the man, will need access to water to achieve it. For other fraction, whether there L5-abilty should related to their racial habitat. Dwarfs (I know, I know) won't need much water to build a huge L5 lybrinth in the mountains. Restricting all fraction's racial habitat to river/freshwater will left a lot 'empty' space around the map where it is dry.
Spending extra essence nor building regular improvement should not enable the L5-ness of a city. Something special is required to turn a non-racial-habitat city into L5, e.g. the city 'happens' to be the biggest hub city of a trade network; or a Civ4 like wonder is build.
Pyro/Xerox makes a lot of good points, when they demonstrated a self-sufficient L5 city is the most rational choice, I feel something need to be done. A L5 city should be vulnerable in some aspect. For a city of this size, food must be imported. This reinforce my belief that food production should be penalized in highly urbanized cities.
L1 Most efficient Farming
L3 Med Production/Med Farming
L5 Best Production/Worst Farming/Best Prestige Produciton
Agree completely with Darkodinplus here. Perhaps, if you initially invest 5 Ess starting a new city does not require you contribute any more when your city reaches L5. But if your initial investment is only 1 Ess, your need to pay 4 more + a penalty amount of ess before the city reaches L5 later.
double post... deleted.
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I'm not sure that's a bad thing. This way most of the larger towns and cities will be near rivers and lakes (and maybe the sea). Outside this area there will be the occasional settlement near resources or a strategic point, but a lot of the land will remain 'wild'. I believe this is what the dev's are aiming for (if they are not, they should IMO). Sure, some races would need less water than others and it might even be fun to have a race that could thrive in area's that are mostly useless to others, but I think that will mostly be left for modders to implement. Also, I'm not sure your average dwarf needs less water than a human, with all the beer that they drink
Spending extra essence nor building regular improvement should not enable the L5-ness of a city. Something special is required to turn a non-racial-habitat city into L5, e.g. the city 'happens' to be the biggest hub city of a trade network; or a Civ4 like wonder is build. Pyro/Xerox makes a lot of good points, when they demonstrated a self-sufficient L5 city is the most rational choice, I feel something need to be done. A L5 city should be vulnerable in some aspect. For a city of this size, food must be imported. This reinforce my belief that food production should be penalized in highly urbanized cities. L1 Most efficient FarmingL3 Med Production/Med FarmingL5 Best Production/Worst Farming/Best Prestige Produciton
Also have to disagree with you there on all points.
First, I don't think there should be any special requirements for a L5 city. The fact that it is a L5, a huge gathering of people, power and wealth, should be special enough on its own. They would be an obvious place to build special structures like Wonders, but it shouldn't be a requirement. And while it's true that global resources make it possible to build a L5 city completely disconnected from the main part of your civ, would you really want to?
Second, giving different settlement levels different bonuses and penalties feels very gamey to me, and is unnecessary. Larger towns will/should be better at production and prestige anyway, because they have a large population and a lot of buildings. They will still be vulnerable, because to sustain their large populations they should need all the food produced from several plots of fertile land. While its possible that a city contains a few food producing plots, its very unlikely that it is able to produce all the food it needs itself. Its access to the food it needs can be cut off by besieging the city, or by capturing/destroying the farms it gets its food from. So giving large cities a penalty to their food production is unnecessary.
And third, the whole discussion about whether maximum city size should be tied to initial essence spent to revitalize the land has been had a few times before. I'm pretty sure the consensus was that it wouldn't be a fun mechanic. It would require the player to plan ahead for a very long time. You would have to know from the start if you want the outpost you're building now to get access to some resources at some point in the distant future to become a huge city. Also circumstances change. The site where you initially plan to build a major settlement might turn out to be very close to an aggressive enemy or a den of monsters, or just turn out to be of little value to you. On the other hand, the village you build on the coast to get access to some fish, might later turn out to be on a good trading route, or be the ideal staging area for your invasion of the next continent. And finally, once the sovereign has revitalised the land, that land is habitable. Whether you only build a small town or a huge city there, or just use it to have a picnic once a year doesn't matter. What you suggest would require there to be different levels of revitalised land, which sounds like a pain to implement and doesn't add any fun IMO.
I don't recall any such discussion on the forums about tying the total essence investment to the size of the city. At any rate how is the reverse of what you describe anymore fun? Not having to make any plans whatsoever because a city can always grow to a LV 5 and there isn't any incentive not to get a LV 5? That seems shallow and not fun at all to me. As with any system the core idea is important but implementation is equally important. The trick with doing something like this would really be to make it versatile enough that you could make changes to your plans but rigid enough to where choosing smaller vs larger has some significance.
You could have something similar to what Climber suggested where later on if you decided that a city needed to be bigger you could spend essence to increase its level cap with some kind of penalty. The penalty could be to essence, resources, gold, population, etc. You could even make the penalty affect tile count. Where each time you reinvested in a city its number of tiles would decrease by some amount. Let’s say I had a LV 3 city and decided I needed a LV 4 or 5 later on. I could expend essence to increase the city level but I would have less tiles then a natural LV 4 or 5 city. The more you did this the less tiles you would get so if I made a LV 1 city and continued to invest up to LV 5 this particular city would have less tiles then a LV 2 city upgraded to LV 5 which would have less then a LV3 city upgraded to LV 5 and so on. Your total essence spent on a city might still be 5 or whatever but its cost you precious tiles which is a major portion of a city’s value
This would encourage players to pick the city LV wisely but still allow for adaptation albeit not with out a price to be paid. I’m not sure exactly what would make the most sense but you might have something like every city can get to LV 2 and the initial investment determines if the city can reach LV 3, 4, or 5. That would really be a balancing issue and since we don’t even know if the current flat investment will stay 5 all one can do is speculate at the moment. Anyway, I see your point but I personally think some level of risk vs. reward is needed and this sounds like a lot more fun than paying a one time flat investment for any city size at least to me.
Well, the natural thought is, if MOST things produce more in a level 5 city, however RESOURCE gatherers produce equivalent amounts in ANY size city (Food, Materials, Ore) ... then its less efficient BY SPACE to have a level 5 city that is also a self-sufficient resource gatherer.
Essentially, you would be able to "get the most" out of a level 5 city if it was largely empty space (thus non self sufficient).
Additionally, lets assume that size 5 is at 1000 or so (even 2000-5000). I think there should be some special bonus for each additional 1000 population. Lets say (for assumption sake) +1 gold, +1 prestige (per extra 1000 people) ... or, barring that, +1 gold for every gold producing building.
At the risk of repeating myself, I'd like to refloat this idea:
https://forums.elementalgame.com/379023
(Sorry, Climber!)
I think there does need to be something special to make a city an L5, but essence IS something special (it's THE something special), and if we want to choose to spend it making a city impossibly large by forcing the land around it into fertility at the cost of making other cities, let it be that choice.
The other thing we can consider is how the great cities in the (real) world came to be: as major trading ports, likely on the coast or at the crossroads of major trade routes.
How about if the city size is limited by the amount of trade routes you're supporting from that city? This would have the mechanic of making it so that only 1/2 your cities could become L5, by definition.
Maybe we do it by a points system. By the coast =3 points, on a river =2 points, on a trade route =1 point, near a scenic view = 1 point. Each trade route you add to a city adds one point to one of the two cities on the trade route (not both, however). If your city has enough geographic plus trade plus other points, it can level up to 5. It follows the MoM mechanic that geography limits ultimate size, except, like MOM, you can influence that limit through the use of terrain altering spells (or units, for the dwarves!) and through raw essence (I don't know WHY I like living in this city, I just know that I do!).
Anyway, great thread. Keeping me awake in Japan during the ah...slower talks...
Winni
If there was a bonus for every additional 1K people I think it should be a lot more then that. I mean a typical level 5 city already needs 1/4 it's tiles in housing just to get the first 1K for L5. Thus they would need over 1/2 of their tiles to make it to 2K population. That's just housing and not counting the food. A city that was self sufficent with 2K population would have nothing but housing and farms assuming they could even reach it. To infiniate tech tree would make it easier over time to reach but that's ok because really long games should have larger cities.
And speaking of larger cities this may seem a bit radical but how about remove the level cap on cities all together? At level 3 and up the game starts the trend of requiring you to have double the population of the previous level. Well what if that trend continues onward? A level 6 would require 2K population, a level 7 with 4K, a level 8 with 8K and so on. The food requirements alone would make it extremely cost prohibative but at the same time give you something to continue working for. Give the food and house requirements having 8 level 5 cities would be better then 1 level 8 city. But because of the level multiplier you might want one city at level 8 on a rare resource you only have one location of.
After all cities don't become large just because they are along trade routes. A lot of times if there is a lot of some rare valuable resource the city grows up around it. And because of that the city then becomes a big trade city.
That sounds overly complicated and would more along the lines of a second point requirement beyond population to to reach level 5. People would be checking how many trade points and what their city population was to see if it could level up.
I still think having presitige be a dimishing growth system helps accomplish the same thing without overly complicating the sytem with additional factors for the player to keep track of. As the city goes it adds a penalty to prestige thus lowering the rate at which it grows. Eventually it will come to a crawl unless the player builds more prestige buildings like inns, pubs, theaters, and such.
I don't really think adding new mechanics to limit the city leveling up or location requirements is that good of an idea. I think it's one of those things that sounds good on paper but is just going to end up making things more cumbersome and frustrating for the player. Trade routes just mean the player is gonna want to setup a route from every city they have to every other so they can reach level 5. And location restrictions means players are gonna get frustrated when they end up with bad starting postions with the required item no where near then then found out later the AI or other player had 2-3 of those prime city locations right next to them.
Again, agreed with Darkodinplus post #63 completely. Rgds to the penalty needed to increase city level cap, I believe essence should be the best choice as it will always be scarce. In a lot of games, you may have lots of resources, gold, population, etc sitting around; when one of these can be used as the price, the penalty may not be enough. Anyway, a minor difference in opinion.Winnihym, don’t you know your idea can be extremely similar to mine? Every developed L5 city should have its defensive wall; when your force fertility around it, will these new fertility outside its wall? I think so (or let me assume this is what u meant).
If L1 city are only great at farming, a rational player with limited will not build lots of defensive structure around it. They will not be as well defended, just like the new fertile land in your idea.
Ideally, there will be game mechanics that making L5 situated only at a geographically unique area, be it a major trading centre, the capital and/or great fit with the fraction’s racial habitat. Winnihym’s point system will work well.
The civ 4 like Wonder I’ve mentioned in post #60 will then contribute a point or 2 in Winnihym’s system. This can represent a reward, if the player can achieve something really amazing in game, e.g. be the first one who sails around the world. For me, this kind of special building should be the only building that make a place geographically unique (instead of the aqueduct), improving its legibility to become a L5. Spending more essence alone to make a L5 legitable does not appeal me.
Different city level should be efficient at different task. Thereby player need to think carefully how they place/develop their cities.
Player can make their empire completely out of the L3 workhorses. Or some others prefer mostly L1 with a few L4/L5 around.
Again with the essence investment, what's the point? I agree with you that essence should be scarce, but it should only be used for magic, not everyday life. Humans are perfectly capable of building huge cities without requiring magic in this world, why should it be any different in Elemental? To me, once the sovereign has cast the revitalise spell to turn 'dead' land into something habitable, he is done with it. The revitalised land slowly spreads outwards, making room for not just one, but eventually several settlements. He may need to cast that spell again if he wants to revitalise some lands some distance away from his original site, but that's it. The rest of his essence should be used for his own power, investing in heroes and items and casting powerful spells.
I believe the best way to prevent every town you build to turn into a L5 at some point is by making sure there is only a limited amount of food available. If you only have enough food to feed 2000 people, and you need 1000 people in a town to make it a L5, you can only feed another 1000 people in your kingdom. So yes, you could have another L5 with 1000 people in it, or 2 L4's, 4 L3's, and so on... If you want to grow beyond that, you will have to find a new food source.
If you combine this with Pyromancer's suggestion of making prestige diminish as population grows, I think you have a good system of preventing that the number of L5 becomes to great. If you want a town to grow, you will need to have enough food to feed those extra people, enough housing available to house them, and make sure that the towns nett prestige is still positive. The suggested requirements for a city to grow to L5 you, Darkodinplus and Winnihym propose seem somewhat arbitrary to me, and don't sound like fun at all.
Finally, I hope that the current population size associated with each city level will be increased a lot. I'm thinking something along the lines of:
L1 Outpost; max population 100L2 Hamlet; max population 250L3 Village; max population 1000L4 Town; max population 5000L5 City; max population unlimited?
This will also prevent L5 spam somewhat, because for every L5 you could potentially have maybe a dozen smaller settlements. This would force you to choose if you want to focus your population in a few cities, or spread them around more. Of course this does require that a few smaller towns could be just as useful as one big city, although perhaps you would have to change your strategies somewhat.
@ Satrhan ... I like this idea, of having roughly the pop-requirements you have stated, or at least sharing a similar relationship between city sizes. In addition perhaps giving a bit more "building space" for size 4 and size 5 cities.
Then, perhaps shrink the size of each building to 1/4 their current size (well from 1Z1 anyways), and reducing "building tiles" to that size as well, making cities relatively smaller than their surroundings. Its aesthetics(perhaps) but meh.
Additionally, having MOST buildings available to all city sizes ... not counting upgrades of course ... since houses would always be in size 2+ only, and Universities only in Size 5 (vs Schools of size 2+ cities). Additionally, things like pubs, taverns (and potentially theaters??) should be possible in any size of city.
Perhaps allow for specialized high-tech buildings which allow for other buildings in Size 5 ... for Housing purposes only. Essentially, a size 5 becomes a housing god with multi-story apartments. (as well as slums ... but well, apartments are more expensive and more effective? perhaps could go the route of slums being cheaper AND costing less food (than houses)).
This is not in relation to the current values for Building output, since those will become outdated, just in case the assumption was made that I was comparing using current values of buildings.
However ... I must say that at the end of the day, I would rather that everyone has a few size 5 cities sparsely dotting the landscape, rather than many low-level cities committing city spam.
Just as a side note. Unless it has changed, it is quite possible to Build new cities without the consumption of Essence.
As for the Caravan entry in Brad's post. I like it but if the dead-head idea sticks, will it be possible to create 2 "routes" both to and from 2 cities such that my Stone producing City B will deliver stone to city A, while at the same time, City A, my Food producer, sends Food to City B.
Or would one route cover both if I create 2 caravan units, one in each town?
My mistake, Climber, I had seen in one of your posts that you weren't a fan of using essence to create farmland; hence the apology for advocating this.
I'm not advocating it as a requirement, I'm advocating it as an option; to me, it's a guns or butter choice for the entirety of the economy; essence is most precious resource in the game; it makes sense to me that it should have the most utility. So I'm not sure I buy the position that it should "just be used for power and magic". It should be used strategically, agreed, but more options in its use is IMO good.
So, if food limits population (which I thought it did, in the build I was looking at? There's a stop point for housing, and a stop point for food?), what's to stop me from building my L5 town around my L2-3 farm communities? I can, with map geometries, set it up such that my L5 city completely surrounds my food cities, and never risk my food production? I suppose that could be used with whatever limiter is in place, but food, at least in the current mechanic, costs me 5 essence to fix any problem I may have; just plop down another city, and populate it with gardens. Since there's no hard limit on the number of cities, and I can go get essence by leveling, what I'd end up with is 3 or so production cities that matter and a bunch of throwaway cities that provide food for it that I can, with a little forethought, deny access to for my enemies. I dunno if I like this mechanic; it smacks of the science city/production city mechanic that arose in Civ4.
I'd like the "diminishing returns" mechanic for prestige explained a little better, please, I'm not sure I get it. Perhaps you could use smaller words for me...
Last time I checked there was a technology that allowed you to "Imbue your Soverign with Essence". However, currently the tech doesn't work, other than allow you to research it.....
John, I haven't been able to build a city without essence, unless perhaps you razed a city, then built one on the tile that has already had essence poured into it to make it city buildable.
I like the idea being bandied around that only allows certain buildings to be built at higher level cities, this is already in place though (probably need balancing later). However, Tasunke's idea of buildings to unlock buildings is too C&C or Starcraft for me. I don't see why I should have to remember a flowchart of building availability so that I can build the prereqs in each city to get the building I actually want to build. Also, the prereq flowchart style is more sensical in a C&C or starcraft style game than Elemental or MoO. I prefer the alternative which is city level determines when certain buildings are available for contruction (supreme commander has a similar system turned RTS though - higher level engineers).
Level 5 spam cities can be countered 2 different ways in balancing. 1) Decrease availability of food. 2) as stated above, increase population needed for higher level cities.
Currently I'm for option 2 because this will allow the creation of 1000 strong armies WITHOUT dropping your city level (after the current bug/gameplay feature that allows you to drop population without losing city level is fixed).
Frogboy's envisioned trade route revamp sounds really good though. The roadwarrior perk will need MAJOR balancing though, as it will give a HUGE advantage, as caravans will be able to built waaaaaaay quicker (gold wont have been consumed to build the road first). Perhaps look at BotF style trade route mechanic, that only allows a specific number of trade routes based on population, or special racial abilities (master traders). Also has a mechanic for dealing with trade routes to other teams, either neutral, peace, allies, at war.
NB// BotF = Birth of the Federation, its a TBS. Don't use too many of the mechanicisms in the game, but the trade route one is good (intuitive, and rewarding, a differentiation point about the different teams).
Did you see my previous post much earlier in the thread? If not I'll post the important part again. If you have any more questions just ask.
In a way you can kind of think of it how food and unhealthyness worked in Civ. Not really where I got the idea but the same princile now that I think about it.
Great discussion.
A few things I would throw in here:
Beware of designing game mechanics to deal with balance issues. How "scarce" something is happens to be purely a matter of balance. Food to plentiful? Then fewer fertile land spots and such. Higher levels not providing enough benefit? Have more buildings that require those high levels.
The scarcity of a given thing is a matter of balance. The game mechanic shouldn't come into play.
Fair enough. I was some-what wary of this, while at the same time couldn't help but get sucked into the discussion
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