So I'm a little disturbed at how the cities are going right now. It seems we have two distinct camps, And I thought we could consolidate the discussion on the level of complication of the city-building element (no pun intended) of this game.
On the one hand we have: Complicate it still further
Frogboy seems heavily in this camp, and seems to have asked us how to do this. For example, Frogboy has asked us to think up additional building that can be built next to the current plethora of buildings to further complement the existing buildings. He has also stated that he believes housing to be relatively simple as it is. Others have also suggested that food is supposed to be a rare resource, hence making it normal to build 5-10 gardens in every city. The devs also seem fine with stretching a city across the map to reach that one rare resource.
On the other hand we have: It's too complicated already
Many other have noticed the focus on garden-building and house-building. It seems that first 1 workshop for materials, then 2 gardens, then 1 hut, must be built before even considering other types of buildings. Then you need research, money, prestige - there's no thought to it - you just have to build it all. And yet food is so rare, you're forced to flood a city with gardens. So you may not even have much room to get that research/materials city you wanted. Cities also seem to look like a mess - it's hard to tell buildings apart, and the square-based build with no room in between the buildings looks unnatural.
In the interests of making this readable, I'v kept the sides short. But please add more info to your side, or develop another side if you think we have one.
I thought at one point there were talks of a governor stat. That the cities wouldn't grow past a certain point unless you had a governor that would allow it. I believe the example was do you use Ranger man as part of your army, or use him to take this city to L3 as he has a governor rank of 3. Did that disappear?
I'd still like to see something like this. With a couple of other features. For example say Druanna can build up a city to L3 based on her governor rank. She is also a Druid, thus using her will grant you some bonuses to food production. Now if you don't want to worry about setting up the city, you put her in charge of it and she builds based upon her background...in this case probably focused on building farms, and using the environment as best she can. Now Drake comes along who is a Military expert and we put him in charge granting bonuses to training and troop building and he expands the city based upon his ideals of military conquest.
Yes I remember this too...... in fact here is the developer journal on it! https://forums.elementalgame.com/376517
Things like this make it hard to know what to suggest, because I don't know what isn't in the game that is planned. Or what was planned but was scrapped...
Yeah, I agree with this. (Posted something similar in another thread. )
I also think that Gardens are the bigger culprit at this point. To grow a city where your food resources exist, you just build houses. But to do it when food isn't adequate, you build houses AND gardens. You need 2 gardens per house (IIRC), and that just chews up more space and adds more annoyance.
If the number of gardens was capped at say 4, it'd provide enough to grow the town a bit, but after that you'd need to use "real" resources like fertile land or bees to grow it further. Which also makes sense, who ever heard of a city that could feed itself entirely off gardens?
The houses themselves serve the purpose of allocating food resources. Gardens really just let you circumvent the limits on food resources by building more. I think we'd really be better off without 10 gardens in every city.
I really like what is said here. Not only is it an excellent point, that solves the particular problem that many people are complaining about, but I think it might make huge megalopolises (Level 5 cities) rarer and special. When I think of a fantasy setting I think of a mix of city types, anywhere from small outposts to massive urban centers. In Elemental you can conceivably make all your cities level 5, making them pretty common.
Agreed. Putting a cap on farms could also make people think twice about starting a city in a stupid position and would perhaps encourage conflict over the food rescources on the map. Also, I think there should be an additional City level for your designated Capital.
Also, I really like the idea mentioned in this topic (https://forums.elementalgame.com/376517) by one of the devs about having a governing stat on champions that can limit city growth.
-first I don't like hard caps -- capping gardens at 4 (or any number) is hard to justify with ingame logic.
That could be solved tho by using 'diminishing returns' - first garden supports 1 house unit and takes up 1 space, second garden supports 1 house unit but takes up 2 spaces, third garden supports 1 house but takes up 4 spaces, etc.
-second the devs changed resources to be available empire-wide and not limited to that one city (which I don't really like as sharing resources empire-wide when the cities are widely separated -- even with enemy cities in-between and no roads -- isn't 'ingame logical' but it's unlikely they'll change it back now). So limiting city size based upon a nearby food resource goes against empire-wide resource sharing.
Not sure how to get around this without a 'hard cap' like 'cities need 1 local food resource for each level past 3'. Maybe involving techs (food storage/refrigeration for transport or the like) -- without the proper tech a food resource has to be in the cities' borders for it to exceed level 3, with one of the techs it can reach lvl 4 without a nearby food resource, with the second tech the city could reach lvl 5, etc.
-third the 'food problem' isn't that much of a problem -- part of it is because it's harder to move about the map to find good city locations because mobs are too tough (will be fixed) and partly because the map is hard-coded (it won't be later) so making big changes now because of temporary problems isn't prudent.
Fixing these 2 current 'problems' might just make the 'food problem' disappear.
That said, I like the idea -- linking city size with nearby food resources makes that food resource more special as it should be. If it could be done without violating the 'empire-wide resource' design feature and without hard caps, it'd be a nice change.
I'd also make the change someone else suggested (sorry, forgot who) where 1 garden = 1 house unit, not 2 gardens = 1 house unit. It's more sensible and reduces the number of gardens.
I'd also make the change to allow essence be used to create fertile ground or bees/etc. out of normal terrain, as that's the sort of thing I perceive essence to be and it'd show how 'special' essence is.
I don't see how each garden being half as productive as the previous one makes any more sense then a hard cap. Besides, other things already have caps, such as schools and markets. It's consistent, at least.
I didn't say anything about local. When you hook up to a food resource, you use houses to decide which city you want to spend it in. That doesn't change if gardens are capped, except that the food resources become more valuable because past tier 2 you can't grow settlements without them.
If you want to build multiple cities it becomes a problem, as even one farm won't get a city to tier 5 without copious garden spam. Big cities require multiple food resources, so you won't have many big cities. I think that's the point, but garden spam lets you cheat some and grow bigger then your food resources would normally allow.
I tend to like that, as with gardens capped you'd wind up with a handful of big cities (depending on map size) supported by larger numbers of villages and outposts to capture resources. The cities then become more important.
This thread has given me a lot of ideas and also reminded me about how other strategy games I've played have handled similar problems/situations.
First, though, I just want to say something about scale. At the moment it seems like the scales for 'cities' is to be honest more like a scale for small towns than anything. A city is a collection of a small handful of buildings and a small handful of people with maybe a small handful of guards...and yet we can mass produce armor and weapons and perform magical research fairly adequately.
I think the scope of the game, graphically, at least, could use some work. I would like to see roads between blocks of buildings, walls, and I'd like to see sprawling cities. The city level idea is fine but I think it might make sense to have the size of the city more based on population than a pre-set cap, so it /is/ possible to just keep building and just keep growing until you hit natural barriers. (Like some great cities in the ancient world.) This can be handled quite easily just by changing the scale of the graphics when it comes to cities and adding some more visual accouterments and embellishments.
Rather than hard, pre-set levels I would like to see a city as it gains population grow in size and certain buildings pop up automatically...and when a city loses population to war or drafting or famine old buildings fall into disrepair or become uninhabited or even fire hazards. (Giving you a decision to demolish them or leave them and hope they soon become inhabited.)
I'm reminded of the Strategy game Tropico in multiple ways from some of these suggestions. (This is a good thing.) Firstly, Tropico had land color coded for things like fertility and mineral richness; but areas that were especially so would be rare and coveted. Most importantly though in Tropico as you gained people they naturally built things on their own.
I'd like to see a system where city planning and randomness were two uneasy partners; get too much population too fast they start building their own slums, shanties, seedy inns, and bars and twisty roads. If you can plan you can pre-build city districts and housing and straight roads...but if you mess up these buildings become abandoned and cause prestige penalties for the city.
Basically, things are built automatically as they're needed, but the things you build via a plan should be more organized and more effective/prosperous than the things people build on their own. You have to balance how much time/effort you want to spend trying to make your city perfect...because if people build the city it will be less efficient.
Just like in Tropico, though; if you knock down their shanties and dirt roads, they'll be angry/work will come to a standstill until you rebuild.
It could be the same with roads between cities: The natural roads that'd pop up would be twisty dirt roads; treacherous and random, but you could either pave those roads, or attempt to jump the gun and build roads ahead of time to be more prosperous...but if nobody uses them they fall into disrepair.
Basically, a section of the city you plan would be visually neater and more prosperous but more costly and take time to build. It will give you a prestige and money bonus. Sections of the city auto-built would be random, disorderly, and cost you money and prestige with thievery and poor living conditions. Some cities might have 'rich' districts as well as slums, and it'd be a matter of balance or a struggle between what the people built themselves and what you built and planned.
Furthermore; with a governor the city's auto-builds could be slightly more orderly, but not as orderly as the things you took the time and money to build yourself.
Example: You build a housing district with roads, houses, and a school You build walls around the district. It costs 350 Gold, offers housing for 30, and provides 5 prestige.
You leave your city alone for a few turns, but have extra food and plenty of trade. Your housing district fills up, and new people to the city start building their own dirt roads and shanty houses outside. These shanties and roads provide population but say, cost 1 gold and 1 prestige a turn.
You could decide to pave the roads and rebuild the houses for a couple hundred gold to say make it so the district costs nothing and offers 1 prestige a turn. Or you could be willing to shell out even more money, and grind your city to a standstill to bulldoze the shanty town and build another housing district.
In another case, the district you build could have no population come into it, and then it falls into disrepair (Graphics darken) and it starts costing you prestige and gold to maintain.
My last point is about combining tiles; I like this idea.
I've played plenty of strategy games, even back in the day (like Civilization 2000 and Warcraft II) Where random tiles would change so that lots of the same tiles looked different than individual tiles. In this way, a row of 4 gardens would become one large garden with a few houses and people working them with a road nearby. Or several merchant buildings would combine into a little open market with a road running through it.
Maybe it'd be hard to do...but stuff like that adds flavor and character that is needed to make the city building not a chore, but fun and rewarding.
Yeah, the problem for me isn't complexity but tediousness. Personally I think smaller cities with buildings that are more effective would be more interesting. My garden or whatever just produces 1 food (can't remember if that's true or not), make it produce 4 as an example but have fewer city build areas. My individual choices right now don't seem significant enough and I hate building masses of the same buildings. Just not fun or interesting. Also do we really need so many buildings that do similar things? School gives 5 research, scholar gives 1, town council gives 1, .... Other games like MOM might have buildings like this also but you are limited to just 1 which makes a difference. Would rather have buildings have upgrades than have masses of similar buildings.
I suspect that the reason Scott's idea about champion Chancellors for cities didn't get more talk (or just implementation without talk) was because some 'too complicated' arguments won out inside Stardock. I still think the Governing stat is the best single anti-city-spam idea that doesn't seem arbitrary and also leaves the possibility for city spam as a workable, but not at all inevitable, play style.
Since Frogboy changed things already, from the 'did you play beta 2 this weekend' thread:
1. Fixed the overpowered monsters lurking around at start.
2. Re-did the whole garden thing.
3. Re-did the whole city population to level up thing...[/quote]
this discussion is likely moot til we see what's new, but for the sake of discussion being fun...[quote who="Tridus" reply="57" id="2652449"]I don't see how each garden being half as productive as the previous one makes any more sense then a hard cap. Besides, other things already have caps, such as schools and markets. It's consistent, at least.
Second, remove the other hard caps.
Third, because we have some hard caps does not mean it's ok to add more. In fact just the opposite -- it's reason to not add more.
I assumed (yes I know...)... Seemed like 1 fertile grounds affecting all cities gives one fertile ground too much power, but perhaps that's quibbling on my part.
So with all the food and housing techs I've researched 1 fertile ground (42 food) can support 10 villas (1240 pop) with 2 extra food. No gardens needed.
I just don't like hard caps to achieve this (or other design goals).
I have no problem with the prerequisite you mentioned. It's about macromanagement versus micromanagement. Streamlined versus tedious. Informed versus being in the dark. Taking your example, having a menu that indicates connectable cities would be a useful tool.
From the menu, select a route -> background calculations check if that route is secure or not -> if not secure, a warning message indicates that there's some cleaning up to do.
With something like this, the player would have a better grasp of game mechanics. Micromanagement would only be necessary to clean up a particular route.
Right now: builds caravan... where's the nearest city?... *zooms out*... *finds city* ... *sends caravan to city* ... *does something else in the meantime* ... *goes back* ... *scratches head* ... huh... where's that damn thing? ... sends another caravan... *watches closely* ... what? I need to kill that stupid critter first?!? Where's the telepathic uplink for this kind of information?!?!?!
I do have a problem with this sort of thing.
Does it make sense to have a city consisting of nothing but schools? Some of the caps make a lot more sense then the alternative.
Well, that city has 3 food resources. That's more then one. But if you can pull that much food out of one fertile ground, you got more tech out of it then I did. (I also couldn't build villas for some reason, possibly due to city level. Don't have the game in front of me.)
The wildgame tile gives a x2 food multiplier. I would argue that city location is hands down the strongest on the map.
I really hate how large cities can get. By the by, I just want to be able to upgrade my huts to villas and villas to estates so that I can build other buildings. Same with gardens. Give me tech that gives passive bonuses to my gardens and farms and what not.
Overall, I'd like to see a system where our true resources are population and land plots. When the sovereign casts his starter spell, that is all the land you get to build your city on. The city gets better by improving the starting buildings and passive technologies. Huts<Villas<Estates Gardens<farms ect..
Make any building that produces a resource or product require part of my population at all times creating a workforce which then increases my gildar per turn via taxation. The non workforce becomes my military and determines my maximum force. The more powerful units take up more population points.
If I want to run less farms to have more stables which increases my military movement allotment, then My sovereign has to cast a spell that increases farm food production for so many turns.
If I want to make more cash with less workforce, My sovereign casts a calming spell that lasts several turns and lets me tax my workforce for more.
You stop cities from becoming focused on one thing by decreasing the effectiveness of additional buildings of the same type with the thought that your best crafters are in the initial crafting buildings, your smartest are in the initial libraries... and so on.
Just my 2 cents.
Edit: If you are a fan of large sprawling cities, You can have your sovereign cast the starter spell a 2nd time near your first city so that they connect which will make one mega city.
I'm in the less is more camp when it comes to city management. Frankly, I don't see how you will ever satisfy everyone with one method because the micro managers will never be happy with a automated system and those of us that would rather not be bothered will hate the micro management. Trying to hit the middle road and make everyone happy sounds like a pipe dream.
Ultimately I think you will have to build the system that the micro-managers are willing to live with and put in enough automation so that the rest of us can play the game.
Here are a couple of suggestions - not based on any method, just some things that seem like they could make the game easier:
Make builds events, or at least be able to flag the game to alert you that something can be built in city X. I see this as something like a cutscene that states that the city govenor is petitioning you for funds and resources to build the following improvement(s). The Sovereign can then approve or deny the request. This keeps me from having to check each city to see what things are in need and which could/should be built. You could give each city a build queue to serve the micro-management (mm) crowd.
When a hero enters your city zone of control, an event notification is generated allowing you to interact with them. Possible interactions could be: Hire for a certain job (i.e. kill local monster), get random information, Hire for city or kingdom use, ask them to leave your territory, carry a message to another sovereign.
When a hostile creature enters your ZOC, a message is shown which allows you to click on the message and takes you to the general area so that you can deal with the situation.
Do away with housing altogether and make it something that the city just does while it grows, if the city population grows, the houses automatically created and are shown in good shape and appear around the town. If the town has a negitive growth, excess housing becomes slums which takes down the city prestiage. As growth returns, the slums are slowly cleared away and nicer housing returns. You can also have a event that allows your sovereign to deal with city slums by making moral decisions (like in GalCiv).
We need some quicker method to move trained units from a city other than clicking on them one at a time.
Just some thoughts.
Choices are good in strategy games.
The point is that by careful city site selection the problems can be avoided (I also posted a screenshot of another location with the same 4 food resources that could be acquired by 2 cities, so wasn't a unique situation on our map). If careful strategic play avoids the 'problem' then is it really a problem?
Anyhoo, interesting discussion (for me anyways!)
Great discussion so far. Looks like Frogboy is actively reducing the busywork and increasing the strategy. I'll wait for the next version to see how much things have actually changed though.
I did not read all the posts, it's just a quick comment.
For building contruction, I personally think that player should only take care about unique buildings. All repetitive buildings, like housing, should be built by themselves (not managed by the player).
Else, it will become like sim city. Players will find an optimal combination of residential, industrial and commercial district and keep this strategy all the time. (ex: 2 residential for 1 industrial and 1 commercial)
You don't want players to be able to balance their ressource income by ajusting the right amount of buildings of each type.
You want each building to have a special unique ability where player must determine which building should built in the city. Not all buildings would have the same benefits, and the player's priority might change which building gets built first. You could also limit the number of buildings a city can have forcing the player to choose the right combination of buildings.
Viewpoint #3: Cities are too simple, but building them is too complex.
It's retarded, to put it mildly. A city with two houses? Food and shelter is abstracted and annoying. Building housing in games has always been an irritant, the more realistic the game it's placed in, the more idiotic it becomes. It's almost rational in games like Age of Empires, even if devoid of real need and just something annoying you have to get out of the way. It serves zero purpose in a game where population grows by itself.
If they can figure out how to shag each other, they can figure out how to build new houses to go with the results. It's only been happening for millions of years with zero need for top down control. If we plan to mate them manually as well, I'll give up this argument.
The gardens being placed manually, loathed just as equally, suffer the same problem. I've raised one myself. The Mayor didn't till the back half of the yard up for us.
Organic populations should have organic housing and food production. They should even have an organic economy. It wouldn't be the entirety of it of course, even a comparably loose system such as modern democracies have are rife with government established production. It would cover the basics though. you shouldn't have to build markets, they appear all by themselves wherever there is trade. Trade simply requires goods, services, and a population.
You plop down your city. You build up a central point for leadership, defenses, production sectors to supply them, security for the populace, put in wells where there's no natural water source, clear roadways to ease travel and encourage utilization of the area. You build up defensive positions to protect your city from invaders, clear out banditry, keeping order so that your economic activity isn't being interrupted by violence. You guide your production by employing the populace towards the ends you need met, but you're never the sole employer. A farmer with food he can't use trades it for things he can, supplying the other components of the economy through the market stalls. Someone becomes a merchant shipping grain between cities, instead of just a stall owner, when the city has more food than it needs, and less than it could use of something else. The farmer himself becomes a farmer by traveling to your new center of power, providing safety and support to the surrounding region, because it's the only intelligent place to farm, and everyone has to eat. He picks out a nearby spot of land suited to the task, clears it, and starts his work. He'll probably build his house there too, why walk back and forth each day?
You now get added strategic and tactical depth, while vastly reducing the need for micromanagement.
I'd also give up on the rigid tile based placement of structures to make things look better and have more flexibility in placement. We already have four sections for a single square. Why not toss the sections and have a build area buffer covering half a tiles worth or so around existing buildings on which you can place objects of varied size in whatever direction you feel like? This is a fairly minor irritant though. An aesthetic peeve more than a major game play improvement. It would make mountains out of a mole hill for how cities look in combination with organic systems. Those of you with an artistic bent would find designing a picturesque city a challenging source of entertainment in itself.
Apparently spells exist to make ground fertile, which means garden spam will no longer occur. Basically you will hunt down a wild game spot (or cast a spell to create one) and spam a farm city. Since there is no limit on the number of food resources a single city can have, you'll just have every single tile devoted to one. This will easily support your entire empire, and if not, just make another.
As far as caps are concerned.. if there is going to be a cap on the number of tiles a city can work than there should be a cap on the number of gardens available. It's just a part of the mechanic.. and no it doesn't make sense for a city to be all schools, but it probably will be (mostly all schools anyway). You would have to justify removing city tile caps entirely (which isn't necessarily bad), I just suspect that each player would only ever have one super city, because defending it would be easy. I definately agree that housing shouldn't take up tiles though. Even if stardock decides to reduce the number of usable tiles to compensate, it's better than being forced to micromanage the exact number of houses needed. Honestly I'd prefer houses just got built automatically, and there was a soft cap (reduced prestige) on each city level until you research the appropriate housing techs.
Organic City Growth is the Future!!!This is centered around two major tenets, one game play based, the other essentially game-engine based:Choice of Essential Buildings:
- There are X number of strategic/player choose-able plots within the central city area, as determined by city level - Building chosen influences both the function and look of the city - These major buildings would affect the capabilities of the city in question. They should be relatively unique per/city (i.e. no spam of one building type), yet there should be more building choices than building lots available in order to provide opportunities for cities to either specialize in a certain area or to be a less skilled jack-of-all-trades. There MUST be specialization *to an extent* in order to avoid a nation of cookie-cutter cities! Also increases the strategic nature of cities and sovereign choice - By lowering the amount of times a player is forced to stop back at the city, and lowering the "make work" factor, you are easing large map/end game scenario tedium for the player while simultaneously opening the opportunity to develop governor options along the lines of SMAC (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri) - Depth and strategy can also be increased without any increase in tedium by allowing for building upgrades and/or (preferably "and" ) building feedback/interaction, the former which can increase game length and strategy, the latter which provides further strategic choices and consequences for the player/sovereign
This also avoids issues with hard caps and realism. Some options are obviously going to be one-per-city/faction/game world, while with others, players will have to balance the increased benefits of multiple instances of a single building type hurting their production/abilities in other areas (specialization versus Jack-of-all-trades!).
City Development Should *Develop* According to the Sovereign's Wishes and Reflect His or Her Choices(aka The Sovereign is *not* the Urban Planner!)
- Housing/minor shops/other buildings are aesthetic fillers (not buildings options for players) and would be procedurally placed around and in between player-chosen buildings, this is advantageous at two levels: 1.) Avoids the busywork and monotony of individual building placement spam. 2.) Provides the opportunity for much more realistic and natural looking towns/cities - This would at the simplest level require a set of basic building designs for fillers (huts, villas, small shops, etc) that would be replicated and modified for various city conditions (e.g. industrial/leisure; economic/military; poor/middle/upper, etc). The filler buildings/houses would not have to be drastically different from each other (i.e. you could use the same basic building blocks), just enough so to convey the sense that the player's choices in building choice (and hence city role) are in turn affecting how the city looks and feels. - I would not go so far as to say this development would in turn affect city development on its own (a la the random factor mentioned by Nathikal in post 12). While it would certainly be cool to have another factor affecting city development, I think in this case having the surrounding city elements simply responding to player choice of strategic buildings avoids some tedium and a potential nightmare on huge maps/long games of having to choose between bulldozing/redistricting/etc. or dealing with negative effects of a random development. - In short, these buildings/props should be worked to provide quick visual cues to the player of how his/her city is performing, it's general purpose, and should be a sort of reward/feedback as to that player's choices in city development. Reward, not busy work!
Other things to consider:
Provide a generic bonus to cities that have a governor of sorts, this:1.) Provides a strategic choice of whether you want a champion boosting your cities or boosting your armies2.) Avoids "over-complicating" things by adding another stat (governing) to champions to worry aboutEnsure that the civilization building portion of this game remains strong! - This is a 4x game, not just an adventuring or RTS game. - City building can be fun, strategic, and gratifying provided tedium/monotony/micro-heavy "make-work" is cut down, while still ensuring that the player is responsible for making decisions that will have strategic consequences. In turn, these choices must have consequences in the game world, such as with city growth, unit options, etc.
In short, the player--as sovereign--should feel as such. The player should be forced to make strategic choices (initial placement of city, development of city's capabilities, etc.) and the cities (and ideally game world) should adjust and respond accordingly. The player is the *ruler*, not the urban planner--strategic choices, not hut-laying!
For futher elaboration, I noticed that Nathikal also has made similar points, see his full post on the
A very good and valid point!
Why even bother with plopping down houses at all? Why not have population growth be based off available food supply (either native or what the trade network brings in), and then have a MoM style build 'housing' which boosts it?
The "why" is that food is a global resource. Any town can access any other town's food without any trade being established. It's just one big pool. Houses serve to direct the flow of food throughout your empire. They are like magical beacons that serve as incoming teleportation pads for the food in your empire. This makes growing cities based on available food difficult, because you wouldn't be able to direct which cities grow and which cities won't....unless you move away from a global food system.
Now whether or not this system is the best system is debatable, so I'm not saying your idea is a bad one, just that the devs are really attached to the "Food as a global resource" idea. So you'd really have to "wow" them to change their mind.
From frogboy:
"Food is global because it's consistent (i.e. other games have "global money") and because it provides greater strategic options to players. The reason every TBS game seems to end in a grind is because each city is a civilization unto itself. There is no real thought in what city you should take first. In Elemental, there is a reason to go after a particular town because resources are global." (https://forums.elementalgame.com/380363/)
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