I should preface this by saying this isnt' a gripe, I'm honestly asking this question.
In Beta 2, city building was seen as too much of a chore, and having to build too many houses and gardens.
In Beta 2A, housing values and food requirements were revamped, and only one type of each building was allowed in each city.
In both Betas now, my cities didn't have anything that made them unique from one another. One may have had a food resource, the other a mine, but by and large, they were very similar in both betas. In 2A, the specialty library (+10 research, Hobson's Library?) was in one city, but there wasn't any reason it couldn't have been in another.
My point is this: my cities are indistinguishable throughout this beta; is this our intent now? I know that we were thinking for a while that we wanted cities to be unique, but have we gotten away from that? It's got to be incredibly difficult to give rise to unique cities, and then balancing them out so you can have fun. Have we made the determination that city uniqueness just isn't fun in this context?
Before you light up the flamethrowers, may I discreetly point out my first sentence.
Winni
It's hard to say. As the system stands right now there is still a "space" limit for cities. Assuming this space limit stays the same, but the number of buildings one can possibly build increases (which is likely to happen, some of the tech trees aren't implemented) then it seems as though there will still be opportunities for one city to have a different set of buildings than others. Now whether or not there will be a reason to have different combinations of structures depending on the city.... I don't know.
Though I guess, while I see your point, I can't really empathize (Edit: I mean the opposite, I do empathize with you). Prior to 2A I built all my cities the same anyway, because I found a combination of buildings that I thought was best and didn't have any reason to change it from city to city.
Edit: Sorry, I didn't thoroughly read what you said. You too didn't find your cities distinct in Beta 2.
no, i dont think Stardock intends for clone cities. they've got more work to do, plain and simple.
To be honest i dont like the city building in the latest build. Before you could specialize cities and you really needed those gardens and houses. I liked it, because you need to make a decission.
With the latest build you take that away. You can just build everything and i have so much free space i doubt the new techs add enough stuff to make me wish for more free tiles.
Also the new Food/Housing/Citygrow ratio is totally out of balance. If you find only one farming tile you will be able to build up a city much to fast, because you only need 4 or 5 houses to hit the cap. If you find no farming tile you will start to build satelite cities just for the one garden that you need to support the grows of one city.
The new city building is no fun and i hope they change it back.
Really, what we need is one off / very few per civ buildings / wonders. Like a building that gives you a +10% bonus to all research in that city, but you can only have two of them.
Or a wonder that gives you an automatic warehouse to place in every city you start up.
Like I've said, this is my problem as well with the newest build. So yeah, I absolutely agree with you.
To limit the spam of gardens is good to reinforce the value of food and how important is to find natural resources and/or use civics/magical techs to increase food output. But I liked to create a city as the granary of my Kingdom while ther others dedicated themselves to less menial tasks.
That said, I agree with Tormy, that agrees with OsirisDawn. Well, not that I dislike current city building per se but how it is done. The lack of three of the research trees doesn't help to that feeling of: "What do I do with so much empty space in my clone cities?"
Quoting Wintersong:
"What do I do with so much empty space in my clone cities?"
Beautifully put. I've felt, all through B2, that I wasn't making decisions, so much as I was filling space.
That said, I understand that we're still looking for unique cities. I guess that's my answer, a citie's uniqueness will come from whatever natural resources it finds itself near. Food cities, mineral cities, magic cities. If a city without a food resource can't feed itself, but needs to be where it is for strategic purposes (or because it's near a shard), then you have to have specialist cities.
Maybe that's the plan, make it so that a city can grow a little bit of food, or make a little magic, but without a special map resource, it's not going to grow very much unless you put some essence into it.
Essence, I fear, is about to become precious beyond words.
The thing that really makes cities unique though are generally only a few buildings. I mean, all cities need housing, all cities generally need food production. You can make a case that each city should have schools and research buildings and town halls and all that. There just needs to be more stuff possible to build that really pushes out one aspect of the city's function while at the same time preventing it from from doing the same to its others. And yes, a lot of this is determined by the map. If you manage to get a city by several fertile fields or other food production tiles, the city becomes a natural "this place makes tons of food for my empire" city. It might leave you with enough space for a basic barracks for defense and maybe a school or and town hall for some research points and prestige, but it will need as much space as possible for food production related improvements. Not that there are many at the moment, but I'm assuming there will be more and more improvements to pick from.
I think each city should have a goal, what do you want the city to do (commerce, magic, production (weapons & Armor) and not just be able to build everything everywhere, otherwise each city becomes the same.
The only difference now is coastal cites (fishing & Harbor) and non-coastal cities. More specialized buildings (one only allowed to be build) are needed so all the cities aren't just copies of the same thing.
Maybe the gray techs will have one of a kind (buildings) that will add more flavor to cities.
This kind of touches on why I thought the "all captured cities immediately become your race" idea is a terrible one. In MoM it is highly advantageous to have cities from multiple races because no one race can do everything. Elves make the best ranged attackers but can't build roads or clear pollution. Humans get Paladins, engineers, magicians and priests but no fliers. Gnolls make great shock troops but are terrible city builders. Halflings farm like mad and have the awesome slinger unit but have no magic to speak of or heavy infantry.
Having that kind of inherent differences helps to make cities stand out.
There's less garden building now but I still don't see the point of it. Houses you still need to build just the same.
Every starting location should have enough food available to become a major city on its own and to feed another settlement or two. Then it would be up to the player whether to try and find another fertile location for a big city (should be very rare) or found smaller, specialized villages or forts. I'd like to see things like a fortress dedicated to magic research or training your armies. Would be cool if only your capital was big enough to build every upgrade and that the rest of the settlements would be smaller and specialized.
I 100% agree with something you're proposing here that I've been thinking about awhile to the extent that
I'm not too concerned about Cities having varied personalities as I think that will come. I am far more concerned that each settlement will BECOME a City. Why not have it advatageous, to some kind of degree, to have smaller settlements? (e.g. your villages/forts). Beyond creating some KIND of advantage internal to the setllement (e.g. village peasants are hardier and have higher attack/HP-- somefing), why not have a opening box that allows the Soverign to spend 1, 2, or 3 essence in creation of the location, with the greater the essense spent the greater the potential size of the settlement. In that way, you can have several small communities or a few big ones, or something in between.
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