I have been playing a lot of Beta 2B, and the city management seems to be playing near the "spam identical cities" chasm. I think this is due to really NEEDING a food resource to make a city work and because its Beta and their are not enough options for buildings to make you really have to choose. I think this could be improved by the following:
Gardens: limiting the number of gardens per city was a really good idea, it makes food resources more valuable. However I think the current limit of 1 is TOO limiting as until you get Civ food techs going on a resource tile or two, your cities are not very useful. I think the limit should be 2 gardens per city; enough to allow a city to become interesting, while still requiring food resources in your empire to support large populations and high level cities.
Building Ideas
I think having more buildings that force you to make a real choice about resources would add a ton of flavor and strategy to city building. Most of these could require being adjacent to another improvement or at least having that improvement in the city. This will allow for city specialization and force strategic thinking as you could NEVER build all the building available in any one city. Some potential ideas (numbers are suggestions but give the idea for the purpose of the building):
Farmers Market: one tile, requires Market in city, available with Economics, one per city (uses 4 food, give 3 gold and 1 pop growth)
Mead Hall: one tile, requires Bee hives, (uses 4 food, gives 3 gold, 1 prestige)
Brewer: one tile, requires Wheat (uses 2 food, gives 1 gold, 1 prestige)
Tanner: One tile, requires Workshop, requires Equipment from Warfare tech tree (gives 2 material, reduces city growth by 1 person per turn [bad smell])
Potion Makers Workshop: One Tile, requires School, (uses 1 material, 1 metal, 1 crystal give 3 research)
Bog Iron Smelter: one tile, requires swamp tile, requires Forging (Uses 3 material a turn, gives 1 metal)
Clothier: one tile, requires Market, (uses 3 material, give 1 prestige, +1 population growth
Painter: one tile, requires School, (uses 2 gold, 1 material, gives 4 prestige)
The idea is to have enough options that every city building decision matters because of what it will do, AND also because of what other options it will prevent me from being able to develop.
It is hoped that the Adjacency rule will be somewhat implemented in 2B. That way we can better access what fits best where and how best fit ideas like yours into the Cities we will build.
P.S. So that Painter dude does strictly Exterior work then?
I'm still not convinced that the adjacency rule will not play in the direction of unnessary micromanagment. Even more in the light that tile resources provides an supre source of resources compared to the city buildings.
But the idea Agrippa is very nice I don't think that is necessary to additionally blow up the research tree, but if a breakthrough provides 2-3 options like those above and those buildings additionally require that there are other buildings you have to build first -> different choices for the cities and no clones (taking the limited space into account)
Another part that I was thinking of: let the gardens provide more food through researches (as we have one currently), with this option someone could overcome the situation if no adequate resource tile is available or if they are tweaked a little bit more. So you could decide on size of a village vs. other decisions
Next: housing (I know, a long story *g*). I still would prefer that the tiles for improvement doesn't fill a full tile but keep some space in between. Those spaces are automatically filled with houses over the time as more and more people move in.
I would limit city growth again based on a research civic tech, research hamlet, village, city, etc, pp. Only if you had researched the adequate tech, your city will reach the next level. Again, a decision to go for bigger villages or other priorities. As food will not be used for houses anymore, the food level defines the city level a city can reach (e.g. 3 foods for each hamlet, 6 foods for each village, etc).
Today I played a few rounds of the good old MoM again While playing the game, I thought it would be maybe a nice idea that you can decide if a city has nothing to build to use the people in the city to gain a +1 in prestige per city level to speed up the population. If certain techs are researched, you may can decide that instead of a +1 in prestige, you gain +15% in material or + 15% in gold income or +15% in rare resources income.
BR
Wyl
I like many of your ideas and mostly your overall theme of Settlement/City differentiation so... to you.
What concerns me as much is that everyone will attempt to build (at least what we've seen in the Beta thus far) a full blown Level 5 City for all of their settlements. There is NO reason to stop at a level three locality (a smaller village) which should have some kind of intrinsic benefits to add to gameplay choices. Look at the following two settlements:
http://screencast.com/t/MzJhOGQyZWE
-and-
http://screencast.com/t/OTFmMmQ3
In the first Level 4 settlement we are just building "stuff" and in the second Level 3 settlement we are still building "stuff"-- both ultimately to get to level 5. HOWEVER, what if you were able to decide that a Level 3 Village is all that you "strategically" wanted. The Village would have the following benefits:
I think different size settlements with unique personalities would add huge flavor and potential.
Feedback???
I still think that resources need to determine city size. In the current build it is way too easy for me to have a constant surplus of food by getting only two food resources. The solution here is to make going for food and therefore city size, a conflict with other strategies. It doesn't make sense to use a predetermined size determined by essence usage as we will see regrets later on when new enemies are found and the only counter is a population boost.
Going after food should mean you don't have the resources to go after alot of metal or mana or whathaveyou. This would create the kind of freedom of choice and city size differentiation we are all searching for. The bonuses to food production are another cause of the easy surplus. either eliminate them or reduce the bonus to a more reasonable level. It might also be interesting to have specific bonuses in the early game for gardens and in the later game some farm or beehive bonuses.
Actually, the Tanner could require the Wild Game square to be harvested in the city.
I like the idea of having "specialized" cities, based on the available resources. Yes, there would be a lot of structures that would be used everywhere - but there should be some that require a local resource. Not only would it give cities a somewhat unique feel, but the town would have a strategic value to your empire.
Food:
One idea that I have is about the Granary. Simply move it to the Harvesting tech, alongside Gardens, and allow it in any city that has a Garden or any special food tile. With the Beta 2A stats, that would allow the Garden + Granary to give 4 (3.75) food, and the settlement could grow from a Village to a Town. (2x huts at 32 each, plus 50 for the town center)
City Growth:
The Administration Civ research could be expanded (and copied in Magic research) to allow larger settlements. What is administration? The ability to handle more complexity. (And tie it up with red tape. ) Administration 1-4 research could give you the ability to build a Town Hall, and larger versions as you get the higher tech, that grants Prestige.
It would also limit the max settlement size you can grow to:
Outpost requires Administration 1 & 25 population to upgrade to a Village.
Village requires Administration 2 & 100 population to upgrade to a Town.
Town requires Administration 3 & 400 population to upgrade to a City.
City requires Administration 4 & population to upgrade to a level 5 settlement.
A similar set of Magic research could grant the same type of benefit for a player going the Magic vs Civ research route.
Another addition to the 'special resource tiles': Would it be an option to be considered that there is a skill or otherwise via a tech tree to define how many such tiles could be harvested? I think if we have to decide if I go for that food surplus tile or for that clay mine, such decisions would add some spice in the game and additionally would limit players a bit more who had luck and got a bit more of those resource tiles near them.
That is already limited by research, for most of them. Look at how many turns (roughly) it takes to get Harvesting, Farming, Orchards & Beekeeping - especially Beekeeping, since it seems to be way deeper down the line. And once we have all 5 research trees to choose from, that will be a limiting factor.
The best way I can think of to limit the "Well, just get every city to level 5" thing is to not have a reason to get every city to 5. For example, let's say with a level 3 city you can build every economic building that can be built. With levels 4 and 5, you can build advanced and very expensive "tech" structures that don't add anything to your economy, and instead allow you to build more advanced units empire wide, or let you research spells, etc. This would of course mean that you might only need a couple of level 5 cities to get all the needed buildings, and there would be little benefit to getting the others to level 5. If leveling up the city were to cost resources as well, then the player would also be encouraged not to upgrade all their cities to max "just because" since the upgrades to 4 and 5 could be made Very Expensive.
This, and most other ideas on how to prevent all similar level 5 cities mostly depend on having the required variety of buildings to construct, which currently isn't quite the case
And I think this is the key, to NOT have a reason to get to level 5. Whereas I like the ideas of building limitations based on resource requirements and it should be implemented, I don't believe it will result in the significant differntiation between settlements-- and it won't address the settlement size difference issue. I would like to have an Education-centric village where I have multiple libraries and schools to perform the research. While I agee with seanw3 that limiiting population (e.g. level) at the outset has consequences, that should be one of the decisions one makes-- reduced popluation (e.g. Army Size) for "faster research" of a specialized Research village. The Administration idea of Spicy Mike might work, but it doesn't address allowing multiple buildings of the same type in a settlement, only the size issue.
Many of the threads' themes is all about decisions, this concept just adds another trade-off decision for the player.
You know I think I misunderstood the adjacency rule when I started reading this thread, you guys are talking about buildings that need to be built next to a special resource tile, yes?
What I was thinking was something Frogboy said about some structures acting as add-ons to other structures. So for example if I have a barracks in a city (and can only build one per city) then if there are, say 5 different structures that can be built next to a barracks but only 2 of them can be built adjacent to it then each city will be forced to specialize.
On a side note, I'm not sure why going for all maximum cities is a bad thing from either a lore or gameplay perspective, but if it is desireable then a simple way to do it is to have valuable options that limit city growth, either by directly capping the size of the city (because no one wants to live near the slave traders guild), or by using up the resources that the city needs to grow (which could be overcome by building the city adjacent to the spiffy tiles.)
So say for example the only way to get a city to maximum size without a special tile is to build the 'farmers market' expansion in both of the option slots next to the cities one garden, but doing so means you are not building the 'fodder stall' expansion which allows the production of calvalry units or the 'workers cafeteria' that give you a boost in mine production for the city. Then it becomes desireable to limit the growth potential of your mining town, or cavalry garrison because of the benefits provided by the non-growth options.
Personally I think simply scaling up the population (outpost from 1-200, village from 201-500, town from 500-1500, city from 1500-5000, mega city from 5000+) is the way to go, and then scale up food requirements proportionately. Instead of having a single food source feeding a megacity, make it so that you need three food sources to provide enough food for a megacity, and that your existing housing costs food wise increase with the tech (so you may increase your housing tech, but if you don't increase your food tech to match you are going to have starvation in your empire).
Food should be the limiting factor to size, with the more food you are able to procure meaning the bigger empire you are able to grow. That being said, there needs to be a choice. Do I want two mega-cities with a large number of small villages and outposts feeding them resources, or do I want 6 towns. Mega-cities should be better at some things, like research, and towns should be better at other things (for the food investment involved anyways). I think that exponentially increasing food production and population required for larger cities (while also increasing the capabilities of those cities) is the way to go here though.
Yesterday I tried to have any level 5 cities as possible - this is not an issue (beside the current crashes because of memory). But still, as the level is reached fairly fast and easy, it still seems not that my Sov is creating a empire but more a sort of a bunch of small villages which are loosely connected.. I will make some additional thinking about this
I still like the idea of Merging 2 Towns a (L2 + L3) to create a L5 City. Any merger can only be done when the borders of 2 towns meet, say 4 -5 adjoining tiles and you have acquired/stockpiled the required Food to handle to new City size, based on the new merged Population #'s.
As it is now, I can drop 2-3 Hamlets pretty close early but they always remain singular in nature. Merging would be an easy way to create Mega Cities at later stages of game play.
Also a good idea.
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