Short version, I hate them, quite possibly in totality. I'm sure there's something I like about them, but I have no clue what it is at the moment.
First, the attempt at limiting them via food. Miserable failure. The only thing limiting city expansion is money. You can build a garden, thus a house, thus hit tier 2, thus having research, income and production of all sorts. You have another location to run caravans, another location to produce troops from, another location to gain population. Even if fisheries were eliminated, it would still be the case. With fisheries there, as long as you have lots of coastal cities, you're even spamming large ones.
Getting tanked by a couple hundred coin on the other hand is quite the deterrent. Which is annoying. You can't build a large empire instead of a small one. What happened to the open environment? Where is my trade off between having a powerful Sovereign or a powerful civilization? The answer is nowhere.
Second, cities themselves are incomparably lame. I used to hate the way Civ was set up with the lame access building system, but this is so much worse. It's like civ, without building terrain improvements. The design of the city is meaningless, what you build in the city is meaningless. They all end up almost exactly the same, someone in a persistent vegetative state could build one just as well.
Established points, the food mechanic utterly fails, the monetary pile driver makes every empire roughly the same in size, and the building system is about as interesting as a dentist appointment.
Solution, fix food, get rid of the silly soft cap nonsense.
Sticking to the "resource" model, fishies should be a resource. A fishery should use a fishy resource. No fishies, no fisheries. More than one fishies, more than one fishery. Continuity in mechanics is important.
Get rid of this idiotic one building of a type per settlement system. It's completely devoid of a single redeeming point. This isn't the modern age with fertilizers, most of the civilization is going to be farming. Your ability to produce should be dependent on those left over peons that aren't busy trying to feed themselves. How you use it should be up to you, not some silly one per settlement restriction. A city with no food source should take everything up just to increase the population.
Set costs to building a pioneer much higher, resources to build housing, food through the winter. Include a much higher population cost as well. People don't come from nowhere after all, in return, start them out with more than one population to match the cost.
Disconnect "farming" from the fertile land resource. You know what you grow in shitty ground? Shitty crops. You can still grow food in less than perfect soil. Assuming an expenditure of essence to make land fertile, you simply balance food production below zero use out of a settlement working infertile land to feed itself. Simply amassing cities will then lead to a high population of farmers that can't produce anything else to fund your war efforts.
Populations will now soft cap themselves based on how much work you put into them and what resources you acquire. No "one garden" nonsense required. The population levels suck too, but I'd much rather the suck fest mechanics are fixed than I get to keep using them with a million people instead of a thousand...
Now we get into wishful thinking, things that would be better but I don't expect to happen. Get rid of food and housing construction. It's trivial, it's pointless. You might as well "train" each peasant that's born as micromanage where they're building their housing and farming.
How to do it in a non trivial way that isn't pointless? Automate it, ditch the "food resource" system too. If you build next to fertile land, where do you think the peasants would end up farming? People are stupid, but not that stupid. You start your settlement, begin building things that are of relevance and value to you as the Sovereign. Your peasants handle their own lives. They go out and build houses, start farming, naturally ignoring any demands you make of them unless they can do basic things like eat. Civilization only exists when people aren't starving. When they are, you have bloodshed.
So, you stick a settlement next to fertile ground, your 10-20 peasants, however many you've stuck with pioneers, get to work. Your settlement has a production capability of zero until there are peasants producing excess food that can switch themselves off after finishing their housing. If this settlement is one devoid of productive methods of gaining food, that means never unless you set up trade routes and have excess production somewhere else to get shifted over.
End result, cities that can be geared towards specific tasks, expansion of production controlled by aquisition and creation of resources, no tacky limitations, and, with the latter automated farming and housing, less mind numbing clicks towards the mundane.
I loath the way access and stationing is done in cities as well, but that's more for another subject once tactical combat is added.
Yes.
Best regards,Steven.
+1. I also agree with "All cities look the same". Since housing and farming are required, you might as well use the suggested 'levelup city' screen/time to force the player to choose where he puts down the new mandatory housings and gardens if you want these put down on the map. He'll have to build them anyway.
If you want to do that, just reduce the micromanagement and plant the city immediately by the fertile land. The only thing your suggestion would achieve is newby players building a city near a resource that's not food, and get stuck there and lose without being able to do anything. If you need a fertile land near your city, then start with a city with fertile land, not with fertile land that hopefully the player will find and build a city nearby. MoM started you with a city if I remember well.
+1.
About the cities: Levelling cities! Awesome. I like the current placement, you can in 1 second see how large the city is. And give an estimate to it's importance. Lots of 2x2 or just a small pile of one square buildings.
https://forums.elementalgame.com/386174 This is cool too.
A suggestion to the problem: Everyone can feed themselves if the land is not barren, and by building the gardens, farms etc. we are able to feed more people than the farmers and through this we unlock more build slots. The excess food produced is feeding the specialist population. This is both realistic and makes that food count. Housing takes time to build but won't require food. Please remove food as a global resource too.
Another idea: If we can build a "crude farm" on any non barren land that takes say 15 turns to build but generates a little extra food. So that people without fertile land etc can still get food but slower.
About the magic: New post: https://forums.elementalgame.com/386315
As stability/loading issues are preventing me from toying around with the beta much, I'll throw out some misc. thoughts that both may and may not be related to the current discussion. Some of this might not be all that relevant due to my inability to get all that far into Elemental.Right from the start, Elemental gave off a strong vibe similar to that of [url='http://www.gog.com/en/gamecard/conquest_of_the_new_world']Conquest of the New World[/url], but with a different focus. CotNW is primarily an economic game with a bit of exploration and combat thrown in. For example, CotNW requires resources to be available on a local level and allows one to set up automated trade between towns to minimize micromanagement (Max capacity depends on a few factors, number of docks and the like). The main reason I got this vibe is because town construction operates in a very similar manner.Anyways, I'll mention my one highly critical point right at the start: The restriction to one building of each type. Unless some other gameplay mechanic changes significantly, I don't see how one will be able to develop specialized towns. In other words, towns will be largely uniform with set build orders that maximize growth efficiency.Another offhand suggestion that relates to the next suggestion: Allow farms to be constructed anywhere and retain the fertile land tiles. The obvious balance would be that fertile land simply produces more food than a normal farm. I'd also lean towards all food producing structures having a 2x2 footprint, but that could just be CotNW's influence. Combining the above, a possible solution to the current excessive restriction on buildings is to tie the building caps to the specific "bonuses" that one elected to use as the town expands.I used quotations there as you can do so much more with the mechanic than simply provide bonuses. On one extreme, you can have a highly restricted food production sequence that caps out at a low population but can work an area as large (or nearly as large as) a metropolis. The downside being that the town'll have a low cap for resources and produce next to no magic/research/troops. Note that, due to the quicker expansion of the workable area, this upgrade line would likely break off completely from the main branch for balance reasons. While on the topic of balance, food production could be optimized so that 1-3 food producing towns at their max level can fully support a specialized metropolis with zero food production.The other extreme would likely be more flexible as the non-food specializations mainly just increase the building caps/allow access to higher tech buildings. One can also develop their town so that it becomes a generic metropolis with no real specialty.A basic mock up:An outpost develops and you have three (More are obviously possible, but these are what I've thought of to this point.) possible selections: Expansion, Production, or KnowledgeSay we take Expansion.At the next stage: Production, Knowledge, Food#1 (Food#1 requires the first selection to be Expansion), and potentially others become available.Taking Production or Knowledge now would lead towards a metropolis with limited specialization, while Food#1 branches off completely and (possibly) only allows for the Food#2 upgrade.If one were to take Production as the first upgrade, this'll open up specializations like military, resources, etc., while Knowledge opens up tech and spell research. Also, if one takes Production or Knowledge as the *second* upgrade option, the other specializations will still open up, but their overall potential benefit will be less due to the fact that they'd start on the specializations at level three rather than level two.
Side thought: Perhaps the Food upgrade wouldn't provide a larger working area, but instead would simply have a lower population required for the next upgrade. There could be a similar benefit with the initial Expansion option.
Another side thought: Perhaps Knowledge could open up three other specializations: Tech, Magic, Knowledge#2 with Knowledge#2 providing modest bonuses to both, while the others provide higher bonuses but apply to only one area. Balance wise you could have, on a relative scale, Knowledge#2 being 1, 1; Magic being 3, 0, and Tech being 0, 3.
The possibilities would definitely be easier to see with a drawing/graph/etc., but this should show off some of the potential.
With respect to the global pool of resources (Did I read about that in this thread, or am I remembering a different one?), can't we create a quasiglobal pool? That is to say, if towns are connected to a road/port network, they can share resources freely. But if they're disconnected, they must pay for transport based upon the distance to the other network?This can create some odd situations where a player has two independant networks, but that shouldn't be terribly difficult to handle.On that note, perhaps resources can be tracked on the network scale instead of global, where a particular network consists of all connected towns (Roads or ports). This would allow for better balance (No isolated city near an enemy's border being fed massive amounts of resources from your far off empire), while minimizing micromanagement.This shouldn't be terribly difficult to do, but, unfortunately, time is a limited resource at this point.There would still be some oddities, though. For instance, if sailing between two ports, one can make a trip half way around the world that'd cost less than walking a single tile.This post is already too long, so I'll cut off my ramblings here. I could also post this in the ideas forum instead of the beta, but meh, I'll move it later if necessary, heh.
You can color me really excited now. I was thinking the same thing about spells, them having levels, and that way you could in theory as you mentioned really explore a spell, tricking it out with new tweaks, better range, more damage, multiple targets, double damage against susceptible targets, and so on and so on. Brad, this is really a great idea, especially if we can cue up a spell and then go back to it later to upgrade it with our time and effort.
Seriously getting excited, this is the type of thing that will turn the game up in a big way that feels organic, and real.
From a mechanics standpoint, one of the things I find myself doing now in B3 is placing cities more, and not expecting to grow them past L2. A garden guarantees L2 once buiit, and since cities no longer cost essence, I can build and send out pioneers, limited only by materials (usually, since forests are now harder to find). Gold doesn't seem to be limiting for me, since at L2, I can place a market, and then my L2 satellites become money positive pretty quick. The excess of tiles per level allow those L2 cities to control one or two special resources (shards, in particular, are a favorite target for me). So, city spam is alive and well currently, there's nothing limiting it except materials, and, given time, that's not an impediment. Essence was, because it was so hard to get, and I found myself really limiting the number of cities I put down, because I didn't want to give up spellcasting ability (which would happen at essentially the second city, until I leveled up to L6 with my sovereign...not an easy thing to do).
So, let's see, how to get that feeling of "I really don't want to found another city, because it will hurt me" feeling, without dipping into essence? My non-special resources currently are gold, materials, food, mundane research, and prestige (metal, shards, crystals, and spellpoints are all special, at least to me. Nice to have, and things I'd currently build an L2 city to get, and probably will cost me the game if I don't get them, but not immediate, tactical needs). The throttle is currently effectively on materials, especially once army production begins with any serious intent. Maybe we put the throttle on presitge instead? Make it so any new city effectively resets the prestige of every existing city to 0 (stops growth in all cities), and then doesn't take that throttle off until the new city starts to produce pretige itself. Existing cities slowly regain their prestige then at say, one per turn, back to their current maximum. I haven't really thought through that mechanic, so there's probably a hole big enough to drive a truck loaded with exploits through, but it does get us off the current mechanic.
I've got to think a bit about how this plays in with FB's desire to have food be limiting. Maybe a new city requires excess food in order to build (like, say, you have to have a 10 food surplus in order to found a new city). That way, you take resources you'd otherwise use to grow your current citiess to make a new one. That 10 food surplus throttle comes off at say one food per 3 turns, or some such, to slowly return the food surplus to the stockpile, but at least for a while, the choice of new city placement will impede the existing cities development, so it becomes a strategic choice of which to do. How much turn advantage in your current cities are you willing to give up to control a new resource by placing a new city?
Random thoughts on an (early) saturday morning.
One other thing along the lines of "Leveling" up Cities, and what not.
If it's possible, I think it would be a great way to enhance, EVERY Aspect of the game.
Troops as they level can choose new "Powers/Feats/Talents".
And on that idea, I was thinking it would be really neat if there were Major Talents, and Minor Talents. And that at every level a unit goes up. You can select a bonus. Say At level 1 right off the bat, when building them, you should be able to choose a "Feat" that unit exhibits. (If you have to assign a cost value to it that's fine, but, I think in theory it might work better as a matter of once it's built you can choose that feat, or when building it for level 1 you choose the feat so it is built with that.)
What's a Major Feat/Talent vs a Minor Feat/Talent? Well I'm thinking at level 2 you get a Major, then at 5th level another one, and 8th level another i.e. every 3 levels. With the minor ones, coming at 1,3,4,6,7 and so on.
Major Talents, Assassin Strike 1, Bonus damage to initial attacks. With different levels unlocking different and more powerful versions. Maybe there could be Battle Masters, who are battle force multipliers, who enhance other units (leaders) so they give each ally within a certain range a bonus to attack. And so on.. (I think really this could be a great way to differentiate units), maybe something like Regeneration to recover health in battle slowly like trolls of D&D lore and so on.
Minor Talents, bonuses to hit, or hit points, higher defense against specific types of opponents, like against undead or whatever. Defensive bonuses when fighting on certain terrain, or so on.
And each aspect of the game could use this style of treatment, cities gaining levels gain different bonuses to help differentiate them, and spells with different levels, and other things of this nature.
Troops/Heroes/Champions, Cities, Spells, and depending on how indepth you go that could also apply to other aspects of the game.
I'm not finding this in Beta3-- not finding it at all. Indeed, I'm feeling I can go about willy-nilly accomplishing City Spamming as much as I like now that Essence as generally been removed as a "Settlement Founder." Note the screen shot below:
http://screencast.com/t/Mjg1NjY5MGQ
There is nothing now stopping me from building pioneer after pioneer with the numerous food locations I still have to populate. Removing Essence as a founding requirement was a "bad idea" IMHO.
I further agree with the OP that disallowing multiple buildings of the same type is NOT fun. This is discussed elsewere in some depth in another thread.
https://forums.elementalgame.com/385259
And finally without some kind of auto-build function, I am selecting build items nearly every turn with the existing settlement infrastructure--- and without allowing multiple buildings of the same type and having some additonal restrictions (e.g. perhaps make more buildings require four slots instead of one), I'm not making City building decisions and it is not that fun of a game mechanic yet.
Thank goodness, I was worried that this concept was done away with. I really really liked the idea of small empires with large vast empty areas. Essence originally forced that, but caused other issues with the magic system, so food should be a great way to still acomplish forced small empires.
What I liked about Sins is the game wasn't trying to be a city builder. The building was secondary to battle. Building was there to support the main feature of the game - battle and strategy! I don't see Elemental focusing on any single thing. What does it want to be about? Can it make citybuilding, tactical battles, soveriegn leveling and skills, spells, technology, questing, and war all equally brilliant? Nothing at this point ties all these mechanics together. Each element is wrestling with the other for attention - not one is actually supplementing or supporting another gameplay element. There seems to be very little casual connection between the different elements. Because there has been little actual hands on testing.
Maybe a way to solve some of the lack of uniqueness in building could be to decrease the amount of free space in tier 2 and 3 of the cities. This would be a simple and effective way to cause players to make more decisions and customize each city on their own.
Sorry guys, I got a bit negative there and I changed my mind about the reply.
I think an overall improvement would be to take longer to build the buildings. This would to some extent force people to make decisions rather than just build everything. Also spend less time (maybe even none?) stagnating with nothing to build.
Another idea I had as a possible compromise between 1 garden and lots, would be to have the ability to upgrade garden with certain techs, or possibly for your garden to produce an extra food (or more) with the discovery of certain techs.
Would the City Skills on level up lock/unlock new city building options for that city? And/or new possible skills for next level ups?
Certainly I think it should be that small cities have a lot less build slots, with bigger cities having more. At the moment you can just ICS small cities, which is precisely not what we want. Alternatively make city maintenance such that lots of small settlements isn't economical.
I've only just begun testing the game but this is what immediately hit me about city building. There is no requirement to plan ahead and commit to a long term plan. Everything builds within a handful of turns. If you make a wrong decision, no problem, you can have something else ready in a few turns (on another note, perhaps make building removal take time too ).
And maybe i'm doing something wrong but cities grow so fast that i don't feel the need to use prestige structures.
I agree with this. That's why I was so keen on the idea that improvements would somehow affect the improvements around them either by granting some sort of bonus (ala Supreme Commander) or by having similar themed improvements merge into more powerful, larger improvements once you met the requirements. Frogboy mentioned it in a few of the beta 2 threads but then we never heard much more about it. I think the biggest issue with city building at the moment is that you are micromanaging where the improvements go, but where the improvements go doesn't really matter. If there's no reason for you to be concerned with what goes where, why bother giving you the option? Just so you can control the direction your city grows in? I feel like the mechanic needs more meat to it.
As far as city spam, in my most recent map I was spawned on a continent by myself with a fertile land tile and a beehive. That's it. There was no city spam for me. If there had been a neighbor nearby with more food resources, I'd have conquered his ass. I think the food mechanic works as a limiting factor. Some of the people here have just gotten lucky spawns on their food tiles.
I like this idea a lot. Almost like talent trees for city leveling.
You take offense at being brushed off by the developers? Seriously? Someone brushed you off? The owner of the company/lead designer of the game has responded three times in this one thread... What's he supposed to do, reach through the screen and give you a shoulder rub while consoling your frustrations?
Just because someone disagrees with you doesn't mean they're brushing you off.
And I have no idea where you get the idea that beta testing HASN'T fundamentally altered the game. Because it has. In many ways. In just the last two months alone, let alone all the months of beta 1.
No he is basically shutting this thread down with his response. If your going to let the community in on the development don't do it half way and pick and chose the responses you get. He doesn't want to hear anymore criticism on city building - mechanics are in place basically what he said. I just get irritated when a dev overlooks concerns from the community because we supposedly agreed on said mechanic months ago. We are now testing the gameplay - now is when you need to make changes.
Sorry I may seem terse but I am not happy with the development of this game and I don't see how they can make all this work in the next few weeks especially when I see posts from the devs dismissing city building criticisms. Just by a dev responding to this thread means nothing. Its the words he choses. They are only going to do menial tweaks to city building folks. Get over any idea that there are going to be drastic changes from here. What I want to hear from a dev is yes city building is broken and we are going to completely revamp the system and release this game next year. I don't even know why you guys keep throwing out suggestions on how to improve the system when they already have a plan and obviously don't want to hear it from us.
They are going to do what they want to do. For example putting caps on buildings. Did we ask for that? No. We wanted more strategy and purpose to city building. We got caps.
Another idea I've been mulling over is getting rid of gardens entirely and tweaking the engine to ensure there's a fertile land tile near starting locations.
This lets new players understand how important fertile land is. Anyone who thinks that growing food is something easy should try it sometime in the real world. We Americans tend to take it for granted. Food is a very VERY valuable resource and should be treated as such. And WILL be treated as such. If someone has a problem with that, they're free to find another game to play.
I have to say one of the few things I'm confused about is this:
The game world starts off broken and virtually lifeless which I think is very unique and cool idea. So starting the game struggling for food makes sense; thus forcing the sovereign to wander a bit looking for a suitable tile (with the exception of nations that start with a city like Pariden does/did). If you're really lucky you start right off the bat with a special food tile, and if you're really lucky one that you don't have to research a bunch of techs to get to right away. Else you wander around a bit till you find one, or risk your starting city being small until you can expand into better tiles.
However as you place cities, spend magic, etc. the world begins to turn green (I'm just going from the Kingdom perspective as I have yet to test out the Imperial factions/mechanics yet). At this point, even if you delayed it for X number of turns to represent the land lying fallow for a bit to regain fertility, why is food becoming an issue? Send farmers out to these now fertile tiles or why are they not doing it themselves?
The modern American (and mostly any other person on this forum whether American or not) comes from an industrial society where only 2~5% of the population farms or is in agriculture/food production at all. The people in this world are hardy survivors more akin to the settlers moving west to settle the great plains than any of us. Those people came from a society where 80% or more of the population was agriculture based and far more likely to be able to build and run a farm. Your comparison is apples to oranges, but the point still has merit given the bleakness at the start of the game world.
However if the 'greening' is only cosmetic...get rid of it. Currently it is like only saying this is the only spot one can farm in the entire Mississippi river system. It defies logic. The game system makes perfect sense as it is for early game, but falls apart mid to late game.
As your design concept doesn't incorporate regular tiles doing much beyond offering defense bonuses, movement penalties, or be passable/non-passable what's the point of it turning green? If a green plain tile offered you bonus food, like how in MoM it would yield a +1 food, I could see it make a difference, but as it stands now it is kind of silly.
As for getting rid of the garden only to replace it with starting location near a fertile tile will help speed up the early game, certainly reduce expansion for quite a while, but it is going to get rid of any wandering for a food tile which I think it an excellent start to the game.
I'd say get rid of gardens (maybe just give new cities an inherent low natural food source from the get go...enough to sustain a level one city), and make it so a player could spend points at sovereign creation to start near one, kind of like how MoO2 one could spend points on a large or rich homeworld, or just make it a feature of certain factions/nations as one of their bonuses (say Pariden starts with a city near a early accessible food tile for example). This leaves the early wandering in unless some one wants to choose not too.
Just my two cents.
Now that is an idea I like.
I like the idea of specialization and cities being harder to develop. If this is a shattered and broken world, spreading out over the land seems like it would be a harder thing for a number of reasons.
Fewer cities with more chances to specialize would really seem strategic and bring value/worth/I better not lose these sense to cities.
I don't care so much about slots and them all being the same. To me, that's not so much cookie cutter is that all the build options are the same. I never liked having just one viable build order, and if you can only build each building once - that build order isn't just most viable - it's pretty much the only one.
Perhaps one way to do it is like in Nobunaga's Ambition: Iron Triangle where you can research improvements for your force and if you wanted to reach advance improvements, you're going to have to devote some serious build slots in territories. You could have varies Kingdom/Empire improvements that would require a certain number of various buildings in order to research them and allow multiples of these special buildings. Say it could be called a Civil Research Building or something, and then a basic improvement might need just 2, while later on, you might need 40.
So a small kingdom/empire with specialization could get so far up the tree. More advanced would require expansion of even specialized kingdoms/empires while the most advanced would require decisions on city building from all but the largest nations. The sheer number of slots would require heavy specialization of a few cities/regions or do you go with a more flexible, but more city demanding (i.e. how many cities you'd need to pull it off) spread?
He never shut down the thread. He said that they were redesigning the entire mechanic. At the same time he said they are doing more balancing of the mechanic. Seems like they're still looking for ideas, but not ones that suggest a completely different city building system.
He even went so far as to suggest some of their own internal ideas for improving city building that they are considering. That seems to suggest that they are still very open to ideas. Again, just ones that don't go all the way back to ground zero.
His words said "some won't like it, some will." How is that at all untrue? If they changed the mechanic and went with what you or psychoak want, it'd still be true. The group of people who don't like it would just be different. It's the catch 22 of having an open beta and dealing with a large community. Some part of the community is always going to be unhappy.
As far as putting caps on buildings, that mechanic came specifically out of beta 2 feedback on city improvements being too spammy. It is something "we" asked for.
He's obviously interested in feedback and suggestions. He offered some of his own in this very thread. I happen to think that his suggestions, and maybe something to make WHERE you place an improvement more important, would make city building much more fun and interesting. I also don't think its terrible now, it's just not terribly relevant either.
In Civ, most citizens, at least early on, are busy working tiles that provide food. Otherwise, cities don't grow.
The parallel of Civ citizens working tiles is Elemental buildings.
Brad says food should be important, but let's see. In Civ, a size 8 city in plains (i.e. not fertile land, much like what Elemental world is supposed to be, although deserts/tundras might fit better) is likely to work mostly irrigated plains, i.e. most improvements are about food. In Elemental, most buildings are about, well, just about anything else.
In real life, fields take a lot of place. I mean a lot. But in this game we are supposed to have scarce food, there is no farm anywhere, but cities take up about 10 times the surface of land actuallly used to grow food. I dare say in Elemental it's easy to crank out food. You need to think of micromanaging once a small tile, and that's done...
Why not create fields around the cities automatically? There's little point in micromanaging that. I loved MoM handling of food. You had to put some farmers to work in order to sustain your population and armies, yet it was quite simple to handle, although getting a settlement to grow into a city required a lot of time or money (or halflings).
Some thoughts on cities.
Currently, food is the major limitation to city growth, as without excess food, you cannot place more housing to raise the population limit to grow the city. So, the basic concept is that I need a 'food production' city, with one or more special resource tiles (counting beaches as such, for fishing), in order to feed other cities.
Food is obviously the limiting factor to growing big cities. But what if we abstract food production?
[Idea]
What if housing & population is limited by city size, instead of determining the city level? Right now, an Outpost turns into a Village when it hits 26 population, into a Town at 100 pop, to a City at 400, etc.
Lets ignore that. Lets abstract food. Heck, lets get rid of it entirely.
What if we require 'support' villages to build up? A huge city is completely unable to feed itself, and thus requires the support of others. Instead of population determining city size, our total number of cities limits it.
Level 1 Outpost:
Lets leave Outposts as they are in Beta 3 - they can produce enough food, and with one Hut added, enough space, to level up to a Village. They do not get any bonus to production.
Level 2 Village:
The traditional rural community, villages focus mainly on food & raw material production. They get good bonuses to food, lumber, & metal production. They are also a good source for big strapping lads (and lasses) for the army. While some studying, spell research & merchant activity goes on, there is a slight penalty to those activities, as well as a slight penalty to unit training time.
Level 3 Town:
Towns begin the process of refining raw materials and crafting goods. While they lose some of the bonus to food, lumber & metal production, they gain a slight bonus to tech research, spell research, and gildar production. They are vital to producing costlier goods, such as ships, light armor and light weapons.
Towns also require at least one Village to support them with enough food, as the population can no longer feed itself.
Level 4 City:
Cities are the bulwark of civilization, and require a lot of support. They now have a large penalty to food, lumber & metal production, but also have a large bonus to research & gildar production. They also give a slight bonus to unit training time.
Cities require two Towns to support them.
Level 5 (thing I've never built):
A teeming metropolis requires a lot of support to attain, but attracts master artisans of all kinds. It has the largest bonus to production of all types, but also the largest penalty to food & raw (lumber, metal) materials production.
A Metropolis requires two Cities to support it.
Summation:
So, to have one Metropolis, you need a total of eleven settlements - two Cities, supported by four Towns, supported by four Villages.
Food production can be completely abstracted into Villages, and special tiles & their structures could add to the 'Village' count. For example, a Village with a Farm on Fertile Land might produce 'one Village' worth of food, and that single Village could support two Towns instead of one.
It would also give you a reason to defend your settlements from marauders & invading armies. A lack of support might cause larger settlements 'up the chain' to slowly decay as people leave, eventually losing a level (but retaining built structures, now inactive).
This would require a manual toggle to upgrade a settlement.
If you also add in the ability to choose bonuses when you 'level' a city as Frogboy suggested they are looking at, you could specialize your settlements by size & choice.
Anyway, just an idea.
After another play through, specifically keeping this thread in mind, I had the following thoughts.
Food as the most limiting factor in city spam/expansion is quite achievable with a few changes, most of which Frogboy has said are already being considered. Kill Fisheries and further limit the number of building spaces per level. Once those are done, balancing the seed maps so that players start with one food resource near them and otherwise food resources are rare. Kill gardens.
At that point, food resources on the map become more important than just about any other resource, except maybe shards. Food resources something to go to war over or to negotiate a major treaty over. Food producing villages (ie, with a food resource) become focused on food production because it is so important. It's limited building slots get food resources and granaries. Its level bonuses (if they implement them) become food bonuses. These villages, even though they probably never see level 5, become major assets to your kingdom and something you need to protect.
Further, limiting the tiles available per level and creating a talent tree structure for cities means we'll finally be able to really specialize cities. If a city is mostly full (regardless of how many buildings it takes) of research buildings and has managed to reach level 5 because other cities are providing its materials and food, then it is truly an academic city. A research city. You can level it and enchant it accordingly.
I think these changes, along with some sort of mechanic that makes where/how you place your improvements more important, would make city building much more interesting. You would have to plan ahead on which cities you want to level to 5 and how you are going to have the resources to get them there. At the same time, lower level cities would be more crucial than they are now, because they would be the driving force allowing you to build larger, more specialized mega-cities.
I like this idea a lot.
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