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.
I find the city building fun. The resources aren't balanced yet, but I've yet to encounter a severe lack with any of them in Beta 3. The thing that balances most now (for me anyway) is the build time, since I might not want to wait 15 turns for that palace to appear.
EDIT: Well the food is a bit awkward if functional. Can't say exactly why though.
Your post is a bit flame-y, but I agree with you that city building is booooooring.
However, I don't think you understand a couple things here - you can not grow shitty crops in a wasteland. You can't grow anything at all. See all those dead trees and rocks? That's all there is in Elemental. Fertile land is the shitty land. The "good" land is stuff like wild wheat and whatever else there is.
edit: ^ you know what I take that back. Gardens seem to grow stuff just fine in Elemental. I have to agree wholeheartedly with you. If I want 10 gardens in my city to increase population, great! Just don't let me build too much else (which Stardock already does with the tile system).
What's wrong with the city building right now as you said, is that the design of the city does not matter at all except for the very very limited free-move advantage you get. It's basically the equivalent of a civ system where the city's buildings are just being plopped down automatically.
Also, I agree with your implicit point that food being sent to new cities abstractly and without any sort of trade route is really, really strange.
And of course, your main point here is valid - there are way too many tiles available and way too few improvements to choose from. All my cities look the same save one or two "wonders." 1 workshop, 1 study, 1 garden, 1 lab, a bunch of houses and a guild or two. City specialization needs to be more present.
I loved Dawn of Discovery's city building (Though I know that is too in-depth for E:WoM) as you could watch everything neatly come together in a working system. Setting up trade between the islands really made the settlements feel unique. Large cities feel very impressive and an accomplishment. E:WoM feels like tiny, lifeless villages in comparison.
Actually, psychoak is being kind of restrained here. He can be much more feisty when he wants to, which makes me suspect he cares quite a bit about his basic complaint and is (unconsciously?) showing awareness of the flies-vinegar-honey thing.
I haven't gotten to see if Beta 3 is significantly different, but I have to admit some strong sympathies with much of the rant in the OP. News that sovereigns would no longer be able to plant towns willy-nilly was very exciting to me, but I still worry that the game will be biased towards mindless, monotonous 4X work instead of seeking a bias towards fewer, more distinct cities.
Making Pioneers very expensive seems like a good basic tactic to prevent this 'problem.' It might be even more effective if the complexity police could tolerate an additional, cheaper unit for founding resource outposts (and hopefully also small communities to support remote fortifications).
The balks that some of us have about how the global-food thing has shaped up might be reduced if there were other parts of the game that 'intuitively' encouraged minimal city-founding while still leaving room for a viable mass-army strategy for conquest fans.
So insulting! Just because I occasionally(or not so occasionally) tell someone to eat shit and die, doesn't mean I'm not aware that flies are more attracted to honey than vinegar!
The proverb has always been idiotic. While you can attract more flies with honey, it's even more productive to give them shit instead.
It's not that they'd be more expensive, they'd be more substantial. Right now you take one population, and plant it somewhere else. If you took 20, and food to feed them while they build their domiciles, they wouldn't really be that much more expensive. It's mainly a transplant of resources, as opposed to a cost. It would however really hurt like hell if your pioneer got smoked on the way.
i like the current city building maybe some food mechanics change and it will work perfect
Yes, well, that probably depends a bit on the sort of fly whatever fool behind the aphorism is trying to catch, but it also begs the underlying question "Why catch flies in the first place?" Catching flies just to catch flies kind of describes how I feel about building housing and food production in the builds so far. And I'm really fond of SimThings from before The Sims.
Yet another weird moment where we are agreed on principle but don't like the same shorthand way of describing things. In real life and in games, money is never as real to me as concrete resources like people, water, food, fibre, and shelter. What you describe as "substantial" is quite close to what I might have answered had someone asked what I meant by "expensive." Especially the part about how shitty it would be to lose a properly valuable pioneer or founder unit.
You like building one workshop, one bank, one blah blah blah blah blah till hell freezes over, in every city? I get tired of the repetition just describing it.
Obviously I don't agree with most of what is posted.
I do agree that we need to rebalance the # of tiles per city since the removal of duplicate improvements.
But I strongly disagree with the concept of simply being able to crank out food. It's been a major objection of mine in most games.
Look, some people won't like our system. There are other games they may like more. We had 9 months to debate the system and we like the system we have - albeit with more balancing.
Suggesting we toss out basic game mechanics that we clearly are in favor of is pointless. If you want to help, provide suggestions that would make it more fun that function in the system we've chosen that we already like.
For instance, my view is that the Revive Land spell should produce a fertile tile (cost 1 essence, get food producing tile). I also think the # of tiles should be dramatically reduced per city level.
But the main city game mechanic, which is still being fleshed out with assets, is that the better, more important city improvements require larger city sizes and the only way to get that way is with food which means choosing some cities to be smaller.
Also, we're slowly making it back to where imps must be continguous. So the location of improvements will be important.
And lastly, Fisheries are going to go away. Those are only in there to test the ability to require buildings being on a beach tile.
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.
Good, I object to it too. When I went into detail over why it's failing, I gave a suggestion of how to fix it. Population is irrelevant if all it produces is food to feed itself. You can control growth just fine limiting productivity instead of population by keeping valuable food resources limited while not sticking to these odd restrictions on building choice.
Nine months of debate came down to limiting every building to one per city? Sorry, I can't think of any way to make that particular mechanic fun. I can't think of any way to make building housing fun either, it's just not fun. Maybe if we got a free sucker with each house or something, but that's the sort of thing you get for going to a dentist. Maybe it floats someone else's boat, but mine sinks.
I'm already working off the Revive Land Change. It's the only thing that will return sanity to the concept of trading personal strength for a larger empire, a distinctly lacking point currently.
I too would like the number of tiles reduced, since there aren't enough improvements to even fill them up, but why are you limiting everything to one?
I can't make a training center for my empire, it's impossible. I can't make a production center either. I can't really make anything but vanilla cities. Maybe if you gimp the cities enough, by sheer lack of ability to put down more than one or two buildings I'll be forced to have this or that city be production simply because there's no room for anything else, but that seems a silly way to create an open environment. My question would still remain, why limit improvements to one a piece?
This isn't a friendly game mechanic, I don't see how it's anything but arbitrary to only have one workshop.
If this is the main mechanic, I haven't changed anything. Building more than one of the lesser improvements doesn't make them better improvements. Building an entire city full of gardens wont get you anywhere if all those gardens only support the population it takes you to get the spaces. I argued for the opposite of unlimited food, I just want it limited in some other way besides tacky.
The way it is now, if you get rid of gardens and just tack three food onto the base production of a city, it would be an improvement. I'm probably crazy, but I doubt the lucid members of the community are in any way enjoying the act of building their one garden per city either.
Edit:
I do grow food in the real world. It's very sad, no broadband out here in the sticks.
How about giving city walls a chance to be really fun and making the town-vs-country distinction part of the game? I'd love to see how things played out differently if I were able to choose between building a given improvement within a city wall or getting the asset at lower material and labor costs by building it out where you need strong field presence to hold off aggressive neighbors.
One of the thigns that the Fallen got but the Kingdoms haven't gotten yet are more buildigns that can only be built once in a kingdom.
We are also looking at having a level-up screen for cities that let players pick a bonus each time they level up to make those cities more powerful in a particular area.
Oooooh!! Now your on the right track. When Cities level up, they should be able to choose some great enhancements. Like traits. That way they can grow even more organically. This is a great idea Brad!
If you rebalance the number of build tiles available vs the number of improvements available, such that say if I wanted a mainly military production city I wouldn't have much room for anything other than maybe a tier-1 research building or two (not counting houses, obviously), then this would be fun.
I guess it depends on if you want *specialized* cities, or just *different* cities. Two cities with about the same buildings but different level-up bonuses are different, but not specialized. The bonuses, I think, should require a minimum investment in that aspect of the city. For example, you wouldn't be offered a "trade increase" bonus if you only have the one tier-1 merchant hut.
This way, people will be encouraged to specialize their cities a bit more to pick up the bonuses they want (again, keeping in mind the rebalancing of available space vs number of improvements). Some high-end bonuses should only be available if certain structures are present, in particular the once-per-faction ones. A city with one of those can get a unique bonus.
In addition, to encourage people to stay on "one path" (an all-trade city, or an all-military city), you could have it so that completing a "bonus set" of like-traits gains something extra. Like, if I picked up military training bonuses at each level of my city, I'd get something really cool in the city, like a few fixed-wall siege units that are always part of a city and rebuilt if destroyed in tactical combat, to signal that the city is a hardened military fort, or something along those lines.
There's a lot of potential in this level-up system, it just does need the groundwork laid for it. As you mentioned, the spacing needs to be rebalanced. I'd vote for making more of the "key" buildings 4-plot instead of 1 rather than just cutting a bunch of plots to build on. The idea is that it's still awesome to see really big cities, if you can build everything in just 4-5 tiles it's a lot less fun.
Are the adjecent-bonus-improvements still going to go in at some point?
Thanks. We're considering the same system for the magic system. So spell points would be replaced by Spell levels. When you learn a spell, your lore masters approach you with info about the spell you just learned and give you the option of either going on to the next spell to learn OR giving you the opportunity to spend that time going up a level.
The display at the bottom would display your spell knowledge level. Spells you don't have the spell level to learn would be obscured using the Elemental font.
It would only take around 6 engineering hours to implement and we're 55 engineering hours ahead as of Thursday so this might be worthwhile to do.
I just downloaded the Beta today, so I'm probably missing some stuff. I'm an experienced 4X player though, so I thought I'd dive in. Here are my problems:
Gardens--groovy, I can increase food production! But only once. I build a garden once, and I no longer have the option to again.
Improvements in general--groovy, I can build a study, or a lab, or whatever. Once. I never get the option again. WTF?
Farming--I research farming, supposedly I can build wheatfields, etc. So why do I never see them on my build screen? I'm not sorry I prebought the game right now, and I'll look for explanations, but right now, I'm researching improvements I can't use! Are there other improvements I need before I can build wheatfields etc? They're not even greyed out on my build menu.
Right now, building my city to a survivable size is nigh impossible. I can't build agriculture, I can't build improvements. I need food to build units, but I can't improve my food prodution!
Thank goodness! There is never enough beach tiles to allow both a fisher and a harbor.
Would like to see the spell "Lower Land/tile" allowed to create a beach tile! Magic can raise or lower a mountain but not a beach?
Two Issues with Cities
1. I can't tell what's in them? The city detail screen should show a list of buildings. Trying to zoom and use the tool tips to find out what's in a city is a big PITA!
2. The Requirements for improvements aren't shown or not correct, some improvements have a city size limit, not just technology, this info isn't show anywhere.
I too really like the idea of city leveling traits. Between that and "one per empire" improvements we'll really be able to specialize a city and make it distinct from the other high level cities in our kingdoms.
The spell leveling mechanic also sounds interesting. So essentially you'd be choosing between learning another spell of the spell level you have access to from the books you have access to or you'd spend your time going up to the next level instead? You'd be choosing between lots of lower level spells early or gaining access to the higher level spells sooner? Am I understanding the system right? If so, I like it.
Also requiring more... resource(?) cities to support the few mega-cities in your empire fits very well with the pre-industrial problems of food production and distribution. If larger cities generally reach a food point where they cease to be self supporting (depending on local resources) that increases the value of smaller cities at the edges of your empire. Lose a small city providing food and you're mega city's growth grinds to a halt.. Sorry, just working out the implications as I go here.. This should definitely help kill city spam and makes food (with the removal of fisheries) even more important. Wars being fought over fertile land tiles even.
As far as city building, has there been any more consideration to having lower level improvements merge with and/or benefit the improvements around them? You had mentioned considering something like that at times throughout beta 2.
I ask because my only real issue with city building is that, aside from directing your cities' growth between/among the landscape, which improvements you put where doesn't really matter much. I feel like if the game is going to give me the option of where to put an improvement, that choice should matter beyond the obvious "which direction my city sprawls". Forgive me if you've mentioned anymore on the topic, I just haven't seen it and really liked the idea.
I just want to wiegh in as well, I do feel that balancing willl help a lot, but I keep thinking about sins and how much I like that game's building process. You feel limited by resources, and every building counts. You still build an extractor on every planet, but don't have the tactical slots to allow for every planet having a shipyard, and everything else. I would like to see Elemental limit what you can build in a city by resources/ and by tactical slots. Another thing that may help balance it would be how long it takes to build a specific building. I've been playing X-com lately and a building that takes 32 turns to build is 4 times harder to build than a building that takes 16 turns, because it takes up a precious tactical slot that you need to chain to, and while you wait for the building to build you get beaten up quite thoroughly.So yes, the system shows a lot of promise, but as it stands, I build the same thing in every town, and never feel like I am forced to make strategic choices in building order. So I guess we will wait and see the balancing side of it.On another note, Frogboy said something about leveling citys up... (Yes) That would be very cool, to choose different special abilities that a city gets as it grows. Do you want more tactical slots, or more income, or whatever. Cool, and look forward to seeing if it is a reality.
Don't use Lower Land to create a beach. Use Raise Land on the ocean and it will create a beach and meld it into the coastline.
Psychoak is right, Frogboy. If you're not going to let us build gardens, then don't let us build gardens. Strike that improvement from the game and do what you said where a piece of fertile land is located near the sovereign's start location.
Oh, lord. I love these ideas. Leveling cites and leveling spells to give traits? DO IT.
That's... genius. Just genius! I have a random comment though:
I had upwards of 70 free food with houses going nuts in all my cities. I had 6 level 4s, if I remember. This was because, maybe by chance, I had a bunch of champions that were Farmers stacked in a city with wheat, fertile ground, a beach tile with a fishery, a garden, a granary... you get the idea.
These "Governor" type Champions. Maybe cities should have a Governor slot, where the Champion applies their citywide bonus, rather than stacking these guys all in one place for insane production?
Agreed, I think this is a very good idea. But I would still like to see more specialization. One of my favorite things to do in Sins late game is to colonize a desert planet and fill every logistics slot with a factory (works best with TEC) and if I'm TEC I'll get a starbase with the factory upgrades. Then I'll finish the fleet supply research, and pump out as many ships as I can. Basically, I find specialization fun, because it lets me do things like that. On a somewhat similar note, it would be fun to build multiple training centers in a city and train multiple units at once, but thats another thing.
So what I'm trying to get at is that I think specialization in cities is good, but as has been mentioned, that isn't really present.
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