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 think that's a neat idea and would work well as a mechanic, but it has 2 problems.
Firstly, Frogboy has said that they like the current mechanic and are just looking for tweaking/balancing. They do not want to go back to the drawing board and create a whole new mechanic.
Aside from that, abstracting food removes one of the big goals that they're going for in the world. Food is supposed to be a major resource. Potentially THE major resource. This is a world devoid of life struggling to come back from nuclear winter essentially. Food is concern number 1. Wars should be fought over fertile land.
Think of Waterworld (yeah, crappy move, I know). Drinkable water and dirt were the most precious resources in the world specifically because the world didn't have them. That seems like what they're striving for here with food.
I think as long as they get the balance right (ie, you have enough early access to food to get your society off the ground) having food being the limiting factor in growth will make for awesome mid and late game situations. It will also make how you start your society off quite important. Do you start out expanding to food resources (because building cities is expensive and hard) in order to give your society room to grow mid game or do you expand towards other resources (crystal, shards, gems, etc) in order to give your society earlier access to special items and spells. If each new city is an expensive commitment in terms of gold and food, your choices on where you put your cities and how you specialize them (provided they make specialization a possibility) become immensely important.
I have to say, I love having peripheral hobbit villages supplying my major production centres in MoM. It was genius, and I do think it'd work well in Elemental.
Maybe have a bonus for the percentage of space / groupings of the various similar type buildings? So, a village with all it's spaces (except one) filled with gardens should probably produce more food than a city with half it's buildings as gardens? Just hand wave it with "application of labour".
I did like being able to have more than one building in a city etc.
I think I was brushed off, but if I got offended over something like that I'd need to expect people to hunt me down and kill me for my own posts. It's not the most diplomatic of critiques, a feat I rarely accomplish, and I kind of expected to be ignored after ripping on one third of the existing game play. On the off chance that city mechanics get slightly less fugly as a result, I went ahead and posted.
Beta testing doesn't appear to have done much for them either. Sure, we're having plenty of input in the game at large, but I don't remember any outcry that led to the over simplified economics. The threads on it were in favor of the more complicated version, and we're looking at one more simplified than the alternative was. I'm certain there wasn't any push here to make improvements all restricted to one per city. I know people were complaining about spamming lumber mills, workshops, gardens, and housing all over the place, but they didn't change building spam by having us spam one of each in our 51 population city. They just removed choice from what we spam.
The way farming works in the real world would have been quite sufficient for "limiting" city spam. It's real simple, before the plow, people starved if they didn't grow food. When they started spreading shit on the fields and leaving them fallow every so many years, food production went from something almost everyone did, to just something a good half the population did. Before concepts like irrigation and fertilization came about, you didn't farm productively anywhere but on a flood plain. The river belts were lush centers of power because those were the only places on Earth where ten thousand people could all live in one spot, and only those naturally fertilized fields would produce enough to get sufficiently above the poverty level to field an army.
His fertile land mechanic is perfect for it. Automate farming, dedicate most of the citizenry to it, and you can support your population, and dick else, with enough terrain. Get yourself some ground actually worth growing food in, and you can flourish in less area, with population available to produce something besides food. Research into agriculture could eventually turn all those non-productive farms into something nice, but late game tech advancements would be too late for someone to spam cities to take advantage of. They'd have a large empire and nothing to defend it with.
As tech advanced, you'd shift more and more of your population away from agriculture, taking production, and thus armies, from very small in the beginning, to massive in the end. A lot like the doesn't seem to be happening vision we were presented with earlier in the process.
I agree, but I don't know how difficult it would be for them to do. Actually, it might not be so bad, as you'd just be 'hiding' food production info from the player. As is, the 'town center' will support a set amount of housing.
Hmm, I somewhat agree with you here. Yes, food should be the biggest, most fought over research.
But wait - food, or potentially food-producing areas? If you fold the actual food production into Outposts & Villages as I proposed, then your empire is based on those villages. Lose them, and you start to lose other settlements as well - you can't just build one, gigantic, metropolis and fort up.
I haven't messed with Empires yet (game keeps crashing), but I did read where Brad was talking about how you need to spend essence to create usable land for your faction (fertile for Kingdoms, desecrated for Fallen). What if most of the land is neutral, with small areas of each type around, and also with patches of special resources around. You still need to 'create' or find the type of land your faction needs, but then you need to build up from there.
Either way, the bit I like about my kind of idea is that the player chooses which settlements to upgrade, and that you can't realistically sit tight in one mega-city. You simply couldn't compete with a much-larger nation.
What you propose doesn't sound terribly fun to play as a game. Second, what you propose is well beyond what the developers could do in the limited time available even if people did think it was fun.
So I have to ask, are you just trying to be a troll or what?
Yes, yes, yes yes!! Customization + Interesting decisions = Great Game. I love this idea.
I REALLY like the city leveling idea.
I like that you can build "offsite" material collection buildings.
I like that there are a giant screaming pile of upgrades for each city as well.
I would like to echo some of the OP's frustration with the rather bland cities, however.
I, for one, REALLY enjoy the ability to specialize cities, and keeping us from placing more than one of any given improvement really frustrates the city development aspect.
Additionally, the city sprawl that you can do kind of bothers me on two fronts.
1) First, there is no incentive for keeping your cities tight in the way they generally develop in the real world. City centers are what they are because of a concentration of economic factors making a lot of things develop in close, and less group-critical things move to the outside. In order to both lessen movement abuse (a VERY minor issue to me), and keep cities from getting all gangly, I think that some aspect of building cost ought to increase based on the number of tiles from city center. Additionally, tiles such as marketplaces and granaries could/should offset those costs slightly within a few tiles. This will lead to tighter cities, and slightly more consideration when it comes time to develop your city rather than simply pooping out another 4 buildings real quick (which is what kinda seems to happen now).
2) Second, I think that cities are WAY too liberal with the number of tiles that we are afforded at any given development level. This really ought to be reigned in in conjunction with allowing greater specialization of cities. Additionally, many of the tiles seem superfluous once you start developing the city. Why does the Palace get built off site from the city center? Shouldn't it replace it? Why doesn't the barracks replace the command post when it gets built? Furthermore, why doesn't the command post require a 1x2 plot so it can upgrade to the archery range AND barracks when those are built?
Cities that are L1 and 2 should go OUT, cities that are L3 and 4 should go UP.
Just my thoughts.
I was going to just say yes, but there are too many stupid people in the world that I can't directly respond to.
They're already doing most of the work from what I can tell. I wont claim programming genius or anything, but I can stumble my way through someone elses code just fine with a little time.
The only part that is in any way a substantial change and doesn't appear to be receiving just as much or more attention regardless is the concept of automating and moving away food and lodging from the city building setup. In the original post, I added this section in with the statement that it was wishful thinking too.
If they're already going to decrease build slots, remove gardens, etcetera etcetera, implementing my suggestions probably boil down to deleting a few lines for the most part. The limiting function is probably the work of a single digit alteration. Changing the cost on the pioneer sure as hell isn't complicated. The only thing I can see being at all complicated is letting you farm sub-par land in return for a zero production population boost by burning all your productivity on barely self sustaining agricultural exploits. If it's more than a few hours work, I'd be very surprised. They already have tech that increases farm productivity, they already have art assets for a farm, all they'd need is a duplicate structure with a piss poor return in comparison that could be placed anywhere. It could even be the garden, again with a craptastic return.
While we're being vague, what exactly doesn't sound fun about doing less micromanagement with more options? I'm assuming you find the wishful thinking to be a detractor on fun, since you whine about how much work it would be to implement it. I've tried to rationalize building houses as a fun activity in a 4X, but it just doesn't work. If you don't find the basic changes fun, how are they worse than what exists already? You're a pretty good troll yourself, blanket criticism without a single point of identification.
Actually, I wonder how so many people manage to provide input to game balancing mechanics when there's no ai and no multiplayer. Well, there is an ai, but it's not yet able to do anything worthwhile, and the mp part was so limited I'm not sure people tried to use the system against one another.
Details, details...
I agree especially with two aspects of the original post:
1) City building is immensely boring. There are not enough reasons to think about which way to lay out our improvements. We need much more motivation to place improvements in a certain pattern. As it is now the only two reasons to actually plan tile placement is
a ) blocking the enemy from passing through the city and making our units able to reach a certain tile quicker and
b ) to reach a certain resource tile.
Neither of these reasons seem like enough of a reason to have the current system.
2) Food sucks. Probably because there are too many ways of acquiring it. Give us a version where food is actually scarce and we'll see if the system work out well enough. In the current state of the game I'd rather just have housing and prestige and get rid of the food. Food seems like too much of a hassle and is not that fun at all.
But your definition of food producing areas is the smaller settlements that are used to support your cities and metropolises. Essentially you're not fighting over "Food producing areas" you're fighting over cities.
I think that is much different than having players coveting specific food producing tiles. The goal, I think, is to have food resources being a major strategic resource. Something you covet. Why would you covet your neighbors infrastructure villages when you could just build your own? Unless you're out of room, then you're not coveting his villages or his food, you're after his land. Again, that's something different.
Given the current system, or maybe I should say the goal of the current system once it is balanced and food truly is scarce, if you get lucky and find an area with 2 or 3 food resources you can hook up to one big "farming" city, you know that it is a target. You know for sure that people, ai or other players, are going to consider ways to get it from you. Because a city that can be built around food production and has more than one food tile would be enough to feed a large portion of your kingdom. In that scenario, the food tiles themselves, and your right to control them, are things you're defending.
Strategically, that is much different than knowing you have to defend your infrastructure villages.
One thing that caught me is how different play styles seem to determine whether or not someone likes the current system. As it stands in the public beta, we have to pay more for newly founded cities and the price goes up to stop city spamming. I suggest that this will disallow players who want to have several weaker villages as opposed to a few powerful cities.
I suggest that we begin to count the number of cities by total population as opposed to total number of cities. We could do this by a population count determining a new settlement's cost or we could say that a level 4 city is worth 4 outposts and so we would have to pay past the fourth cost to build the outpost we want.
In my opinion this solves the issue of me being able to have five massive cities and still expand relatively easily.
What say you?
I like this suggestion a lot. Food was something wars were fought over well into the 20th century. For example one of the major reasons Hitler invaded Russia was for the Ukrainian grain fields.
Currently city spam is just incredibly boring. I think cities and food should be rare, not something you can build all over the damn place.
I don't hate the city building exactly and I like being able to build a lot of cities to mimic an actual civilization but I do admit there is not a lot of customization. Although, when you start to get higher up in tech, there are lots of different buildings to build and not enough room to build them in your city. Plus, if you want to get a big city you need a good amount of houses but I have not had any trouble getting the food I need to upgrade my towns honestly. Perhaps food should be more rare? I would like more customization in my cities too. You know what I would think is interesting? I think a city should be somewhat different depending what area your building it on. For example, a town built between two mountains or right next to a mountain, could be more industrial. Look more like a mining city. This could just be aesthetics but I think it would be a nice change. A town built near the ocean could look more like a dock town would look. A city built on the plains would have a different feel and look to it. I think that would add a nice aspect to the game. You could even have that certain areas can only build certain buildings. I don't see that as hard to implement either. A mountainous area wouldn't have farmland or orchards but it would have minerals, gold, etc. A city by the sea would be a port town where ships are built and perhaps fish are caught but there wouldn't be other natural resources nearby. A plains city would have a higher chance of farmland and horses, etc. This could be tweaked of course but I think it would give more of a unique feel to the game.
That's an interesting idea as well, and it could be implemented by looking at the tiles within a certain range of a settlement. Each terrain type might give a certain bonus or penalty to production, and as the settlement expands, new tile bonus/penalties are added. So if you'd build a 'Plains city', it would have major farming bonuses, but mining/material penalties. On the other hand, a city build in hills would have major mining bonuses, and one in the woods would have lumber bonuses.
It would be an interesting way to differentiate cities - currently, the only thing I look for is special tiles & expansion room. (IE, coastal or mountain 'non-build-able' tiles). If the total terrain of the city would make a difference, it would make city placement a tougher decision.
I'm with Psychoak. 100% of his ideas in the OP and follow-ups sounded exactly like what has been going through my head the last couple weeks.
This micromanagement of this lifeless population and city feels incredibly robotic. Things that individuals in a society could take care of themselves must be directed by my clicks, but limited by arbitrary non-realistic limits. I would love to see a realistic economic/production model in Elemental. like:
population builds their own houses.
population grows their own food (tech, tiles, and specialty buildings increase food production efficiency).
available production/labor is based on the amount of free population not struggling to survive (building food/shelter) and increases with tech/tiles/specialty buildings.
population conducts its own trade caravans once you've established other cities/trade agreements and established trade markets/merchants/etc. in your city based on economic differences between trade destinations (division of labor).
All the existing units, buildings, graphics are there. I'd think it might be a fairly interesting AI challenge as well.
As it currently stands it feels like I might as well be following my old Warcraft III build order. The micromanagement of mundane items a reasonable person would take care of on their own really kills the immersion and the suspension of disbelief.
Now that would be a major change to game mechanics that entailed a lot of work... Duplicating all those assets for the different locations, designing the restriction measures, major game overhaul. Even the full blown organic farm and housing spread with all the automation work needed to have it function in a non fubar manner would be a lot less work.
Doesn't really sound like a bad idea though.
Edit: The above is in reply to the subject above Olikut
Yay, I'm not the only one directly comparing it to dumbed down RTS games... It's exactly like a build order. Build production, build watch tower, build food, build research, build money, rinse and repeat.
I don't think the system would be so bad if there was just a little more choice and strategy involved, but it may be that if they were to limit the amount of food you can find, thereby limiting the houses you can build, we would probably start to see much more serious choices in what we put in our cities because of limited space.
Psychoak, I don't think it has to work like that at all and I don't think it would be so difficult to implement. Most of it would just be limiting what buildings a city can build. You can then make some simple graphics to make the city stand out a bit. Like perhaps the gate/wall/fence could be different and maybe a smoky haze over a mining town. A forest town could have more of a flowery haze or something and a plains town more open, so no haze. I mean there are simple ways it could be implemented. The bonuses could also be simple as well.
I agree with this.
Best regards,Steven.
Psychoak has a good point. And never forget that this whole game is very moddable, even to the extent of making your own economic system. One thing that I think will get balanced in the next few weeks is the space in each outpost and town. They were probably set higher to let testers build every bulding and see if it worked out. Once these are cut by say 35%, we won't have cookie cutter towns, and the economy will be more complex.
The first mod I see people creeating is a flavor. We need more variety in house choices and buildings. I plan to set one up so I can plop down a house and it will draw on eight different buildings to build. That way my towns can look really unique.
I think with a little flavor we can all conceed that farming is a pointless debate that only matters a little IN MAGICAL WAR, don't you agree?
The main problem that I have with city's is that all map squares under city considered as one. Not only it allows movement exploit but also it removes ability to pillage improvements. Which possibly would be main source of income for those of us who prefer playing roaming barbarians.
Second thing is building slots, I really don't like this mechanics, as its feels totally artificial. I prefer that building would use population as limiting factor. For example if you build school it will use 20 of population to operate and university will use 40. Population also should also be used for support of troops so each of the units will use certain amount of population(mercenaries for example won't use population but will have much higher gold cost and no ability for customization). And if army unit dies city population will also be reduced by amount used. There could be a slider of how many of population you would like to allocate for farming/workshops/army.
The last thing is walls. The compactness of cities in middle ages was mostly because of desire to place most important city structures behind the walls and as anyone who learned basic geometry knows that circle has best ratio of area to perimeter. With time there would be no place inside the walls and newer buildings would be build outside of city walls as outer city would grow the new wall would be build around (I have heard of city's with as much as four or five wall that were built) after wards the inner wall may be removed. So i believe that cost and time of building walls should be calculate relative to their length. That would force players to make more compact cities and if you consider my first point buildings inside wall should be protected from pillaging (of course some buildings would be build outside such as mines or farms). This also gives player more options to customize town would he leave free space for future buildings but pay more for the wall now. Or would he build outside and leave buildings unprotected until later when he will rebuild the wall to include them.
I don't want to have an army limit my building options that make my army stronger.
I fully support getting rid of gardens. Food production and housing are both still a no brainer to build a.s.a.p. so I don't understand why the whole thing couldn't be automated. The only thing you actually need to choose is which city to grow larger and which ones to leave smaller. That only requires some very simple housing mechanic.
I also fully support providing the starting city with food resources enough to grow it to a level 5 capital. It's easy to assume the Sovereigns were searching for such a spot and that's when the game starts.
Farming the fertile land should be automatic as well. That is the logical first step in building a settlement. It's not believable people would have forgotten how to grow food. Building a study before farming is pretty silly. Farmers should always come before scholars.
Another issue with the cities is that they grow way too large with the amount of buildings. For reference, a level 5 city in this build is a lot bigger than a snow-capped mountain.
I still think the building placement is irrelevant and I would much rather have the cities look good with buildings, gardens and farms automatically appearing in appropriate locations without the tile symmetry.
Me likes Akiralen's post...
I'm not crazy! Wait, never mind. I'm not crazy for this reason?
There are many great features available to you once you register, including:
Sign in or Create Account
