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.
Putting a building synergy system in(ala TA) and lowering the slots would be the way to do it, coupled with city specialization.
Honestly autoplacement of houses and improvements would make NO sense at all. You aren't dealing with 2000 years of slow technology growth. You are dealing instead with what would be essentially building cities on the moon.
I.E. everyone already knows what a flour mill and a bakery are, and why you should have them as close as possible on top of having a trading post nearby. Oh and don't forget to put the tannery on the OTHER side of town, no sense in having your bread smell like pee.
I wish it would be the advanced trade system they debated very early on. Food should be localized and only shared between cities with caravans as well as other resources like iron, I think we also need a few more resource types with applicable nodes which allow certain items to be built. Building synergies would be a great addition and liven up the building process.
Doubt any of this will happen. Just upsets me cause I know there are alot of us that wanted an advanced trade system and this game is going to be heralded as being built in conjunction with the beta testers and thats probably the main piece of the game that I and alot of others have a serious difference of opinion with the designers. Plus even with more simplistic trade too much is getting abstracted, namely food which is what I feel this whole post is about.
This has the potential to be the slider/economy fiasco that was in galciv. I hate to say "it's not like this in civ and they got it right so copy it" but making food a global resource is still a bad idea, and well it wasn't that way in civ ...
Well, we have to get other less hardcore gamers to like it too. If the majority of us were black supremicists they still wouldn't put hate messages on the loading screen.
Black Power is Loading!
I wish we had less incentive to spam city growth, and more for spamming peons just to save the city from dying in infancy ala MoM. And here's another idea. why are any people left at all? Why not just allow character to create? Let the buildings do the work. Heres for hoping more Master of Magic concepts that made it such a gem, make it into Elemental.
The world doesn't need another city builder sim.
Well, if it's absolutely definitely 110% certain that the advanced trade system would not be in the released game, the question is:
Will the modding system be comprehensive enough that such an advanced trade system would be able to be modded in?
I personally don't like the idea that if you can sneak a Pioneer and a few troops to a space 1/2 the way across the map, the food ever after gets transported magically between all the towns for no risk and no caravans or roads required!
Best regards,Steven.
One thing for me that would make cities feel more interesting would be to have certain buildings with unique styles based on who you are playing as. An example would be the palace. Every player gets one, and they all look the same. What if each Kingdom and Empire had a unique looking palace. For the player who chooses a custom civ they could be given a couple unique choices based off of whether they are Empire or Kingdom. I realize that is a lot of work, and time may prohibit adding it at this point. I love the city leveling Idea.
"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."
This was brought up a long time ago and now seems an easy way to limit city growth but do so in a manner that does not detract from other plans, Leveling per say.
Each Building placed, that is not a Food or Housing (non-elite types ala Huts and Houses) structures, should draw off some of the existing Population as a maintenance fee of sorts.
Who the hell is running and maintaining these structures? Wizards Towers, Opulent Palaces, Schools, Universities... etc. etc.
A 1 tile structure should consumes 10-15 Pop while the 4 tile structures consumes 40-60 Pop. If you want a town to supply Armed forces, then you have to cut back on all those fancy City buildings that provide either Prestige, Spell points, RP's etc. and focus just on Housing and Army bonus based structures.
That way, if you want different City types, you could build them that way but not every city would have SPARE folks to be drafted into your Army.
Another note was made and I agree. The AI is not in place quite yet and as such there is little to focus on but dropping and growing Cities.OK, and avoiding the totally crazy 250HP/10Att./13Def. roaming monsters.
When the AI gets more advanced and aggressive, perhaps more time will be spent focusing on keeping your first set of Hovels or Town in your actual possession...
I assume if played in MP, that will not be an issue as the Rushers seek you out asap... LOL!
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.
I like this idea. It blends very well with what a few of us have been saying. The extra population (not focusing on providing food) serve as your pool of labor resources to build and maintain buildings, enlist in your armies, etc.
That's not a bad idea, but I think you'd need a few things.
You would also need some mechanic to track total/used/unused population of a city, and a means to have production penalties if the total drops below what is needed for the structures you already have (due to war, disease, famine, etc).
I don't have any problem with the balancing mechanics Frogboy put forward. As it is, I can only run a game ~three hundred turns long before I crash, but at that state I've got one large, formidable city, and enough technology and magic to clash with a reasonably intelligent AI empire. That's exactly how I'd have it, too. Maybe some satellite forts or outposts or something to hold onto shards if I need them, but on the whole I'm kosher.
Honestly, if I've got to found eleven settlements to get my one actual city off the ground, I'm just going to play something else.
I can agree with you there Garisi. If I wanted to play Civ like psychoak seems to want to, I would go buy Civ.
Like I said before, this isn't a 'Dawn of time' situation. These people remember what advanced technology looks like, it is just that all the specialists that held the details are scattered/dead. They know what advanced farming technique is, they are just unclear on the details. Not like it has been 10000 years since the 1st war. Their gaffers don't HAVE to use rosecolored glasses when talking about the 'old days'. They WERE better, magic automated printing presses, Enchanted fields, non-euclidean housing; these were things that grandpa saw firsthand and used! None of this subsistance farming crap.
Honestly this is not a fire-and-forget population model. This is very much a central government planning game.
+1. I think units shouldn't remove pop when dying, butt when being built however.
I also agree wholeheartedly with the walls thing. Farms behind walls is just silly.
Food
Since food is a global resource, have a deficit to food production for settlements that require "food imports," say minus 0.5 food per square from the "exporter." This negative variable would go away when a caravan was developed b/t cities. This would then result in caravan routes being prime targets of opportunity to choke off food production. If global food went "negative" due to this mechanic, population could decline in the respective cities. This "deficit concept" adds both a strategic layer element and a food-reduction element (which I think we're all looking for as too much food leading to spam).
City Uniqueness
Brad's idea on level-up selections is a good one. If anyone has played the board game Alhambra there is a game mechanic whereby you get more points for building "like stuctures." If the existing structures in E:WoM were grouped into 4-6 categories (e.g. income facilities) and bonues were awarded if you ONLY built these kinds of structues of one category in one settlement, then this would also incentivise to create unique cities, while also adding another decision-making element.
I don't "think" any of this would take too much programming...
I made the same face when they made food a global resource as I did when I figured out how the slider/building maintenance/local and global economy worked in galciv, it wasn't pretty. This is some weird brainstorming idea that unfortunatly got off the table and into the game that I don't think they quite worked through, I hope it gets canned before release.
Also please stop with the "they had to dumb it down for a wider audience" argument. It doesn't make any logical sense and its probably one of the primary arguments that has brought gaming, over the past 9 years, to the lowest common denominator point its at today. Show me some proof that complex game mechanics equals poor sales and then come back to the conversation. Also don't forget that correlation and causation are two completly different things.
Being different for the sake of it isnt smart. Its one of the arguments that people used to use on the Hellgate forums for various unpopular parts of the game when it was compared to diablo. (Stat feed for example, if you didnt like it then you should go back to diablo)
I still think a simple tweak that would vastly improve things is to take much longer to build buildings. For me it gets boring when there is nothing to build.
And by that coin remaking the same game 3 times with minor improvements isn't smart either... I didn't say go play Civ 4/5, but then there is almost no difference between 4 and 2 for that matter.
Elemental already has some great games to base it's systems off of. Copying anything avoidable from the stagnant pool that is Civ since after Alpha Centari would be a mistake.
Edit: I do think longer build times would be good as well as more buildings with more effect/specializations.
It depends what the game is. I think if roper and co redesigned HGL to be like diablo 2 but with minor improvements, they probably would have been more succesful than they were. It really gets down to what minor improvlements (or major improvements) you make. My point is that you have to take each case on its own merits. Just using the argument "well thats how its been done so we should do something different" is a recipe for disaster.
Each discrete element of gameplay has to be debated to determine if it belongs in this game. Globally saying something should be in the game because it was in another similar game is about as bad as saying that it shouldn't. However when your examing discrete elements of games its fine to bring up their success or failure in similar games.
In other words, stop globalizing and start talking specifics.
Ok, cities:
City building is pretty boring right now. There have been some really cool ideas in this thread, but, like it or not, Frogboy said the mechanics are set the way they are, and they aren't going to change. So, that being said, here is my 2 cents:
Zero specialization. Like the OP said, making buildings locked at 1 per city results in every city being a mirror image of each other. There is nothing I can do to make them unique. Every city I build is 100% identical, which is just blah. The city leveling idea could do something to fix this, but it could use more. Something as simple as giving bonuses to a city for multiple buildings of the same type. E.g. every barracks/command post/military building adds a stacking x% bonus to training time/veterancy/whatever for military units, every school/research building adds a stacking x% bonus to research points, etc.
This way, there is an incentive to specialize if I wish to. Obviously this would need to be balanced with available tiles. This way, I have to choose to make general purpose cities, or specialized cities. Should I plop a barracks in every city, taking up valuable real estate, or save space by concentrating most of them in a special city focused just on military production? Choices like this are an important part, and fun of, STRATEGY games.
Yep. This is because of this "new" 1 building type/city rule. I liked the old system better. If I want to create a city, which focuses on food production...allow me to do that. Limiting the player in stuff like this = bad. Not to mention that the current system is lot less "strategic" oriented, than the old system, because we cannot create specialized cities. City builiding is extremely boring as it is now.
->
However this city leveling idea sounds promising. Maybe it will fix the current "all cities are mirror images of each other" problem. We shall see.
PS. My favourite eco/city system: No limit / building type / city & local resources. Gold should be the only global resource. -> We must make a mod like this.
Honestly I have always found local resources to be terribly unrealistic.
Caravansary has literally existed since the dawn of recorded history. If you want to see a good city building system look at Dawn of Discovery. that was much more realistic and fun with its Building Synergy, Placement, and Global Management. "Local food" has never been an absolute in any nation since the bloody wheel, if not before(I have heard of these things called camels, mysterious beasts you know).
The issue with Elemental cities is more one of lack of Variety and too many building slots. This is easy to fix, simply add more diverse and specialized structured buildings and City/Governor. Econ example, instead of just market/mint/bank, you would have market/Exchange/mint/bank/treasury/tax office/Reserve. Each would be have a different, but complimentary effect, like the market would be a static 2g a turn, but the Reserve would increase all city income by a % per 500 citizen in your total empire, whereas the mint would just be a flat 15% to the city only, and the Echange would increase all Caravan income by a % of what the city it was created in made. In addition in a econ spec city you would only have room for very basic production and maybe not even enough housing to get to level 5, BUT it would crank out a nice chunk of change every turn.
Add city level perks(not just by pop hopefully) and Non-combat champions like the Merchant having trees and you are golden.
I.E. this game needs more options, not just a fire and forget OR 'spam-my-building-type Workshop'.
Are you kidding? The global res. model is unrealistic [everything is available everywhere] not the local res. model. Local resources combined with a caravan system = perfect & realistic [...not that realism matters in a game like this].
Local + Caravan, yes. That's realistic. Just like modern times. Virginians don't have to farm to feed Virginians. People my city don't have to farm to feed themselves (food isn't a local resource of my city). Instead, we shop at markets that get food brought in from other "food cities" via air, road, rail, and sea, which are the modern caravans.
Local resources alone doesn't sound realistic. Requiring roads doesn't sound realistic (what, wagons can't travel on dirt?) Roads would speed things up greatly as the travel would be easier and indicate a route the driver could take, and would be a focus for patrols or obvious places for watchtowers and what not, but it wouldn't be a requirement, just expect much slower going.
I think each city should produce it's resources locally (food produced in Iowa isn't immediately available in Virginia), however, if a city has a shortage and another city has that resource, the city that can help make up the shortfall should dispatch a caravan to the city that's coming up short with time required and risk of transport getting harmed/destroyed, etc. Maybe allow stationing troops or otherwise assigning some kind of guard to the caravan, even if it slows down travel time (makes another strategic choice available).
Or, perhaps cities could be set to "automatically" export a certain amount of their resources (say an amount above whatever the minimum to sustain itself, and the surplus is divided evenly between all cities this source city is exporting too - For example, if a city is +20 in food surplus and exporting to 5 cities, each of those would get 4 food, but if exporting only to 2 cities, each would get 10 food). The export would then use caravans/sea transport to deliver their export to other cities, and then an exchange of resources could take place, just like in modern times meat and rice and fruits get exported from the states that produce them to all over the country. Floridians aren't the only folks that can eat oranges, instead they send oranges and orange products everywhere in exchange for a resource (mostly money in modern times).
This would create sort of an intra-nation economy (just like the economy between states in the U.S.) and would also encourage specialization (and income because trade can be taxed). If you have three cities, it might be a good idea to specialize one for food and one for materials and one for training troops and have those cities share resources across each other. Might be very efficient, but losing one would screw your whole economy and you'd have to scramble to recover, or turn to foreign sources.
@Tormy: You might want to reread what you posted to instead of the just the first 10 words. Not being part of the global pool unless connected by caravans is one of the things that I argue for. But the idea of food being local to the city it was grown in is tomfoolery. Rome was totally feed by the farms in a 1 day walk right? No.
One of the things that I really don't like is that there's no incentive to build a compact city. If there are two resources seven tiles apart, I build a city that looks like a piece of spaghetti, and there's no downside for me to do that.
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