Okay, so, I've been playing the recent beta builds a fair bit and have assembled various thoughts. I know improvement is hiding in every shadow already, but just going to ramble about everything I noticed so far to be thorough. Not sure if this too harsh or somesuch, but to be clear, Stardock are awesome and have earned my trust. Maybe theyll find some of this useful, maybe not. Only one way to find out.
1) I don't like houses. They are not really interesting to build or manage, they are annoying to find if your food income gets scuppered, and it makes no sense that hundreds of people fit inside 3 of them. It also does not feel as if I am gaining anything from having all these people, other than levelling up the city. In GC2 they were valuable, population was something I considered. Here I just don't care.
My point here is, I am having to maintain the population like GC2, but do not seem to be getting the pay-off for doing so. Admittedly there's no pesky morale to deal with, so its a fair bit easier, but it still feels to me to be a dangling bit of gameplay hanging off the main game, that doesn't really lead anywhere or do anything important.
2) City bonuses are dull. See here for something I wrote weeks ago. As they are now, they are very plain, very clinical. Why am I getting this? Why would I not always pick the gold option? I am more excited by the visual upgrade of the centre city tile than these bonuses. If they are to stay as plain old percentage boosts, more are needed. Recruitment speed, defensibility, materials/metal/food income. I often see the need for each of these things in a city, while the bonuses as they are always push me towards gold, which I have no need of as it's everywhere.
3) When picking bonuses I don't always know about the city its referring to. Related to the one above, it would be much better if I could see some statistics from the city in question in the pop-up. Also a shiny picture would be nice.
4) Sovereign only useful as fighter/explorer/spellcasterer. My sovereign is the leader, yet gets no bonuses to leading. If I wanted to leave him/her in a city, whether for safety because s/he is out of essence, or because s/he wishes to operate through champions, there's no bonus to the city. The grand leader of the empire is staying and the city carries on as usual. Especially mid-late game this feels silly, thousands of subjects and all.
5) Some bonuses to whichever city the sovereign is in would be nice and could help promote using champions instead to project power about. I have not forgotten the starting bonus that can be picked, but then again I always pick pathfinder anyway. Perhaps because staying in a city feels like a waste of a unit.
6) Such bonuses could be magical, with some magic research, perhaps some sort of sustained enchantments that only stay as the sovereign or even a champion is present. It could also be increased trade and prestige from having such an important person in the city.
7) There can be gaps between buildings in a city. I like this, I can make my cities look bigger than they really are. Problem is, it leaves these pesky gaps everywhere. Some huts, or gardens, or nice paved areas, fluff city tiles to fill them in – would look nice.
8) Again with cities – the crappest wall type takes 20 turns and a 4 tile building. Its a wooden fence, or a hedge. I want it for free. A good early game defensive tech that simply upgrades all settlements without having to build anything, with the ones that come after taking the time and money and resources to build. By the time its built I can already have the one after it from research anyway.
9) Tech needs a TL:DR bit. In GC2 I would often read the long descriptions and such, for fun. But also sometimes I did not. I looked at the simple bonus and then clicked it. Some of the techs in game require me to read it, especially in the latter tech trees. Some nice summary of what it does would be great, perhaps even in nice coloured text to make it stand out.
10) There's nothing out at sea. I am likely thinking of HOMM3 here, but sea is so empty. There's no shipwrecks or flotsam or crazy whirlpools. Feels like a waste of potentially interesting terrain.
11) Bad guys getting stuck in my territory. Actually they are not bad guys, they are neutral. Without a treaty or a wardec, they cant move, and I have them captured within my web. While funny, having influence expanding onto your units which then cannot be moved needs looking at.
12) Adventurers having their own faction? One wandered up to my city, I thought “Hello! I will give you money in exchanges for services!”. Out I wandered, to greet him in person and tell him of my happy and productive thoughts. I then stabbed him in the face and stole his 5 gildar. Why? He was on the city exit tile and it caused combat. Not a major problem, except every adventurer in the land somehow knew and all turned hostile. Just in case I end up killing one in future, some way to engage in dialogue to sort out any potential disagreements with them as a whole would be nice.
13) Adventurer guilds. My worlds keep running out of adventurers. I remember guilds lurking in the tech trees in betas past, would be good to see them return to create a source for adventurer types.
14) Out of town locations are boring. What is a lone gold mine out in the hills near a city without a good haunting every now and again? What is a distant logging camp on the edge of an old growth forest without werewolves eating all the workforce? I would like stuff to happen around these sites once built upon at random that requires some sort of intervention. Ones in city limits it wouldn't make sense for, but out in the borderlands they seem awfully vulnerable with nothing taking advantage of that fact.
15 Cities feel too big for the distance between them. An option on startup to change the min distance between cities would be cool, I generally like to have some neutral ground in my 4Xs. As it is now cities are just everywhere. I understand this kinda thing would be a very personal-preference type deal, and I would just like to be able to preference it myself. Especially on the huge maps I will end up always playing on.
Some other thoughts in general about larger issues:
City building is always the same. I build everything available, and that is it. Theres no limits, and as such no challenge or thought involved. Simply “is building A available? Yes? Build it. What about B and C? Build them too. D? Build.”. In GC2 there was limited terrain and this provided thinking opportunities. In betas past, there was a limit at each city stage on tiles. While a bit annoying, now city building is just going through the motions. Its dull.
Last 3 tech trees are barren, and tech in general feels short. Again a GC2 comparison, I would be researching things for aaaages. Here, probably due to lack of all those dull stages of weapons and whatnot, it feels very quick and I am already halfway through the tech tree before I even get into a fight. As far as the last 3 trees go, I get the impression they are being worked on, but I simply feel they need more to them in general.
Interface is pretty horrific. When city building my camera keeps me wanting to look at it instead of zooming off to the next city. The spellbook is a pain to manage, reminiscent of my EQ days (a decade ago). Everything just takes too many clicks. I again get the impression this is being worked on so not going into too much rambling on it.
I think that's all my thoughts for now. Keep the good times coming Stardock.
A pretty general method to deal with that if it occurs is to just reduce the efficiency of the buildings at low-than-needed workforce levels. Or do it more black and white and just pause production from them until the required number of people is present.
I agree that would be the easiest way to do it. I was thinking about an option to turn buildings on an off so you could choose which buildings functioned. But that would add even more micro, and would be easily exploitable (for instance only turning the harbour on when you want to build a ship).
currently there is no mechanism in the game for people leaving, dying etc. Therefore I would suggest, if someone builds an improvement the needed amount of population is blocked for the recruitment. This would give the player the need to consider adding additional improvements or save some pop for armies.
In fact, there is. If your prestige is negative, people will leave your settlements. If you don't have enough money to pay your troops, they will abandon you.
That said, under the proposed system of having people "work" in the buildings, it stands to reason that the workers will not count towards the recruit pool. To do otherwise is just bad design, since the player should never have to worry about how many people he actually has free and have to subtract workers from total to find out how much he can recruit.
For armies the payment towards population was already done during recruitment. As soon as they are recruited, the don't count in the city anymore.
I agree that the has to be somehow self-explaining showing 'free' population which can be used for new improvements / army recruitment and already blocked population. But this should be rather easy in dividing the pop bar of the city in two different colors.
With the negative prestige: tbh, I never faced this issue till now, therefor I was not aware. May it should be done in that way that when you don't have enough population anymore to support all the improvements, an popup appears where you have to choose which improvement gets destroyed / abandoned
If the system is implemented, I'd rather not have a popup that lists each of my 20 improvements to select. Just pick one (or more, depending on the dip) at random and roll with it
But then it needs a good system to provide a feedback that something goes into the negatives Don't want to loose something random because I was not aware
In a number of other threads this has been discussed in some detail. Allowing cities to specialize (BEYOND the recent "pop-up" when a City expands) would give the player an enormous amount of choices. Why can't we have a banking City such as Switzerland, a manufacturing City such as Detroit, etc.? If multiple buildings of the same kind (e.g. gildar producing) were allowed in the same city, this would lead to the requisite decision-making on the part of the player. The balancing would be the issue-- trying to tie in the Economies of Scale benefits associated with multiple facilities of the same kind (e.g. gildar producing) with the Point of Diminishing Returns issues (who needs 20 banks?). This could be addressed by first increasing then reducing income streams by a percentage, using-up tile space as more of the same facilities are produced (a bank takes one tile but then after 3 uses "two" tiles for construction even though it occupies only one), or a variety of other ways.
Choices are fun-- and are a fundemental element to most Game Theory mechanics -- the more choices the more stiimulating it all is...
I like the idea of requiring people to man your buildings, and a % of efficiency going away if you don't have the proper free people. I wouldn't want to see this as a cap though so I believe whatever the maximum number of people it's set to at level 5 should be enough to man everything.
I also feel costs are just way to low. After the first 15 minutes of play I don't even look at how many materials are gold it costs to make buildings, it's all so small I can make a 100 turn queue in 4-5 of my cities without batting an eye. If a palace cost around 400 materials and required access to stone/marble (that resource I never see anymore but was around in build 2) to build I think it would be far more interesting.
I'm glad to see you like the workforce idea, let's hope the dev's take note. I think it would make you care a bit more about your population and where they live beyond having them available to be recruited into your army.
Two thoughts I had about the system;
1) The Egalitarian trait. Factions that pick this trait could also have a bigger workforce than other factions. If normal factions have a workforce that is equal to say half their population, egalitarians could have a workforce of two thirds of their population. There would still be stay-at-home mom's and dad's, just not as many as in normal factions.
2) Resource gathering. Although the new system for building on resource sites is a vast improvement on the original, the old one does have one advantage, should the workforce system be implemented; being that resource buildings could also require people to work there. Farming and mining require a lot of workers, I would like to see this represented in the game. It would make building a new settlement near a resource less of a no-brainer, as you would need to consider not only the building cost and possibly maintenance but also if you have the people to work there. I think this could lead to more specialised settlements like farming villages and mining towns.
I'm not making this suggestion to slow down the game (although it propably will a little), but because I think it would lead to more natural growth of kingdoms (and empires) and prevent making the first part of the game a rushed land grab, that is imho not fun at all.
One more thought;
3) The Labor Pit. Perhaps this building could be given a bit more flavour. Instead of it producing materials, it could lower the workforce required for each building in the settlement by a certain percentage. This would represent slaves/non citizen races/forced labourers doing the lowest, most demeaning, physically demanding, or dangerous jobs that your citizens would rather not do. The drawback being that the building requires some workers (guards and caretakers), so it might not be very efficient in smaller towns.
Any feedback on this? I'm really interested what the dev's think of the whole workforce idea...
Damn, I was going to suggest this, too!
Also, fully agree with monsters not completely sacking a town. In later Civ games, I think I recall that barbarians only hurt a city, not completely level it. I think neutrals should never completely destroy a city, just do damage - drop it a level, pillage gold, destroy buildings, whatever.
Reading over the thread, I still kind of think having a maximum cap to a city is important. If a maximum city can produce every single building, then eventually every city will just level up to max. Seems like there should be more tough decisions to make. Maybe a combination of housing labor and some other system should exist, such that a dedicated player could still have cities that do everything, but it would cost them in some way: tons of cash, tons of added dangers, etc.
In real life, a city that gets too big has problems. There should be a lot of ways we could represent said problems in Elemental. Morale (too crowded) is overdone IMO, but perhaps:
I agree with the ideas expressed in the last six posts. I don't think it would be particularly hard for the devs to implement such a workforce mechanic, either. It would be a welcomed tweak to the game, I think, and not a wholesale "start from scratch".
Frogboy, what do you think about the workforce mechanic for Elemental? What do others think?
Best regards,Steven.
I'd think Kingdom cities using such a building would take a prestige hit.
Excellent ideas here; this is a juicy thread.
One thing that just popped in my head after reading some (but not all) of the comments is that you can have a hybrid tile maintenance system. Kinda playing off of Spitz’s idea is that you have three types of tiles risks for raiding green, yellow and red. The yellow and red have a higher chance of being raided. By raiding I mean that a special unit gets spawned on the cities boarder and it will attack the city in X turns. If the unit is not killed by the city defenders then the raiders take X resources from the global pool. I kinda think that Gildar and food should be the primary things raided. The raider units would be stealthed until they hit a building tile unless you have watchtowers or something similar.
Using this system you can ignore the raiders and pay the “maintenance cost” of the stolen resources or have the cost of more defenders, watchtowers and the time keep an eye out for them.
The other bonus idea to this system is that with the correct research option the player could developed raiders to raid other players cites. The raiders would not cause a war incident since they would be disguised and they could steal much needed resources when needed. Raider units would need special clothes and gear equipped so that they could not some of the high end arms/armor. This way you could kinda start and economic war. It could tie into the diplomatic system by asking someone else to raid a city.
Hopefully that makes some kind of sense. I’m not fully awake yet…
How about: link it to number of tiles.
Each population in the city can work 1 tile. So to support a market (4 tiles) you need 4 population. To work a farm, you need 4 population. To work a workshop, 1 pop.
And make all the various on-map structures (farms, mines, etc.) tie into the population of the nearest settlement.
And then tweak the balance of the costs benefits from the buildings accordingly (a large building should be more effective than a small building).
And if you don't have enough pop, then the last built structures appear red on the map, and don't have any effect.
Seems simpler than introducing a percentage efficiency.
With the reduction in allowed Military (200 units max. (roughly) the city based Work-Force idea, which has been around for some time under different guises, becomes sorta moot.
I can have enough Civ tech come Levels 3-4 that I have 8-10+ Pop. (via prestige) generated per turn. By then the # of structures I will build, mostly Housing, become way more limited if other Cities are to have the required Food to also grow.
When 1K plus armies were envisioned, Pop control would be great. Now not so much. You cannot afford to deplete your Pop. no matter how many armies dudes you make. If you don't do so purposely...
I like what they did in the old Civ games - a barbarian entering a city would pillage a certain amount of gold from your treasury, but you still have the city. Elemental could do the same, with the possible addition of population/building/other resource loss as you mention. Either is better than the nonsense in Civ4 where a barbarian raiding party can enter a city of millions and either raze it to the ground or take it over and start some crazy barbarian civilization, they're treated more like another major player bent on conquest than raiders looking for plunder. Not that I would mind minor civilizations trying to conquer me, I just think random wandering monsters or barbarian raiders should be treated differently - they're trying to snack on a few citizens or plunder your city's treasury (respectively), not take over and institute a new government.
How about scaling inefficiencies? For instance, buildings built in the first 15 spaces would work as per normal. But subsequent buildings in the city get increasing penalties to their production, say the first building 20%, second building 35%, third building 50% etc. That way people will need to decide on what they want to build first in their cities. It also reflects logistical inefficiencies in an increasingly large city.
I don't think there should be a cap to cities. If food is scarce enough you can't grow every settlement into a city. And while it might be possible to have a city where you build everything, you are at the same time painting a giant target on that city, either for invasions or nuke-like spells. It's the old eggs-in-one-basket situation, that has it's inherent strengths and weaknesses.
But things like corruption would be nice to have in the game. It is beyond what the dev's are aiming for I believe, but maybe it could be introduced in a patch/expansion/mod.
I have played several types of city building and strategy games over the years.
The games I favor when population is too low don't destroy your buildings, but rather just shut some of them down. In some games, the player is allowed to select which class of buildings do not work, although it would be nicer to select exact buildings, or have a set of configurations of buildings to shutdown that cna be chosen, or a prioritized shutdown.
Now, one player suggested it was wierd to only start up the harbor when you wanted to build a ship. Why is that wierd? Don't we do that in real life? We shutdown things we don't need at the time? Look at office buildings all around us which are empty in this lovely economy? Are they torn down just because they are empty - hell no! Maybe there is a 'restart cost' associated with reactivating buildings as well - that would discourage players from cosntantly starting and stopping 'employment' at the buildings.
Now there could be a chance that a building which stays 'empty' for too long might fall down on its own from neglect, just to stop players from leaving them 'unoccupied and unattended' for extended periods of time.
I favor each building requiring some workforce. Or, you could take Simcity approach, and 'zone' things. Or, just make the buildings and let population catch up. What better way to attract people from the hinterlands than to have job openings!
Now, if you keep hiring and firing, your town could lose some reputation, and then it would be less attractive to people. Who likes to relocate and then be fired or laid off two months later - not me!
Some issues larger cities had in the past : overcrowding, disease, pestilence (rats,. mice), garbage issues, waste issues. I am not sure how these could factor into the game, but each was part of the trouble of cities becoming larger.
This stuff may have been mentioned already, I'm only halfway or 2/3rds through the reply list (lazy), but I'd posit that an incentive for housing (and improving housing) could be more directly linking taxation and population.
RE: Spitz, really has his noggin going with the soft cap idea. Brings some needed dramatis persona to the cities themselves. I could come up with a few reasons offhand why building bigger isn't always better in a world like Elemental... For one thing, cities -stink-. Not to human senses, maybe, but an animal (particularly nasty, magical animals) would be more likely to come for a big city filled with sickly/soft/civilized types than for a little village where scavenging isn't likely to be as lucrative. The coyote problem in Chicagoland is a great example of this.
Another thing about bigger cities is that they're more difficult to defend. Logistically, it just takes more effort to patrol a larger city. The risks of slums and shantytowns developing as refugees and criminal types increase in number is also fairly logical.
As an aside, I think there should be bonuses/monetary incentives for networking cities together with caravans in a progressive fashion (roads going up in quality as caravan travel and military patrols increase, creating more income and prestige for both connected cities); rather than building multiple 'super cities' or even the one, it might be best to describe the virtue of multiple centers of civilization. After all, an entire world of people, all in different environments with different perspectives, but communicating, is much more likely to produce new ideas and creative leaps.
I agree on the tech tree flavor text, too. I'd like to see some more of it, for one, and those humorous anecdotes that accompanied tech in GC2 were one of my favorite parts of the experience.
And, /endrant.
Thanks for reading.
The problem is that allowing this would add a lot of micromanagement to the game. Why? Because at higher difficulty levels and in multiplayer it would pretty much force you to keep doing this in order to remain competitive. A player that does this would have in effect a larger workforce that a player who doesn't. You might say that it is a way to distinguish the better players, but to me it just feels like adding busywork to the game. I don't mind micromanagement in certain games, but in Elemental, especially when my kingdom is getting big, I don't want to be forced to manage individual buildings beyond placing them. The only way that the restart cost you mention would work if it is high enough that you wouldn't really want to use it, in which case I ask 'Then why have it as an option?'.
I do like your other suggestions btw
Anyway, I bumped this thread hoping that there would be some dev feedback coming
Or an upkeep cost. You have to "pay" the building a "wage" or else it will collapse if un-manned (if manned, the workers will keep it in shape). So if players want to leave it unmanned long term, it will cost and over large nations, it should add up pretty quick.
So if the player is doing it to get a competitive advantage, he also has more to keep track of. The other player would not have to, at the cost of not having his workforce diverted to something else. If the cost is sufficient (i.e. not so low that he can just forget about it), I think it could be a fair trade.
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