There seems to be some lack of clarity on how and where you can build improvements and resource nodes. So here's a guide, I guess, to how it all works.
Updated for 1.07
To do: Update to use the term resource horde since that's what Stardock uses
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[ Definitions ]
Tile: One unit on the world map. If you have the grid turned on, those are 1 tile.
World Tile: Same as above.
Square: One buildable space unit. This is equal to 1/4th of a tile.
Space: Same as above.
City: What you build with pioneers. Anything within the city walls is considered a part of that city.
City Tile: A tile that is considered part of a city. A city tile is any tile with an improvement on it. Special case with resources (see below)
City Center: The initial tile that a city is founded upon. It will change appearance as the city increases influence and level.
Town Center: Same as above.
Enclosed: When something is surrounded by city walls and thus within the city limits. Improvements by default. Resources depend (see below)
Usable Space: A measurement of how much space a city has to build with. You can find this in the city detail screen. This is the same as Open Tiles and starts at 50.
Buildable Space: Same as above.
5-tile limit: The 5 square area away from a city that other cities or improvements can not be built within.
[ Building Limits ]
Every city has 50 squares of buildable space. This does not increase; you can always destroy buildings to free up space. Some buildings will take up 1 space while bigger buildings will take up 4.
Any part of your city counts as 'city' for purposes of movement. A unit can enter the city on any tile that is considered 'city' and leave on any tile adjacent to a 'city' tile. Thus if a unit enters a city that is 1x4 world tiles long from one end, they can leave on the other end at the cost of only 1 movement point.
Any part of your city counts as 'city' for purposes of defense and military engagements. Thus a unit trying to enter any part of the above 1x4 city would have to face the defenders with the city defense bonus.
Cities and improvements can not be founded or built within 5 tiles of another city tile. It is important to remember that this limit is based off city tiles not just the city center itself.
[ Improvements ]
Improvements can be built on any square bordering an existing city square. This can work on both diagonals and horizontal pieces. As with cities, they can not be built within 5 tiles of a different city square.
There are few restrictions to where you can build improvements. You can not build on non-walkable terrain (steep hills, mountains, and water). You can not build on beaches (other than the harbor improvement). You can also not build on forests. The latter are important; not all the tiles in the game are distinctly forest or beach; some of them may have only a few dead trees or such to indicate what they are. Thus it may see 'clear' but not actually be clear. You will need to use the terrain window (upper right) to check. You can build on swamps.
You can also build improvements outside your influence area as long as all other requirements are fulfilled. That is, if building it keeps you under 50 squares, and if it's far enough away from any other city's tiles, and it's next to another existing improvement, then you can build it even though it's outside the area of influence. If you do so, the tile with the improvement will produce its own influence for itself.
Improvements count as part of the city. As such, even if there is only one improvement on a tile, that tile counts as a city square for all intents and purposes.
2x2 buildings can straddle more than one world tile; they do not need to be contained into one world tile to be build. I've checked this on two tiles and need to check using 4.
[ Resources ]
Resource nodes are special and a result of a lot of confusion and ambiguity.
As long as a resource node is outside the city limits (it is not enclosed by the city walls), it is -not- considered a part of the city for any purpose. It only provides resources and can be attacked independently of the city. If there is an improvement within 1 square, a resource node will be enclosed. This makes the resource a part of the city for -all- purpose. It will count as city, allowing you to build improvements off it that do not connect to any other 'normal' improvement.
However, it will also count as a city square - thus allowing movement but also preventing building things within proximity. As of 1.07, resource hordes
Not Enclosed Resource: Provides resource, is not protected by city units, does not consume usable space, can not build improvements off, is not considered a city tile for purposes of the 5-tile limit.
Enclosed Resource: Provides resource, is protected by city units, consumes usable space, can have improvements built off it, is considered a city tile
Non-enclosed resources are built using their own independent building cue. Resources that would be considered enclosed are built using the city's queue.
What this all means is that resources can act in two different ways and change what they do depending on what you do. Most importantly for other cities, this means that a resource can change state from not-a-city to city. This in turn will change which tiles are considered within the 5 tile limit.
Resources -always- benefit from multipliers in the city it is linked to, enclosed or not.
[ Examples ]
( Example 1)
Say you have two cities (A and B ) with a resource (R) between them:
[A] [ ] [R] [ ] [ ] [ ] [ ] [B]
A and B can build improvements normally. They respect the 5 tile limit and they can build all around them. All seems well. A decides to build improvements towards the resource in order to enclose it. B also decides to build towards the resource for some reason.
[A] [X] [R] [ ] [ ] [ ] [X] [B]
The moment A finishes it's improvement, something -very- important happens. R is now considered part of A; it is now a city tile. This means that B is now -inside- the 5 tile limit by 1 tile. This prevents B from building more improvements on that side, regardless of space. If there is a forest or some such on the opposite side of B, then B will not be able to build in that direction either. This is because B is on the edge of the 5 tile limit but the tile past it is not.
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( Example 2)
Here is another example (and probably more common). In this case, there are multiple resources near by and they are touching.
[A] [ ] [R] [R] [ ] [ ] [ ] [B]
[A] [X] [R] [R] [ ] [ ] [ ] [B]
A builds and encloses the nearest resource. Then, he builds the second resource; that encloses automatically since it is linked to the first resource which is linked to A.
Now, the both resources are considered part of A and a city tile. But, now, suddenly, look at the distance B is from A's city limits! B is not 1 but -2- squares within the 5 square limit. As a result, B can not build -any- more improvements since any improvement would be inside that limit. The only time B could do so is if B had build two improves in the other direction -before- A did. Note that resources that are not enclosed do not suffer from the 5-limit. So
[A] [ ] [R] [R] [ ] [ ] [ ] [B] [X] [ ] - B builds X and the player builds on both resources.
then
[A] [X] [R] [R] [ ] [ ] [ ] [B] [X] [ ] - A builds towards the first resource and connects them; again, both enclose since they touch.
In this case, B could then build improvements off the existing inprovements since that tile beyond them is outside the 5 tile limit.
( Example 3 )
Save you have a big city with 4 spaces left. You build a resource building that will cause it to be encircled. Since the resource is 'city', you will now have zero usable space left. If you have less than 4 spaces left, I don't know yet how the game will react but it may mean that clearing out a few buildings may not bring you over 0 again.
[ Special Note: Town Hall and Influence ]
The town hall and the empire equivalent increase influence, according to their description. What does that mean?
Influence is a hidden number that seems loosely based off prestige; that is, they seem to have close to the same growth rate. The amount of housing available determines how much influence a city can have. This in turn determines the size of the zone of control a city projects.
This radius is normally centered on your city center. Cities will produce a circle. Town halls act as a second city center, effectively projecting a second circle of equal size from their tile. Note that resources also must be within a certain distance of the city to be linked to it. This presumably affects that as well.
In effect, that level 1 city can grow it's zone of control without leveling up by using its improvements to span a greater width. The effect is also more noticeable in larger cities with sprawling layouts.
What these buildings allows a player to do is build cities further away from resources while still keeping those resources in range of the city. The question of whether you want to build in a cluster of resources or not depends on how big you want that city to grow, how much protection you want on those resources, and what not.
[ Special Note: Enclosed tile with no improvement on it ]
It is possible to create a city where a tile has no improvement on it but it is otherwise enclosed in the city walls. In this instance, the blank tile is not a city tile. A unit that walks into that tile will not enter the city. Therefore, in order for a tile to be considered a city tile, it must have an improvement on it. Resources, of course, only count as city tiles if they are enclosed.
Something to check out is enclosing a resource without actually touching it. My guess at this point is that it will not use up any city space and not be considered a city tile. However, with improvements all around it, it could effectively be defended for all intents and purposes as while no space around it holds an improvement, the world tiles around it would be considered part of the city.
I hope this helps clarify this.
One thing that sucks is, as I said, you get no advantage for having an enclosed resource other than your city has to be attacked for the enemy to destroy that improvement.
But let's be realistic.
A) There's no resource that valuable that you'd want or need to go through a whole city just to get to it. Destroying or capturing a city would also be more valuable in the first place. Because obviously you're not going to claim that resource from the enemy without dealing with the city first.
A1) Destroying a single resource, or even a handful, has no real effect on the enemy at this stage of the game. Their economies are broken, they build cities like crazy, and unless the AI is failing terribly, you're not going to make a dent.
So far it seems like the exception rather than the rule that an enemy gets within your territory. With the travel spells, there's really no excuse for letting them rampage around destroying your outlying improvements. It's not that hard to defend your turf, so there's less benefit to enclosing, even when you're sandwiched between two hostile empires.
Along with that, what's resulting in a lot of confusion is....
This. Sure it says Research +25%, Research +100%, but those numbers don't translate very well. If LL produced 5, and a Study produces one, people would go "Oh, I don't need a library or any of this other crap!" Or at least they would see the tile vs. resource value trade off a lot more clearly. As it is, with your average city, you can build things all the way up to Level 3 and not miss anything, But levels 4 and 5 are where you run into the tile cap, by which point your city is already big and nuking it requires tediously going tile-by-tile to find what needs to go.
So I really think resources enclosed within your city need to provide an additional advantage over being defended.
Buildings and/or resources should have adjacency bonuses. So put a research +% building next to a Lost Library, and it gets an additional research production bonus. Do this for all types of buildings, and suddenly city building gets very tactical and very awesome, and there's good reason to have resources within city borders. It'd even make fluff sense; consider why trade "districts" develop in real life within cities?
Supreme Commander tried this type of thing, but it was more irritating than useful because it was too much to worry about in a real time game. Elemental is turn based. Adjacency bonuses would be awesome.
Updated with some information on what happens when you enclose a tile without any improvement on it. Also some other minor information updated elsewhere.
Yeah, I did some numbers on what you would ultimately get with ten cities with a study versus two cities with a lost library in each versus one city with two lost libraries. These being the the most common situations a city could be in (none of a particular resource, two of a particular resource but spread out, and two packed close). I am going to write up a post about it at some point.
A quick question. I sometimes have a large city going. Some resources with the city's influence says it's linked with the city, some don't. (Meaning that the LL that is linked has 12 or so tech points, while the one that isn't has the normal 5. Is it because there's no city square within 4 of it? If not, how does that work?
In advance, thanks. Great thread.
This was supposed to have been fixed in version 1.06:
+ Fixed bug where linked pioneer improvements were getting the multiplier bonuses from their linked cities twice
Can you take a screen shot with the grid on? It'll help seeing what's going on. But off hand...
Influence just lets you build things on stuff; it doesn't determine actual control (the link radius) In smaller cities, influence and the link radius are the same. In large cities, they may generate a large enough aura that they influence further than they can actually link resources too. From what I've read elsewhere, the limit is 4 or 5 tiles for linking resources. This range is based off the city center (the place you plopped the pioneer down on), I am guessing, as opposed to any city tile in particular. Could be wrong though but it's not easy to test since we'd need a city high enough to have a very large influence area and/or enough cities around it to provide that influence (without also getting in the way of testing).
I am guessing that, yes, it's not close enough to one of those to link up. Can you do me a favor and build a town hall (or whatever, if you're empire - the building that says it increases influence) close to the resource and tell me what happens?
I know that these buildings generate a second aura of influence and I am guessing that they act like a second city center for purposes of resource linking, if it is based off the city center and not any city tile. If it is any city tile... I'd have to see the screen shot and reverse engineer Stardock's process!
I'm guessing that some of these city building mechanics were designed to either prevent city spamming to an extent, encourage large fantasy style cities, and/or increase the distance between cities by allowing cities to reach further than the typical 'fat cross' in other 4X games. After all, if a city can claim multiple resources across an area that is effectively equal to two cities using a town hall or through improvement crawling, there's less need to have two cities where one can do.
Unfortunately it was based off experience from an earlier game, not the one I'm currently in. I'll see if I can dig something up, but it'll be a while. If anyone else has useful observations of this phenomenon, go ahead.
Edit: I wish this forum let us upload pictures directly instead of using random servers.
Anyway, I built one city, and the resource in question was exactly 5 squares away from it.
I built another city, also 5 squares (1,2,3,4,there.) away from the resource.
First city gained influence over the resource first. (It was my capital.). It could develop the resource, but it did not gain the 'linked to (cityname)' text.
Second city eventually also gained influence over the resource. It did not gain the link either.
Now the funny bit - I increased the size of both cities so the resource would be 4 squares from both cities.
The second city gained the link to it. HOWEVER, when I demolished the building and the first was 4 squares from it, the second city lost link, the first one did not gain it.
Also, to specify - although I guess it is covered - diagonal squares do not count as linked for city wall purposes.
Thank you for posting this. I hope Stardock will make changes to city tiles. It is simply not fair to be building a city and when your research enough tech suddenly several resources "pop" into your city grid and takes up all the tiles accordingly. I've had this happen to me several times.
Hmmyeah, there may be a reason for it, but the effect currently is that city design must be a bit more arcane, and not much else. There also should be a way to remove forests in the same way you may raise and lower land.
The basic system seems both interesting and effective, though.
OOH!!! So thats why!!!! Why the FUCK isnt these things explained in the tooltips or Hiergawhaddayacallitgamon or anything ingame??Basic core game RULES NEED TO BE EXPLAINED so you can play the game the way it was meant to!!(sorry ive been watching too much avgn today)
No idea how far a city can be expanded that way (your own continental subway?) but it sure could get some impressive boni by "capturing" faraway resources like that.
Thanks for testing this out! Did the size increase happen on the same turn or different turns?
At any rate, that's ... odd. One hypothesis might be that linked resources don't change ownership once linked or there needs to be some sort of change in addition to 'lost' such as the first city building something to force a check.
I assume you kept a copy of that game to play with (also, are you winning in it! )
Can you clarify what you mean by the last statement?
If you hover over a tile while you have an improvement selected, a popup will appear on the right. I agree that it is -not- clear though, if for no other reason than it's a somewhat non-intrusive popup and it's not where the eyes are focused on.
Unfortunately, improvements in a city need to be connected in some way. So you couldn't slow crawl. Would be an interesting way to protect your units while traveling cross country.
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I think in the future, I will just make a custom map and landlock an AI into a small island.
Updated a tidbit on improvements - you can build them outside your area of influence. I've gotten up to 2 tiles away from the edge so far - outracing the increase with new buildings isn't always easy.
Let's see.
Yes, it was on different turns. It could also be something about ownership only being checked for things in newly expanded areas, and not looking for it in areas allready looked at, or something. *shrug*.
And yes, I kept a copy of the game, and I'm doing fairly well, except that everyone but Kraxis has been blackmailing me for money, and I'm playing Yithril! But now I've got darklings or archer teams garrisoning my towns, and things are more ... safe. One little detail further, on another subject - getting the Yithril starting bows actually give you the technology, and you can get the second best melee weapons in the game on the first conquest research. That is a bit excessive, I think.
What I menat by that last - I agree it's poorly worded. Let's see. Okay. If you have a resource field on a diagonal square to an improvement, that will not make the resource field enclosed. I didn't remember that being in the OP, but it was long enough I didn't bother to double check.
That it would only check for ownership when something changes makes sense; in general, it'd be a waste to check every turn. The game might just need to check in most situations rather than just when influence expands.
And Ah, I think I know what you mean.
Thanks for the write up and the effort to explain this mysterious city development topic.
As it is currently implemented I feel the system has some problems but has some potential to make city design contain interesting strategic and tactical decisions. It seems that the goal of the system is to place limits on cities to force decisions about city placement, city sprawl and arragnement, city number, city growth and specialization of cities.
Current 1.06 Problems related to City Development and tile managment.
What does this all boil down to? As a player I rarely will have the information I need about how my kingdom will develop when I will actually make the decisions that will affect that development. I will be shooting into the dark, almost guessing. This is no fun in a staregic game.
I agree, Cree (nice name by the way), I can see where they were going and what they were trying to accomplish... but the end result feels like it was designed more by a programmer rather than an artist or a designer. Done-and-out rather than refined with the guideline that non-experts will need to use it.
1) Yes! Some basic elements from grand strategy and construction games like Victoria 2, Settlers, Majesty and SimCity, and what have you would help. Most 4X are Risk-like; the overworld map is a place to move figures not a place to give information, make economic decisions, and the like. The use of overlays, of building auras, and other forms of feedback common to those games would dramatically help with the ability of players to use the system.
2,3 & 4) I suppose the idea was that every city has a basic level of 'defense' that must be built with in ie you can only have so much city wall and space inside of it. Thus you would only be able to defend so much. One change might be that you must specifically build this layer of defense for any given square and that -this- is limited (and follows the current rule of being contiguous). Smaller cities would have smaller limits, larger, more. For something of a city-builder feel, perhaps some resource and upkeep cost for being outside the walls countered with a general costs for being inside
5) Nope, level 1s are free (pioneer cost not withstanding). But otherwise, yes, the major restriction is mostly food. Ironically, once you have a few food nodes and a sprawling empire, it can be far easier to generate more food. I was able to get a near 100% food bonus off a single caravan - and since I was connecting two food producing cities (both with two farms each), that single caravan alone doubled the base production of those cities. And I still had many other cities I could stack caravan bonuses on to.
Overall: Yes, information can be very cryptic at times. I can see what they wanted to do - organic growth and making do with what you have in a post-apocalyptic world. But it just feels like there could have been better ways of doing this. Resource popping, for instance, could happen only within the fog of war; within the borders of a kingdom, resources would not pop. Instead, existing tiles and buildings would improve. Civilization does this to a very minor extent - there are random events such as "You discover parrots in this tile that everybody loves! This tile now produces +1 gold in addition to any existing things". So instead of a new gold mine appearing, an existing gold mine gets better or "This Arcane Academy found a way to harness essence that allows merchants to do transactions faster! This building now produces +1 gold". It would all still be linked to technology research, but it would avoid the popping issue within a city. I'm sure there are better purely mechanical ways to do this as well.
Frankly, I think they should just do away with that building restriction entirely. It's frustrating and annoying to be told that you can't do something perfectly ordinary and expected in a game for no good reasons. What I'd suggest is to increase the minimum distance to found a city ever so slightly, and then totally remove the restriction on placing buildings. This would prevent you from ending up in a situation where a city's expansion is hampered, while still preventing you from winding up with cities butting up against each other most of the time (or until your cities get really huge). It also wouldn't significantly restrict your ability to place cities where you want for optimal resource claiming, since it's pretty trivial to get a city's influence radius up to 2 or 3.
Suggestions for improvement of current basic design:
I agree that a tile cap is a rather crude and unfun restriction to force metropolis specialization. I'll post in a moment about other ideas to encourage city specialization and choices.
CreeDakota: I think most of your suggestions make sense, though I haven't quite been able to think them through, but I'm not so sure about #1. I think having a resource inside your city walls is quite valuable; I've had resources outside be destroyed because I didn't have the gildar to build troops strong enough to protect them and didn't notice the nearby monsters in time to teleport an emergency stack to do so. Something that valuable ought to have a cost, I think.
On that part, it would help to have more !s and such so that you can see enemy movement when it's important to you. As well, some mechanic of automating city defense (including resources); less important with small empires, but when you have 12+ cities (which, mind you will, not take up more than a quarter of the map, if that), personally dealing with a handful of spiders is un-interesting busy work.
As for resources in cities, perhaps one thought would be that resources in cities do not take up space but they do require some form of upkeep (food, gildar, material) while those outside a city are inefficient and lose some of their base production. As resource popping would still be an issue here, resources within a city could also be shut down (stop producing) and started up at will (with the results taking effect next turn) in order to temporarily reduce costs.
Well, the single biggest way to increase city specialization after removing tile limits (which I firmly believe needs to happen) is to make buildings actually cost. Right now I don't feel that I need to even care about the cost of buildings after the first ~50 turns (at the most). They're all extremely inexpensive relative to what you're pulling in, so why not build all of them?
In reflecting on my own reaction to the game and to people's comments in various threads, it seems to me that our various reactions can be fit into three categories that we need to think about differently:
I think it's going to help my own reactions to other people's posts (and to Stardock, for that matter) to think about which of the three their comment fits into; I hope the observation proves useful to other people.
*Not that "the rules" are written down or anything, except in these threads -- that's a whole other issue!
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