I can totally understand only having a limited number slots available before the city reaching lvl 5, but after that it seems ridiculous. It doesn't even make any logical sense..."oh, you have plenty of space around the city but you can't build anymore cuz we say so."
One time in beta cities had no building limits. But the overwhelming majority of testers didn't like being able to build everything in every city, instead wanting more specialized cities so you'd have to pick and choose a bit what to build because space is limited.
Yeah, it's one of the few things right now that helps cities have their own personality.
oh
OHHH
that explains why that city can't build any more
i would not mind a no limit to city size or tiles, but then founding new cities would have to cost ALOT, 500gold + stuff, and as i have suggested earlier, if each building had a chance to gain a slight bonus, like a farmer that figures out a way to produce more efficient and thus gains +1 food on that farm, or a researcher that discovers a lost way to read lost languages, thus gains a +1 to tech on that library, just examples, but it would make cities appear to have more soul, these bonues should be rare and national wonders though
and im hoping that buildings can be upgraded mutch more in the future
Plus if there was no limit, I think people would be snaking cities all over the place and exploiting it. In Civ, you could add a bunch of buildings but your city itself wouldn't spread to multiple tiles (sure it would look more busy, but it didn't take away other tiles). In elemental, everytime you add a building you're taking up another land tile. If everyone was doing this on a small map with lots of players, every tile would have a building on it. Doesn't make sense. In fantasy maps from any book, cities have a fixed location. They just don't go meandering down the coast for miles and miles.
So, in our reality it doesn't make sense that a city stops expanding when there's all that open land, but in game reality it keeps cities from becoming too crazy sprawling.
In medieval reality what stopped sprawling cities was the need for fortifications. Anyone left outside of the defended areas was just out of luck which cut down such practice except in areas that saw long periods of peace in which you would find sprawling cities following key trading routes, roads, and rivers. If rampaging monsters and barbarians started tearing up things and armies were laying siege to cities you'd see the most people wanting to live behind walls with an army protecting them. Then there would be no need to artificially manipulate the world and you could have just reality.
I don't mind having requirements for certain buildings though I can't see a reason you can't build many. If they had a maintenance cost then it would simply be unwise to build it. Like a school for a city of 5 doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless you're building for the future.
I dislike snake cities alot, but as the game is now, its a must to get to what you want to protect, if you could create forts, or have some sort of defence upgrades on resources, then i think snake cities would stop, also if there where less buildings but more upgrades on existing buildings, or a bonus to keep things thight, as in defence
yes TyLarson, in old times they created cities that was more like a maze, so intruders would get lost, but those that walked the streets and lived there knew all about where to go .. the strangers did not, perhaps this would be a good addition to the game, would work as when building you see a defence bar go up or down depending on where you have your not yet placed building at, perhaps ?
There are ways to "tweak" the city limit in game. When your city is close to things like farms or ore mines, those become "part of the city". Building around these things so they dont connect will save you building space. Or, if you already have something in your city, simply destroy it, build what you need to build and rebuild the thing you destroyed. I've destroyed many farms this way. Anyway, I haven't found I've had really any problems since I've done that. Except for the hybrid cities (ones taken over from the opposite faction type). In those cases, its beneficial to have a limit.
I think the limit should not be a fixed number though. It should be scalable based on the size of the city, tech researches, and other things like that. I also dont think things like farms and ore mines should count as some of the city's structure count. I hope this gets looked at at some point.
I like that tamides.
Okay, so if your city runs into your influence edge, you can't build past it. The city already takes up some world grid space as you build individuals buildings. My point is that when there is nothing but open space around your city, not being able to expand it beyond an arbitrary "no more # of buildings" limit seems silly.
The current combination of the city tile limits, city growth mechanism, building effects and recruitment system all lead to city spam as THE winning strategy; there is simply no trade off. Two cities grow twice as fast as one, recruit twice as fast, generate non-node dependent resources twice as fast, and on and on.
The glaring problem is that the game engine/UI are very very VERY badly suited to managing anything beyond a handful of cities. So you have a system where the only reasonable strategy to pursue in terms of any rational cost/benefit analysis leads to an annoying muddle to play. Why/how this wasn't glaringly obvious in testing is sort of hard to see, or if it was reported then someone made a very bad call in not fixing it much earlier in the process.
I'm not sure that there is a way to "fix" the way it is now really. It would almost have to start with doing away with tile limits plus a near total revamp of the tech building trees. There would have to be many more recruitment time reduction buildings for large cities and maybe even a way to recruit multiple units at once; at the same time all of the +XX% (or number) to unit/champion stats would have to scale up with city size as well. (So that having one really big Temple of Essence in a capital was as good as having 10 in outpost/snake cities)...or an ability to build multiples of the improvements.
It should almost be self regulating like in the civilization games. If there is not enough food, resources, monetary support, etc, then sure, no more build slots. I guess the build limit does add some strategy to things, but most of the time I have some cities that are fully maxed out with unique buildings while others are requiring more build slots to build the last 20 buildings. I haven't quite figured out where the difference between them lies, but I'm just going to wait and see what they do with updates to the game. I'm sure this is one of the considerations they have in mind for future updates.
There is one more option one could have, and that is to incorporate city templates, or city plans, these would have different bonuses and some would restict buildings yet be very easy to defend, while others would have no defence at all, but be open and free to construct all you want, the templates would define the cost of building the city, this would also put some shape to cities, just a thought
I would like to see no building limit and a huge fee to start additional cities. Perhaps even a constatly increasing amount as you build more and more cities. It annoys me to have to take over 90 cities to take out each AI player.
I would like it to be just like Civ or MOM. None of this silly sim-city like placing. If you have the resources in the city than you can build if not than you don't. Let th city sprawl the way it wants and only show important buildings. Get rid of housing placement altogether. If you want to grow you build generic housing like in MOM and if not your city grows until there is no more food.So simple it hurts.
Don't know why they opted for this other method. Just takes away from the game.
the biggest problem with tile limited cities, in my mind, is how deeply resources cut into your tiles. especialy on smaller maps where the rsources are much denser. if you have 3 resources inside your walls, then thats 12 tiles you don't get to use. this leads to very snakey cities as you try to avoid resources in an effort to actualy make use of your 50 tiles. I do not like this.
I think a far better method would be to limit cities economicaly. every tile increases a cities upkeep, so you can have giant sprawling cities... but they won't be producing any gildars and will likely be costing you some. idealy it would balance out to an ideal of having a handfull of moderately sized cities running at a modest surplus.
either way, resources should not count toward any tile limit, tile upkeep cost, anything. you cannot choose thier placement, and working around them can be quite frustrating.
i do dissagree with this. i think if they get some kinks worked out, this method of city building could be very satisfying. it is certainly new and different for this type of game. I never liked how cities in a game like Civ never really changed. it could be the largest city in the world, but it still only took up one tile. no matter how much stuff you built, you never saw it outside the city screen (and a few buildings on the worldmap) it was all very unsatisfying for me.
I agree. Seems like nearly every game does the "1-tile" city style, and it's very refreshing to get to see your cities actually grow on the map. The system can definitely be tweaked, but it's a fresh take on city building in TBS games.
I do agree brass193 with you to a point about cities taking one tile. It would be neat as your city grows it expands so at lvl 2 it takes two tiles or is taller but the whole building limit kinda sux right now IMO. Get rid of the housing placement and just let a city grow until it has no resources left to grow. Make it so all cities make food but with fertile ground it give x amount more or a % more food production. Irrigation instead of just being placed is placed over the fertile ground if you have it. As your city grows the area directly around your city will have an impact depending on whats around. Forest = more wood and mountains = stone. The resource nodes could just be bonuses and in some cases you would need certain nodes because that is the only way of getting access to certain techs or material but basic stuff like food, wood, and stone or what have you depending on the surrounding area is available to all city build there.
Lets say a lvl 5 city takes up to 9 spaces on a map. It would definitely look different from a lvl 1 city. Also cities will grow upwards not always outwards. I think it would make a more streamlined playing experience because right now it can get muddled down placing buildings and hoping you go the right way and not hit any invisible walls. Anyway I would like less city planning and more playing. Just put limits on buildings depending how many cities that you own. One monastery per 3 cities. Just an example. I think it would work IMHO.
IF they are next to a Strategic Resource, or else... they have no personality.
Basically this seems to have been borrowed from RTS games. I feel city building reflects more the RTS Base building, then the traditional TBS City building.
I have to agree with using money to limit city size and city spam. Make gold more plentiful and easier to obtain. Make a tax rate that gives you gold based on population and each building or structure you build takes up gold to maintain. If you don't have the gold to maintain a building, you are not going to build it. Because cities can level up and get bonuses, this automatically encourages specializing your larger cities and NOT building tons of small cities because your buildings that you build in the large cities will get those city bonuses applied. You won't get those bonuses in smaller cities, so they are less worth-while to develop. This means you will naturally want fewer, larger, more specialized cities verses lots of smaller ones. But city level-up bonuses have to be available to add to each area of income - gold, arcane research, tech research, food production, mining, crystal harvesting, recruiting/military unit creation, etc.
AFAIK today's update will make resource improvements not count towards the limit period, so it should behave more consistently now and make that unnecessary.
How far along is the patch?
Personally I feel that city development and the high value placed on natural resources is the most complete and unique feature of this game at v1.06.
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