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."
I like the tile limit, if anything it is too high. One problem though is that includes resources. This means that if you merge with the resource-squares your city suddenly use 4 tiles extra. This means you have to be "gamey" and avoid merging into resources unless you need collective defense (like on a frontier).
I would rather have a few mega cities to control than a lot of little outposts covering the map. How can you have a fantasy world for our adventurers to explore if the world has been deforested and covered with human settlements? I was hoping Elemental would force the players and AI to leave some areas uncolonized just for this very reason. Areas of the map where massive monsters armies would spawn and a place for our heroes to constantly visit for quests. I suppose this is why you can't chop down forests (as far as I know you can't).
So mark me down for tossing the 50 tile limit, and increasing the difficulty of building new cities.
I have an idea that would make sense and provide game balance.
So, the idea is that part of your population increase comes from new births but obviously the majority of it comes from little pockets of surviving humans right? Thus, have your first city have a prestige of 5 let's say and your second settlement would have a prestige of 4, third 3 and so on.
Since, the amount of surviving people in the area is finite you can't keep pulling people from the local area as you expand your kingdom as after a couple of years most everyone in the tiny area around your first settlement would've either joined or left for other pastures. As you expand your territory you are expanding your reputation and those in far off lands might still make the journey because they share your philosophy or worldview but still the majority of your possible population is limited to your region. As a consequence of this as you add new settlements you spread this available population "thinner" amongst the new cities even though you've slightly increased your territory.
As time would go on you'd start having kids and they'd grow up and that would counter the loss of immigrants and wilderfolk joining the settlement.
Pardon me if this doesn't make sense as I'm really sleepy.
I also hate the idea of a city cap. Why only have cities go to 5 with just a couple thousand people. I want benefits to continue and see no reason why the sovereign wouldn't want larger more prosperous cities. In real life one city of 10,000 in medieval britain would provide more taxes, research, and art then a thousand small villages of 10 to a 100 people. Cities are the heart of an effective civilization and scholarship which propels civilization. You need a population big enough to have a good conversation and 4000 people isn't enough unless they're all scientists, scholars, and engineers.
In other words one city at level 5 should be worth over a dozen at level 1 or 2 rather than the other way around.
In Elemental, magic plays tricks on you!
That is great news Kryo " 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. "
I think that will help things a lot city wise.
I think Founding new citys should be cheap initially and become ridiculously expensive as you build more of them. AND that the tile limit should be something that starts at a fixed value but can be increased by the construction of specific stuctures(actually you could just tie it into prestige we already have structures that can increase prestige and they are appropriatley limited) and by research.
Example:
1st city=FREE
2nd city=50 gildar (early game this is a signifigant enough cost to make the choice important)
3rd City=200 gildar (Not too expensive really, but costly enough to deter just plopping it down for 1 more library)
4th city=700 Gildar (this is expensive PERIOD)
Each additional City = 1000 Gildar (A dragon is 1000 gildar A dragon can easily crush a starting city, and 1000 gildar is NEVER cheap, Late game its completely doable, but still costly enough to make you think twice.)
Base Tile Size = 50 (seems good... may need to scale down though)
+1 Prestige = +10 Tiles (Flat values get a bad rap nowadays, but in this case I think it works since prestige is pretty hard to come by)
Then add a couple of techs somewhere (Anywhere but civics.... that tree is soooo bloated) that Either give you +x tiles OR +%20 tiles from prestige, so that each point of prestige grants you +12 tiles.
Unlimited citys SOUND like fun, but realistically its problematic middle to late game. And your going to have at least one gigantic city (thanks to palaces) Which makes sense, there should be a capital somewhere right?
Nitty Gritty Mechanics:
Im a former gamedev, so if anyone at stardock / Enterprising-modders is reading this, heres some implementation details that may or may not help:
-Pioneer cost doesnt change.
-Count CURRENT-PLAYER-BUILT Cities. This means that if you build three citys, and your fourth city gets destroyed, the next one you build will still only cost 700 gildar. This means that conquered citys dont count towards the current count if you build three cities then conquer a fourth one, your next city will only cost 700 gildar. This encourages aggressive tactics, it means that asidfe from the cost of maintaining and feeding that city its free. This also makes remote undefended citys and frontline/influence citys more desirable targets, as new city tile mechanics make it easier for you to join up these citys to your Zone of influence, allowing you to expand by conquest while still protecting yourself from monsters. Also means its better to try and fix a mismanaged city than to raze it. and start your own city in its place.
-When you click the found city action, a box pops up informing you that it will cost X Gildar to transport the materials/people etc to the site of your new township. If you so wish this is where you put your snippet about how with safer and more comfortable places to live in more developed citys, it takes a good deal more money to convince people to travel to the untamed wilderness and risk life and limb.
-I think (and I propably did the math wrong) that this would roughly triple the maximum city size. Right now your only real options are bananatowns, or lots of towns. This would change that, and might even encourage citys to grow more naturally into the terrain. (around mountains and towards resources) Thats not really an implementation detail but I like to see more organic play than static and right now the optimal play pattern is fairly static in regards to city building.
-This game needs a high end gold sink pretty bad, right now there is RARELY any real reason to save up gold in large quantity. Making gold stockpiles useful for something creates more interesting pacing scenarios for the player. They will never appreciate it from that perspective, but it WILL influence play in fun and exciting ways. It allow for periods of sustained growth followed by sudden expansion late game, those shifts are what made galciv2 interesting late game. Early Game it creates intresting decisions for the player about whether to use his gold now, or whether to save it up and try to expand before his opponents, and the ever challenging "How quickly is my opponent planning to expand?" That leads to a whole nother set of interesting games that always interact nicely with diplomacy/politics metagames. Whats more once the AI is in some kind of shape, it will all work well enough in single player.
I would agree with removing the artificial cap on buildings if buildings had a more significant impact on your economy. As it is currently, only a handful of buildings have actual negatives which effect your overall kingdom. If say the school cost 2 gold to run or the barter hut cost materials, the game itself would force certain limitations on the size of a city. I mean who wants to build 10 huge cities if one is a significant drain on certain aspects of your faction.
I do like the tile limit, because it forces you to expand and specialize, rather than building a giant city with every possible building (imagine what that would do to frame rates...). So I think it makes it more interesting to play, even though it might not be "realistic". Also, it wouldn't make sense to be limited to one building of each type if the city size wasn't limited.
*Cough, Cough*
What? If you don't want to have games with too many cities, I would suggest playing on smaller maps. Also, this would prevent us "hardcore" (or old geezers) play our epic empires of 50 cities. It's not for everyone, but don't take it away ;_;
If SD can find a way to have an AI respect the rules you laid out, I'll lift my hat off to them. For in ANY 4X game that I have played, and oh boy... have I played a few, the AI will ALWAYS... ALWAYS seek to expand as much as possible. The only counter is to expand as fast as you can so that you can claim territory before it's claimed by the AI.
So the whole concept of a few towns across a huge continent will probably be a hard thing to accomplish, form an AI stand point. Without forcing it to limit itself, which will probably have weird results. I'm not an AI coder, so I can be wrong. But I think the past of 4X games can stand for something in terms of illustrating how AI expansion is handled in 4X games.
Cheers,
V
If your AI actually evaluates its resources and compares them to a pre planned timescale, its not hard to make the AI expand at a specific pace. The problem is that then you wind up with a very predictable AI, it always plays the exact same way under the same circumstances.
Also if your AI doesnt just cheat like crazy, it simply wont be capable of the sort of map swallowing expansion you often see in 4x AI's. it will get the second town out fast, and then it will be stuck for a while.
Granted this is all pointless right now, since the AI never really TRIES to win the game. It just sort of paces back and forth randomly declaring war on people. ( note this doesnt mean it will actually attack you, just that it will SAY its going to attack you).
Also, If your game is big enough (Like the 64 bit maps they keep talking about) It would NOT be difficult to get 50 cities.
Time consuming? Certainly,
Chalenging? You bet!
Epic? BEYOND ANY POSSIBLE DOUBT!
Don't agree with cities having all the same building point. That is why there restrictions based on your cities lvl to what they can build but if I can manage to raise 5 cities to lvl5 I would like them to be able to have all the same buildings. World wonders and civilzation wonders is what we use so you can only have a certain amount of buldings. This citys should have the same buildings is silly. One city is all labourers because you can't build a school there because another city has it. Makes no sense.
I like playing fantasy games because they are fantasy but it has to make some sense. This whole city spam idea with different buildings is terrible. Your game is all about city management and not questing or warfare or magic. Comes down to clicking on every city and planning from lvl1 what you are gonna do. Makes no sense to have different cities have different buildings. Now wonders and the like yes that makes sense but I think eventually if your city can support them and is large enough they should be able to build it.
Instead of a hard 50 space limit, the limit should be dynamically based on population, and somhow change the population system so that growth is limited by certain factors such as food supply, wealth, building bonus etc.
This is more realistic and give player something to work for by bring in population management and the benefit it brigns being city titles and perhaps taxation etc.
I think it would be best if the ruler decided to specialize or just grow everything if you can. In Civ you specialized and made cites either produce science, GP's, gold and production. If you tried to build everything you could get left behind.
The reason I invested in this game and followed along was it to be MOM's successor not galciv or SIN's done on a fantasy world. IMHO I think over city management takes from the game. Right now you spam cities and when they hit there limit you go back and destroy buildings like pubs and town halls to free up space. Housing should be automated and you just click either to build more or let it grow at a certain pace. Instead of putting limits on the gamer about what he can build let him decide for himself what he wants to do not some silly reason that all cities should be different.
Not trying to offend anyone just I think it is a poor poor gameplay mechanic. So many better ways to do this other than the way it is.
I am not a Fan of the 50 tile rule.
I find it a crude tool to achieve the worthy goals of specialization and different paths to optimize city growth. A 50 tile cap and the food mechanics, coupled with the troop training based entirely on build times and have nothing to do with the size of the city, really push the player to ignore large late game cities and instead focus on alot of small little ciites covering the map.
Having ONE best strategy is a flaw.
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