The major economic nerfs that were slipped into 1.08 have dealt a blow to the fun of this game, and there wasn't much to be had to begin with as we wait for 1.1.
Besides the absurdity of merchants consuming food (which is just a blatant attempt to limit the number of cities in the game), resources are less common, particularly materials and food. This reduces the size of an empire. Plus, it severely limits the number of cities that can reach the higher levels, which are required to start having anything resembling fantasy, rather than just medieval, armies.
Empires were already too small, with too few cities and too few armies even on large maps. Elemental has tried to impose its vision of "one city, one party" on us with an even heavier hand. I just don't understand how a game that supposedly takes its cue from MoM, GalCiv, and the Civilization games can be so determined to reduce player states to a handful of cities and one big stack that runs around using teleport.
I would try to mod some of these changes out, but the modding system is so cumbersome (and buildings can't be modded anyway, since mod effects stack with core/base game effects rather than replace them) that isn't really worth the time.
So I'll make one final plea to the devs to stop trying to limit the size of empires and states. Restore a more reasonable economic balance to the game by making resources more plentiful. And roll back some of the silly changes designed to simply made food and cities scarcer without remotely being logical.
Actually in CIV and I've played them all except CIV5 which I intend to get soon. Corruption never detered me at all from building cities. What did deter me was that settlers ate up population when creating so I had to plan. And to tell you the truth out of all the yeas I played CIV I never knew until 2 months ago the corruption was linked to the number of cities you have. But then I was always pretty good about keeping corruption down.
Another take on Good / Evil and Population...
Humans are a renewable resource. =P
Well, I would propose the same way as another one said in this topic: Give the prestige an Empire wide effect to attract X/Turn pop to your empire and then divide the population by the number of town you have. Also, to encourage big city, just make prestige more important by level. Ex: Lvl1 city = Give 1 prestige to the pool. Lvl2 city= Give 4. Lvl3 city= Give 9 etc. This way, a lvl5 city will compensate for 25 lvl 1 city AND they will get 25 pop in 1 city insteed of 1 for 25 city. With the bonus (+ 20% per level of the city for a ressource of your choice) one big city can be realy effective. If you add the special building that only high lvl city can construct: it's pretty clear that some big city will perform better in the long run than a lot of smaller city. So, city building will only be made to capture some ressources. My 2 gildar .
Oh really?
Question: which is better - lvl5 city with no resource nodes or 5 lvl1 cities with resource node each?
Answer: 5 lvl1 cities. Because population itself (and city level) mean nothing. They do not produce anything. They do not even speed up troop building.
Brad's concept is much better because it gives you a reason to lvl up your cities.
Same here. I have about that much and I have food tiles not taken, but in my influence border and one wild wheat I intentionally passed up because it was "too close" (for me) to my capital.
And I've never made a caravan.
These no-food, low resource games, I'd actually love to play one, so that I could use the "uncover resources techs" in the Adventuring tree to get up to "average" instead of being so abundant that I don't care about blowing 170 gold on 4 archers.
I don't remember doing it in AoW or Warlords 3.
I don't think you could even BUILD cities in Warlords 3. I don't think you could city spam in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms games either.
Yep, I was talking with this concept too . And, I wrote in the end that city building will be used to capture ressources, not expending the AOI or to gain more prestige. But, like I said, only my 2 gildar .
I am a little champion at Age of Wonders Shadow Magic. I usually play immense maps by email. games that last months, sometimes years (yeah we are crazy) - I never even build cities and I usually kick everybody's butt. Butts that build a lot of cities.
It seems to me that the concept of "specialists" is a more flexible way of giving building slots to cities.
instead of say,
lv 0 outpost - 1 building slot
lv 1 city - 3 building slots
lv 2 city - 6 building slots
lv 3 city - 10 building slots
lv 4 city - 15 building slots
lv 5 city - 21 building slots
combined with a building upgrade system, example: lumberjack gives 1 matt, upgrades to mill gives 4 matt, upgrades to "guild" gives 10 matt etc
slow down population growth a bit. 1 per turn is too fast in the beginning.
prestige can increase this rate, higher city level can increase it too.
pioneers could cost about 3 population, this would encourage the choice of using that population as a resource for something else, such as a building or levelling up your town.
this also maintains the potential to turn your outpost into a special type of fortification or garrison building specialized to training units - this would help stop spam as well by giving more choices into troop training (could train faster than towns do for example)
there are lots of options, you don't have to rewrite the whole system because something does not quite work the way you intended it.
Things are obviously tighter. Generally I hate games with a weak trickle of resources. I think a big problem here is the UI failing to explain what is costing what, making it harder to economize. Agree that the current version could loosen up things a little though. Disagree that the fun is sucked out--I'm still having fun with the latest game in the latest build, I'm just not building up gold in the thousands anymore.
Disagree with OP. Lots of resources and economy change made the first cities development challenging and fun. What bugs me is later game city development which is quite boring. Every city looks quite the same. There should be much more types of buildings, even buildings that grow on it's own (I love how the suburbs appears in Civ5).
I play AOW:SM a lot to though I would never play it by e-mail (does not seem fun that way) anyway due to there usally being a lot of cities already on the map I don't tend to build a lot of cities however on thoes maps with few cities I build them like crazy.
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