OK.
Basing the entire economy of cities on special resource tiles makes these tiles less than special.
When I read that, once again, yet another resource would be seeded next to every starting position (a shard this time), I started to wonder... as time goes on and the game continues to be uprooted and re-planted, will there will be any room left for a city in the starter clump of these "special" or "rare" tiles?
One of the interesting things in the game is how the world is changed based on being in your area of influence. This suggests that the terrain is improving, becoming more fertile and productive, or whatever. Unfortunately, this has absolutely no affect on anything. It's just some pretty visual effect.
If you're going to add cool spells that let me wipe out huge areas of land using your touted deformable terrain engine, you need to make those changes worth a little more. If I destroy or screw up half of the land in your city's area of influence, I expect your production or economy to suffer. It got all pretty and green when you moved in, now it's all on fire. Both sides of this coin need a gameplay ramification.
This brings me to the title. The idea that everything is based on "special" tiles is, well, a bad one. I can only assume you did it to discourage city creep, but, well, it doesn't help. It's still most effective to spam cities. As long as there's shared pools of resources, each new city is another unit factory, and more of those means I get a bigger army faster, whether or not each city makes more than a gold per turn.
You keep throwing bandaids on the train wreck victim that is Elemental. A broken jaw, three compound fractures, and massive internal bleeding isn't going to go away with some gauze.
I understand you removed worker units at some point, which was nice to remove micromanagement tedium, but bad in that land essentially doesn't have inherent value. We can't improve empty squares, they're just... there. Only the special tiles matter, and that makes them necessities, not special rarities.
This is an expansion B suggestion.
My goodness yes! Seriously, I would love to be able to say "Iron ore eh? Meh, got plenty of metal, build a library!" How about a scenic view that can be used for tourism and prestige, or a monestary where it imparts other bonuses? There are a lot of ways to go about what they've tried to accomplish but the way it is now feels sort of confining. Especially where they're talking about making changes to the mana and summoning system. What about being able to put, instead of using a shard for just one type of building, a summoning altar that would buff summons of that type and forgo the additional mana income? Anything where we could do something besides put building X on spot Y would be great as far as feeling like I was making a decision.
Although to be honest I only read half of what you had to say before I posted, you're a little harsher than I might have been, heh.
I've noticed problems with the terrain deforming spells raise and lower land. I use these quite a lot and 75% of the time they don't work. When I cast the spell and the mountain disappears, most of the time the game will not let me move my troops into the now-empty space which is the whole reason I cast the spell to begin with. Also, I think things have changed in version 1.08, I cannot cast lower land on mtns in areas under influence of other AI kingdoms.
Having a high level spell, say "create fertile land," that creates a wheat field in an otherwise open ground square would be a great idea, especially since there is a lower level spell "desolation" (or is it called "desert") spell that allows players to destroy resource tiles.
If the designers really want to keep the original design theme (or game background story, whatever you call it), then they need to have the rarity of food resources tied more closely with spells. IOW: various levels of "fetiile land" type spells that are required to add more food resources to the kingdom before the kingdom can grow. (50 cities should require a lot of extra food). Right now, the "story" doesnt' really match the "gameplay" which doesn't really match the "economics". There seems to me to be a bit of a three-way disconnect here from my POV.
Interesting. You make it sound like Elemental plays like Warcraft/Starcraft where there are explicit "starting positions" with gold mines. And there are explicit spots to build cities. Guarantee of having resource X at starting position is pretty much that, especially if it's a critical resource.
Not at all. Your starting location is seeded with some basic resources that you need to be competitive. Right now it's a gold mine, and a fertile land. I think a tech library too, but that has a longer seed radius. After the initial starting point, expansion is all free, you can build cities in empty spots with no resources, or you might find a great spot that has what you want.
While I agree that shards shouldn't be seeded at starting location (it gives too much incentive for a rush strategy), I don't think the special tile system itself is a problem. Having an economy based on these makes you adapt to your surrounding and alter your gameplay as you explore. However it does have the problem of making the game a bit too luck dependent. A certain faction might have a great start and end up very strong, which might seem unfair in some people's eyes. I personally don't have a major problem with it, since I see it as a challenge. This is more of a factor in multiplayer games, where balance is more of a concern, but I'm not too big on that, so I'll let someone else comment.
As far as the ever increasing starting location resources are concerned, I think they would be better off dropping them as a conceit and just making your first settlement produce them by default, some sort of dubious special building, The Sovereign's Throne. or something like that. They could then go back to allowing random resources around your starting location which would add necessary variation.
Nah, the best way would be to have the faction make that by default (via faction abilities). You can come up with some weird explanation for it, but this way people won't be rushing for capitals to take over said resources and grow x times as powerful in the process.
I think it's more a question of balance, tiles should offer a great strategic advantage worth fighting for in the mid to late game. At the moment they are to essential in the early game which actually distracts from their strategic importance. Not all of them are so unbalance, for example I can build a good army without metal if I select the right tech. But materials, fertile land and gold mines are all essential in the early game.
I suggest putting guardians on all resources but Food (which I think is and should be essential). the guardians should be hard to destroy in the early game so those who are not lucky enough to start very near a resource are not disadvantaged in that early phase and have time to find resources themselves. The better the resource the better the guardian should be.
I agree with Terraziel. If the Capital city founded by your sovereign comes with a building that produces one of each resources, you wouldn't have to seed resources at the starting location.
It would solve another problem as well: seems that the zero upkeep and fixed production of the initial buildings (market/study/lab) were to guarantee you could get your civ off the ground. With the updates, now they each have a small upkeep to try to address the city spam, but it didn't work. The real way to kill the city spam would be to make all these buildings resource MULTIPLIERS, rather than producing fixed amounts.
Combine that with tying troop production ability to population tier, and...
a city with no resources or population would be officially useless.
The resources system is well thought out and balanced. I would agree that having a faction ability that gives what you people seem to have at each starting location (because I only play one massive map with well balanced resources) is an interesting solution to stop a rush tactic from being the only viable strategy. On the other hand, why not make cities harder to capture and just keep the resource system the way it is. City conquering should be harder but reap significant rewards.
How much would it suck to finally sack someone's capital and gain 0 resources and still have to fight all their other cities. They would still have their faction bonus even though I took their capital.
Well by starting resource we're talking like 2-3 food/gold/tech per turn, so it doesn't matter a whole lot later on when you're in a serious war. It just makes sure you don't get a double reward for rushing. You still can to take an AI out, but you don't grow twice as powerful for doing it.
If you make cities too hard to capture, you end up rewarding a turtling approach instead. Can't fight someone evenly? Bunker up in your city when he comes for you... Although this happens to a certain extent now, the first strike/range advantage makes it not a great idea. If you were to say reverse it, and give defenders the ability to go first, you'd find that people will never attack (declare war and wait for him to attack you).
But yeah, happy land is not good news, especially with randomness being so... random: My last game had in the initial spot two fertile lands, a gold mine, ancient library and crystals. It was a mix of "Woohoo!" and "WTF?".
They might be better off putting in some cheap one-per-kingdom buildings that are available very early in the game that give bonuses like +5 gold / material / research / food etc. Then lack of special tiles near the starting point wouldn't be a big deal and they could stop worrying about it.
IIRC, most factions in Galciv 2 had one or two such buildings.
I think my best haul from an initial spot, sufficiently "bad" that i thought about taking a screenshot of it was...1 air shard, 2 gold mines, 1 fertile land, 1 apiary, 2 lost library, 2 arcane ?whatevers?, they were just in a square around my sovereign, the immediate thought is sort of "Yes!" until you realise that means that it is a terrible place to build a city because there would be no space to build anything.
I have to agree. I like looking around a bit for a good starting position and rarity of resources. I am still for some type of slider to make the resources even harder to find.
I can post a screen of a city with, more or less, 7 goldmines.
Funny thing, it is sandwiched between 2 other cities, my capital and the ex-capital of an AI, both said cities contain 2 goldmines each. On the whole continent there's only 1 clay pit and 2 metals. Peoples are building huts out of gold, due to material starvation. What little materials I produce are needed for an army of archers/horse archers, wich are in turn needed to avoid having an army consisting solely of spiders (No metal).
Probably in that world, there are family treasures consisting of 2 clay bricks, a wooden plank and a nail of iron.
I Like this... Say a Structure That is the center of the city- and only the city you found with your sovereigner. That gives 3 Gold,3food,3mats ,+1 mana a turn.
If this is city is taken over the stucture is destroyed, and can be rebuilt in a city if your sovereigner is there.. But at the cost of one Essenc -
Call it Sovereign's Bond or such...
I would like to see a silder vaule for thing like resources, shards, adventures & monsters the higher the vaule the more likely you would have that item near your city & more of that item thru out the start of the game.
This would give everybody the chance to play as they see fit.
Yes, that is how it is now, and I fear that adding shards to this current mix would just make it worse. Turning all the spawned resource into a default building doesn't change this at all. Giving defensive bonus and spawning peasant militia only means a rusher needs exactly x formula before he starts a rush, it doesn't make the rush any less powerful or rewarding. Grab one capital and become twice as powerful, grab two and you just won.
As for your point regarding the "first city" being less powerful... is that a problem? Because I don't see one. Why should your first city have tons of resources as a given? All that does is devalue your other cities. The capital should only be valuable because it was built first, and thus probably has the highest population, and at a higher level with more bonuses.
Agreed. It's a must have option.
I really love how the special tiles change up the game and increase the replayability dramatically. Being able to upgrade any tile ..well quite frankly, would be a boring snoozefest of uncomprehendable magnitude. With each game comes different stategic decisions based on the resources at hand and nearby you or, more interestingly, nearby your enemies or, more interestingly still, nearby your friends.
I like the elemental approach a lot. We don't need yet another civ clone.
My view is the resource tile should not be a nessecity (other than a farm land to get going), but rather a location that is very important such that it can change the course of the war. For example, if you have no goldmines you should still be able to get the general buildings and field an army capable of defending your nation. If you own one to X you can build the good buildings (Ereog's Tower) and be able to defend and invade the next realm over. With X or more you can afford wonders and hire lots of the best units (dragons and well equipped units/heroes). In otherwords goldmines would be the differnce in being able to function and being RICH. The same would apply to other resources.
That would be the best solution- I don't like the feel of having a 1farm, 1 gold start everywhere, allow for a chance of these bonus, but not every game.
I don't know if it would fit the idea of the game lore though.
What would be intesting would be to add 15 or twenty extremely rare tiles that don't have a game-breaking impact, yet are interesting in other ways, for example:
diamond mines/rubies/emeralds/platinum: worth 1.5/2/3/4 times as much as a gold mine
tea leaves, fig trees, wall flowers, 4-leaf clovers, prairie flowers, anything else .. can be traded on caravan routes and are worth some amount of money (economic bonus) to the city that trades them.
Cave site, Raptor nest, troll bridge, shard sites ... should have increased monster spawn & presence near these tiles
lotus flowers, mandrake, eye-of-newt, bones-of-demon .. provide some kind of non-game-breaking spell bonus or perhaps mana-increase for units housed in the town they're linked two (say mandrake harvesting gives spellcasters +2 mana regeneration if stationed in the city for the whole turn [thus 3 total: 1 base + 2 mandrake] ).
There's a whole lot that can be added to the terrain to make things more colorful & interesting without being game-breaking. Tying some of these to adventure tree would make that tree more worthwhile & interesting too.
Also, we have spells that raise & lower mountains and oceans, why are woods exempt? There should be a cut forest or arson spell that can burn down sections of forest in order to plant more cities.
Okay so someone should make and then test a special building that gives starting resources and negates the need for starting bonus resources. Any takers? I would still like to see one that provides defense for one's capital so that it is significantly more important than any random city, but I don't feel like making a building today.
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