Up front I'd like to say I am really starting to love Elemental, of course I've had to ask a buch of basic game play questions on this forum in order to understand what's going. A manuel would of helped, but oh well. Thanks again for all the help figuring Elemental out.
The point of this post is to point out what I feel is the number one thing that will cause me to lose interest quickly and that is the ease in which cities can be build by both the player and the NPC. Cities should be difficult to build, cities should have a reason for being build not just because there is ONE resourse to be had. The NPC should not have 15-30 cities build before I even meet them, in a wasteland that is just wrong, City spaming in wrong and it doesn't seam to fit with the Elemental theme.
Make cities valueable, make it cost me something to build cities, make each city a choice that I have to consider carefully, counting the cost. Please!
I'm not speaking for everyone else (many people = many different strategies = many different capability levels, some may be playing their first game, others are hardened vets), but there are several reasons why I spam in this game other than 'just because I can':
1) More cities with more caravan routes = more roads everywhere. 50 caravans out there create an impressive road network. Several strong horse archer squads make teleport almost an afterthought when you can move these 8 to 10 squares a turn on an excellent road network. I've found that heroes with good attack ability with ceder longbows, horses, ranger cloak, other trinkets are actually a viable combat unit. Side effects are it's a PITA locating a particular caravan city when it gets killed. I waste too much time just searching for particular cities on the map; I wish there was some kind of drop-down that makes this easier (if there already exists some mechanism, I haven't seen it mentioned in the manual which unfortunately is severly lacking).
2) more cities mean more production. If I had enough resources I could be making 50 squads a turn as opposed to 10, that's 5:1 odds over the person I quoted in post, which means (all other factors being equal) you'll lose against me.
3) more cities means I can spam them faster, 15 cities each producing a guard & pioneer spams me in no time.
4) either control resources for myself or deny them to my opponent
4) increase area of influence. My cities tend to not be as close as AI cities are .. I'm looking for land control not spacing .. I want the whole world nothing less. A consequence of this is that wandering monsters can be a pain in some areas.
I keep seeing players saying that AI spams too much, yet I have just the opposite impression. I'm not seeing that many AI cities . I can typically take them down very fast and I usually have anywhere from 5 to 10 times as many cities as my AI opponents, especially once I start conquering them. I don't know why people talk about razing AI cities, as mentioned in another thread. I just use conquered cities for my own benefit. I've actually found AI cities that produce combat units much faster than mine: 1 to 4 turns where it takes me 17 to 27 turns. That's huge when going for conquest efficiency. This is not to mention that you're getting all the tech knowledge, gildar production, arcane knowledge, etc ... so why raze them? This is just senseless to me.
I really dont know, if anything is reasonable or possible, but you ask for ideas.
- Food should be collectable like all the other ressources. (global or not)
- How much food you need should depends on the population of your city. Higher populations should require more food. (more then 1 food per hut)
- pioneers should cost food (5, 10, 20...not sure). My thoughts .....Pioneers are a group of people, who go to take a long way (needs food) to build a new city. They have to survive for a while, before the new city is build and before they can start to exploit their environment.
One idea to prevent city spam is to make population coming in from the wilds global. Each tile would generate an amount of people, and the area influenced by a city would pull in those people. So, for .01 people/tile, if your city influenced 100 tiles you'd get 1person/turn. Then, if your cities got too close to one another, they'd directly hinder each others ability to grow in population. Then, prestige could instead determine which city they would travel to if city influence overlapped, or possibly would draw people from other cities.
I agree very much with such a game-setup option.
Personally, I prefer games with fewer cities -- for all players. I should be able to setup such a type of game.
But instead of a slider "from low to high", I would like to have a slider associated to specific numbers : it would allow more precise control, depending on what style of game one wishes to experience, and depending on the number of players involved.
sry...wrong thread
Before I start, I'm sorry if this has been mentioned before in this thread, but this is my collective thought after skimming some of the ideas.
My thoughts on the food issue, which in turn affect city spamming:
-Get rid of the food resource tiles.
-Create something similar to the 'create settlement' button that would create the farm improvement on land near water, or create an irrigation system. Make it so that this improvement only generates 1x food (So you'd have to use four tiles for farming to create a mid-sized village) and can be pillaged.
-I know this sounds a lot like the civilization form. It is, but it's also the most realistically thought out way of creating food productions. Blizzard and Westwood didn't go after other RTS developers because their resource gathering systems were used in similar (Game mechanically speaking) ways, so I doubt that there would be any reason why this form of irrigation system would cause a problem.
-This would also mean that big cities would need more than just space for housing tiles, etc, but they would need surrounding areas. Housing and food should be separated. Many large cities were surrounded by acre upon acre of farmland. It kept the food supply and the farmers close so that when the cities were attacked, people could retreat inside for the siege.
-It would also mean that caravans would be required to grow isolated communities or to provide food to resource outposts (i.e. mining towns, etc). Say there's a resource node off in the hills but no viable farming solution, you'd have to run a caravan there not only to bring the resource back, but to bring food to the community.
-To add even more life, perhaps upgraded farming techs could lead to things like hill terracing like that in South America, cross country aqueducts that are visible on the 3d map, things like that.
-By creating a farmland type improvement, you add more use for civilian style units. Pioneers only appear in my game if I'm making a settlement. That would make them a pretty hefty target once I start multi-player. But if there's a reason to keep multiple pioneer units around, it means it's harder to guess what I'm doing, and even if they kill some, chances are I'll be able to survive because I'll still have one somewhere.
-You also add more viability to sieges. What is realistic about besieging a town that has a node or two inside that produces enough food to supply not only that town, but two others? The siege would never end until someone attacked each other. There's no wearing down of food stores. This would create a way to occupy (Or burn, it should be a choice) farm land that could not only affect the besieged city, but other cities.
-Tactical options created by separating food and housing would become much more in depth. Say your opponent has a heavily fortified coastal city that is walled in by mountains or hills, and it controls that one elemental shard you desire. But because housing and food would be separate, you could send in a spy unit (Something else I believe should be viable, having heroes spy for you as they are not in any particular uniform) to track the trade caravan, and then besiege the source of the city's food.
-Water-based trade and warfare expansion. This is something that is extremely lacking. It would allow food caravans to travel to small islands for resources as well, and create cause for blockades too.
Separate musings:
-Perhaps add a fresh water resource? If there was a great cataclysm, freshwater and springs would be extremely important.
-As I said, if I were a sovereign, which is the premise of this game, any adventurer I hired for field work isn't going to be wearing a banner or a symbol of my kingdom. They would be hired for discreet work. Smuggling, spying, causing dissension.
-These changes would require not just simple tile and resource changing, but changes in the way the AI acts and processes its decisions. It would provide a chance to create an AI that can react based on more than it is now. The AI could more strategically plan its cities because it has to process things such as, "What areas have I explored that are large enough for a good food settlement and relatively close to here?" "Is it more viable to attack the food supply city or the population center?"
-A water resource would mean options to poison the water resource. Just saying.
Sorry, buildings should require materials & gold not food, but it depends on what your definition of an "outpost" is? People eat food not buildings.
If an outpost is just a small settlement, then a pioneer is what it should cost. If an "outpost" is some kind of new military building then it should require a military group to be positioned there for a certain number of turns to constuct (say 4-man squad 4 turns), and this should provide some tangible defensive benefit if attacked on the tactical board.
I think players user the term "outpost" to be a city founded by a pioneer that they have no intention of growing up. It's not a formal thing, basically it's just synomous with city. "Outpost" is just a reference to how it's used functionally in the game.
Of course there should be numbers but I can hardly make up any specific numbers without even knowing what kind of scale would "work". =PMaybe increments of 1 or more are needed, maybe 0,25, maybe less... Who knows?
City spam is just a game strategy technique. It's no different from using "killer stack," "teleportation," "blitzkrieg," "imbuing multiple heroes vs imbuing few or none," or going for spell-of-making vs conquest, etc. It's just unbelievable to me that players are trying to negate a valid game strategy? If you don't like this particular strategy, use another.
The problem comes down to one thing and one thing only ... a weak AI.
The AI cannot compete with the strategies that players use in this game .. whether the strategy involves "city spam," "teleportation," or "killer stacks" .. period.
Any strategy that is unbeatable against the AI is going to seem "overpowerd." Would you nix the strategy or change the AI? Sorry, but I find nixing the strategy to be exactly the *wrong* solution. The correct solution is to improve the AI. Period. Then none of these strategies would be overpowered.
I firmly disagree with the OP. The following are the major arguments against city spamming:
1) The more cities you build, the more units you can build. Since building units in elemental can only be done one at a time in any given city, the more cities you have the more units. Yet, as the game progress and companies begin to appear, lvl 1 cities can not produce these units and lvl 2 cities can not compete with the effectiveness of a lvl 4-5 city. I think a better approach than reducing city spam would be to make cities require certain buildings to even build certain items. For instance, a lvl 1 city probably can't train or equip a unit with a lord hammer or a claymore. Adding something like an armorer would give larger more organized cities and edge over city spamming for unit creation
2) The more cities you build, the more low lvl maintanence free buildings you can produce. Since any city can produce a labor pit and a lore shop for nothing but the cost of building, which is extremely low, a player spamming cities can get a significant advantage over his opponents in spells and materials production. Yet, ultimately, this is a balance issue with most elemental cities. Currently, no buildings are mutually exclusive and therefore every city can build every building. Yet, if a city only allowed so many of each lvl of building, ie a lvl 2 city could have 3 lvl 1 and 1lvl 2 buildings (Houses being probably lvl 0), then each player could decide for themselves if there was a real benefit to city spam or if they want to have a more robust economy based on a small number of large cities.
3) The more cities you build, the more caravans you can spawn. Currently, caravans magically create food, which is fairly hilarious considering. I personally feel that caravan's should be redesigned to be more like the traders in galciv2, and be based upon a global maximum. It seems moderately odd that a new city with one person can build a caravan capable of giving a 25% boost in food production to a major city.
4) The more cities you build, the more resources you can harvest. It is silly to argue over one of the x's in a 4x game. Since cities are the only way to absorb a resource ( sadly no mining starbases anymore ), it only makes since from a game stand point to allow players to build cities to expand their influence to procure these resources. If there was some way of building a fort or non city outpost, then city spam would not be necessary. Yet, the majority of the time I spam cities is to fill in the gaps of my influences and expand my area of dominance.
I personally don't think a city should cost a food to build, as you already require 1 food to get it above 10 people. This would be inconsistent with the food costs/population gains for huts (10 for 1 food/25 for 1 food). I think a better idea would be to make pioneers cost 1 food upkeep until they actually made a new city. This would limit the amount of pioneers AI's and players could build and limit the rate of growth of the faction.
regarding requiring food for outposts...I don't really care for that thought. In my mind, the outpost is small enough to "live off the land" so to speak. I realize it is basically wasteland but I think some latitude is needed here. Making food required seems to be an un needed overhead.
I agree with many here that city spamming is a turn-off. I vaguely remember a dev's pre-release video that explicitly stated city spamming was something he was trying to avoid. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible NOT to spam, since the AI does precisely that. I don't know how many times I've watched literally waves of AI pioneers streaming past my zones - even before I can set up choke points. The AI pioneers also seem to be immune to wandering monsters (IOW, unescorted). It's very easy to get completely boxed in very quickly - meaning you either need to spam yourself (bleah), or rush the nearest AI faction with a crowd of peasants and your sov to give yourself some breathing room.
In short - if the AI didn't, I wouldn't.
I like this idea a lot (as long as it applies to the AI as well =P). An influence penalty like this would be great. It could even be made more interesting by adding in a CIV-like "unrest" factor (counteracted by the presence of a member of the royal family, perhaps), or even an "enemy influence" factor.
In the meantime, I guess I'll just have to keep spamming cities in self-defense ...
I am certainly for this. It will make selecting a location for a new city more important. We will have to way the option of acquiring more resources and strategic locations. I think this would certainly make city spamming more difficult. You could even make it more difficult by costing 2 to construct an outpost. It would make progressing through the Civilization/Imperium tech tree even more important. Perhaps add a couple more tech like fishing boats. If it does cost 2 food to establish a city, which I think it should, you could probably eliminate the food point on the merchant.
How about food being the local resource. Building cities is easy because of global food abundance. If the food was local we'll have the big cities, filled with population around fertile land and much smaller outposts. How to provide the outpost with food? That's a tricky one. Basically we can't use caravans cause they are defenceless and there are too micromanagement involved...
Of course it would, though it would require the AI to put some thought into city building. Having the population revolt seems more like expansion pack material and a fix is needed now. That and per the fluff civilizations cannot exist without a channeller which makes revolutions difficult. In any case, for the time being it can be assumed part of the cost is going into preventing revolts.
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City spam should not be the most effective way to play, but that does not mean it should not be viable at low difficulties. What ever system is used to limit it should make it so that you can but a well planned realm of strategically placed cities should have the advantage (scaled so that it is only required for competitive play in PvP and going against high level AI). This is how all parts of a strategy game should be; the method that takes more thought, skill, and effort should be equal to or better than the other methods.
Players spam cities because it is the best way to play when it should not be. The AI does so because it is programmed to (thus making any non-AI change ineffective). Before it is pratical to make the AI not spam cities that advantage in doing so needs to be dealt with so that there is a reason to change it.
A well placed city is one that is located to provide maximum coverage of resource tiles and/or is in a location of strategic importance (e.g. fortified city in a mountain pass to act as a barrier). Building a city near only one resource tile is not bad, but building two cities near resources when one city could cover all the tiles is bad... the worst building one that has no strategic value or a resource tile.
Whatever system is used should follow these principles, and requiring a food cost does not because as it stands food is quite meaningless.
Just increase the minimum distance between cities, and increase cities' zone of influence by about the same amount so we won't a big problem with resources that we can't exploit.
Your local geographic region grows corn. Then one day, people from far away come with potatoes, which happen to grow quite well in your region, allowing for more yield per harvest than corn.
It happened all the time throughout history.
I think Caravans bringing food is actually rather immersive form a historical perspective on how civilizations thrived.
Yeah, but it doesn't really match the the theme of a few survivors in a world after a cataclysmic event. Does it?
There was a super-volcanic eruption on the earth about 300,000 (or was it 100,000? can't remember exactly now) years ago, Toba if I remember correctly. It reduced the human population to a few dozen fertile females (according to at least one source) and created a "genetic bottleneck." I bet there weren't that many caravans bringing food around the day after that happened.
Well,I totally agree with you on the first part: it shouldn't be exclude because it's a good tactic. The other part however is not really that the AI can't compete... it's nobody that can compete unless they use the same technic. There is no viable option to counter this one even if you plan well your city or try to win with diplomacy/magic/questing because those are too long.
We just need to remember that your sovereign bring back life to the land. Magic should be the key to restore it. I totaly agree that at first, you should struggle like hell between wild animal/thief/weather (should be implemented ) to survive. But when your sovereign grow in power and is able to grasp the essence from magic (lvl up and arcane tech lvl)he should be able to "cure" the land.That's my vision .
This would probably also be my biggest turn off. There's this really nice period of exploration at the start of the game, but it immediately ends once you find the first AI, because it instantly becomes a land grab from there on out. By the time the land grab is over, you've probably killed one AI and seriously hurt another one. Then the rest of the game is just killing the AI at your leisure...but by then the exploration has kind of lost its zing because you've got so much other crap going on now.
In my last game, I had no less than three AI sovereigns locked out of their own kingdoms, because they were so busy bouncing off my borders looking for new cities they let themselves get stuck inside my sphere of influence. We're talking 100 turns or more, just sitting there trying to get more land.
I want a nice, epic game without slowing research down to a crawl (which doesn't actually slow down the AI from expanding.) I want to see differences in the way the AIs grow, and I want them to exercise the same kind of judgment I do. (Is it worth building a new city, or can it wait until my influence expands?) That makes for a flavorful game. I don't want to have to explore my guts out just to get my fair share before half of it goes inside someone else's influence and I have to make alliances or go to war to keep exploring.
I mean, it's gotten so bad, I divide almost all my cities into East/West, North/South, since I have to build two or more cities right next to each other to stop the AI from doing the exact same thing. I'd love to build just one city and know that, in 30 turns, it'll claim those other resources and I don't need a 2nd city just to stop the AI from plopping one down 5 tiles away.
I have said this before, but since the frog hasnt listened yet, I will repeat.
The number of people in the world is limited. All empires are in essence "fighting" for the same people to join them. If there is a pool of people that will be attracted to cities each round then prestige will be very important. Each city will produce prestige, but for each level the prestige raised exponentially: Level 1: 1 prestige, Level 2: 4 prestige, Level 3: 16 prestige. If a pioneer costs for example 10 people then city spamming will be reduced. One would get lots more people to the empire with 3 large cities than 8 smaller ones. One extra person attracted to my empire would mean one less for someone else. There would actually be a cost to produce that extra settler. As a final point the game also need to reward larger cities with better buildings (this is done to a certain extent already).
I have another brilliant idea. Monsters target Pioneers. They actively seek them out, as well as undefended cities/outposts. Let the retaded A.I. spam cities and watch them get turned to cinder every turn by rampaging monsters.
I agree with Gwen and the CPL. It's not spamming itself that is bad; it's that it's the most effective way to play and thus it possesses a sort of snowball effect. You get out 5 cities and benefit. Those push out 5 more cities each and you benefit even more. All the effects in the game and all the victory conditions in the game reward having a city - so there's no reason not to have more cities. You want to beat a guy up? Spam units. You want to cast the spell of making? Spam research and land grab. You want to master quest? Beat 'em up or have a big enough military that you can ask for open borders. You want diplomacy? Have a big enough military and enough merchants to pay them off.
Hardcaps and such won't really make it any better. Yes, it will limit spam but it's just fixing the symptoms not the reason. If we just say "Okay, you can have 10 cities", there is simply still no reason -not- to have 10 cities. Some of the ideas (if not the specific details) that Civ 5 uses might be a good place to look for inspiration. There are very real reasons for me to not spam cities or even conquer all cities - I may not have the happiness (which is hard to get; not having it doesn't stop me from making more cities but it does slow growth and prevent golden ages), I may be trying to improve my culture (each city you have adds a percentage increase making larger empires require more overall cultural growth to get to the same level), I may not have the economy, and I may not have the social policies that really reward that. These are things I can potentially overcome... but these are also things I may not -want- to have in the first place. Golden Ages may be important to my strategy and if I'm going for a cultural victory, the cultural cost is important to that. Thus I -want- a small empire and need to ask myself if the added cost (of building up a city, of the shadow costs, of the increased culture cost, etc) is worth the benefit.
Other smaller costs the game uses are things like empire costs. You have to pay to maintain roads; they provide a trade bonus (based on city size) which off sets much of the cost... but only if you avoid making excess roads. If you want to have more than just a single highway, well.. that will cost you.
Choices like these, these will help mitigate city spam because -not- having a city can be (and often is) as beneficial as having that city.
I can agree with this. It should be possible to win on other strategies in about the same timeframe as any other strategy. Perhaps diplomacy/magic/questing need to be shortened somehow. The AI should be able to win on "ridiculous" setting in no more than 200 turns. I think most players can win the game on conquest in the 200 to 200 turn range on a large map. Other victory conditions should be matched to this timeframe. Of course, it will be easier to win on smaller maps by conquest, so there's no real "equalization" of victory conditions across map sizes: i.e. even though it'll be easier for the player to win by conquest on a small map, say in 50 turns, it will still take the same amount of time to reaseach the magic victory option, perhaps less time for diplomatic since there are less oponents, questing is probably a bit easier since the locations are not so far removed on a small map.
It would be very nice if the first part of this game was more of an immediate "survival" type game rather than immediate growth with pioneers. If the sovereign was forced (say) either to use his essence to create food resources vs using it to "imbue champions." This would be an incredible trade-off: Do I start my city spam at the cost of weakening my sovereign, or do I start my tide of conquest by imbuing Janusk and moving toward a more military stance (gaining experience by killing wandering monsters).
If I was to guess, this is probably what the dev had in mind for this game. The problem is, it just doesn't work out this way in reality. Also, food resources should not be made available at all (in a cataclysmic environment) except at a high cost, say: some technology (advance) + development(a building type) + some spell + some other resources (say a lot of crystal(like 100) or moonstone[whatever that goody hut resource is] ), or unless a sovereign or heir sacrifices essence.
If you allow the sovereign to create too many food resources at the cost of essence, then city-spam is inevitable. Not only that, you'll create a completely "food rich" world, but weak sovereign. Perhaps a good work-around would be to "prorate" essence-created food resources. For example: first food resource created by sovereign' essence sacrificing costs 3 essence, second costs 4, third costs 6, each one after that adds 3 more essence to the cost .. 9, 12, 15. This will allow city spam only at the expense of significantly weakening your sovereign or paying a lot of crystal (which is a significant factor in improving your military capability long-term).
On the other side of the coin. You can attempt a conquest victory by imbuing at the price of having only a few cities. But, fewer cities means little knowledge production, little arcane knowledge, little gilder collection, little metal, material, and crystal/shard collecting. So, the player is forced to be successful at conquest right from the getgo or risk annihilation by falling behind.
Of course, this all sounds great in theory, but I seriously doubt the AI would be able to overcome these additional hardships .... we'd probably just see a bunch of one-town AI's everywhere which would really sux ... hence this is probably the reason that the game evolved the way it did (i.e. not matching the "cataclysmic" theme).
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