Creating new cities is a fundamental part of Elemental's gameplay. At first glance it seems like you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by expanding: New cities allow you to expand your borders, tap into previously unavailable resources and bolster your population which will allow you to make larger armies. This looks great from the game designer's point of view. For the player however, it is a different story.
Lately I've noticed that the motivation for expanding outward into the world is self-justifying. This is a serious design problem and it is taking the fun out the game. Before I go into the details of this problem, I want to clearly communicate what I think is missing from Elemental. I will start with an example.
I recently played Anno 1404 (Dawn of Discovery), a very popular city-building game. This game has a lot in common with Elemental from a design point of view. For example, the scarcity of resources plays a huge part in both games. In DoD, my home city requires resources that are on other islands in order to continue advancing. In other words, I must expand to other islands and seize their resources. Doing so is an incredibly rewarding and fun experience for several reasons:
1. I now have access to resources which other players may not have.
2. My expansion allows my whole empire to advance.
3. The game very clearly communicates the effects of my decision. Before, I had no coffee which means my Oriental settlements could not advance. I now have coffee. Sweet.
If you've ever played DoD you will notice that you are never forced to expand. No. You WANT to expand. This is the missing link. With Elemental, it feels like Brad is standing in my room, right beside my chair and forcing me to expand. Most of the time I feel like I can do everything on one city:
Research through a whole tech tree? Don't need to expand.
Recruit champions? Don't need to expand.
Complete quests? Don't need to expand.
Yes, it's true that there are external factors which necessitate expanding (wandering creeps, player armies etc...) but having done so I don't feel like I have actually 'advanced' within the game. The whole process feels very mechanical and cold. I think what it boils down to is that I end up expanding for the sake of expanding. It is very hard for me to pinpoint why it is the way it is in Elemental. Is it the fact that I can build the same set of buildings in every city? Is it the fact that there is a huge variance in how much I can get out of a new expansion based on the resources it is next to? Is it the fact that I don't clearly see the benefits of expanding affect my empire? It is hard to say.
Does anyone else have similar thoughts regarding expanding?
Personally i think it is gold that is behind the feeling of pointlessness in expanding.
It is really very simple - You need gold for your armies, you need gold for buying and equipping hero's, you need gold to support research, all the main parts of the game rely on gold, and gold is the one thing expanding cities do not give you (unless you manage to find a gold mine)!
The way gold is calculated in cities now, whereby maintenance costs stab at the very heart of gross primary gold production does not help, it should come off net gold production, so your multipliers have something to, i dunno, multiply!!
Tax income based on population would also provide incentive to expand.
Edit: basically it is the number of gold mines that you have in your control which is the primary factor of how much expansion is worthwhile - you can go over but there is little point and little reward for your efforts.
I've played a couple of the Anno series of games. I enjoy those type of strategy games a lot, if you liked those you'll probably like Colonization (colonial era civilizations) and imperialism (an older but still great game).
The big advantage in those games that makes them more enjoyable from a city-building perspective was the "need" to gather resources in order to move your population to higher levels of numbers, happiness, and prosperity. This game doesn't have this. For example, in the Anno 1620, which I played a couple of years ago, the economic system totters on a needle-balance, which is increadibly kool. Not only do you need to plant the tobacco plantations, and the marble quaries, and the iron mine, and I think whale oil for late game expansion to that highest population prosperity level, but the actual construction-placement of the buildings had a *huge* effect on your citizens of that city. In fact, there were whole threads on optimal building construction & how to position the buildings. For example, you wanted the tobacco stores near the widest amount of people, the church radius and later cathedral covering the widest radius of people, too many houses clumped together without roads would be more likely to cause fire. When a fire did occur the fire engine actually had to travel down the roads to put out the fire, and if you didn't position the firehouse & construct the roads well, half a block could burn down before the fire engines got there. The whole city constuction had a *huge* dimension of its own that this game doesn't have as far as city building goes.
In this game 1) it just doesn't matter where you build individual buildings, makes no difference except with regards to resources which you can envelop, which is a small thing in the big scheme of things 2) There's absolutely nothing limiting expansion. There's no "teetering" that's present in 4x strategy games which have a strong economic system in place (the best part of Anno was that economic "teetering" .. the AI was weak, as unfortunately pretty much all strategy games suffer from that, but that game was much more fun to play from the "economic" city building & pirate confrontation dimension). The Civ series is just a much better developed city-building & economic system than this game is, but in all fairness this game is bran new so I'm willing to cut a little slack there since it has the potential to have a very good tactical combat dimension which I like a lot too (Civ is a bit weak in this area).
In this game I could build 500 cities, and I usually do have well over 100 citeis by turn 300, but there's nothing really special about them. There's nothing that the citizens need beyond food. In anno you could see the people walking around & talking and the fire engines putting out fires. In Civ, the graphics would show very viscerally the food bars with the grain & the stacks of coins when money increases, or the happy elvis faces (in version 3 I think it was). In this game all this info is just in a bland table two-clicks removed. Maybe if they had a toggle that showed the output on the strategic map (like colonization does: it had a resource display toggle & a yields display toggle, that you could set on the strategic map and the cities would show this info on the strategic map where the city is so players could see at a glance, there was also a caravan display that showed the trade routes & expected yields).
In this game, you only need to expand for military conquest reasons, there's no other factor pushing a faction to increase its size. citizens need nothing beyond food. The economic & city building dimension of this game is massivly lacking & weak.
Gold is only a need early in the game, once I have 100 cities I'm usually rolling in 100+ gold every turn and it's just not a problem any more. There's nothing "limiting" gold enough in this game. In Anno you needed that gold for city devolopment and shelling out for military was a PITA. The economic system in this game has not developed that well-rounded teetering point yet, which other games have developed better & more fully. The underliying problem is that there's probably not a good match between upkeep costs , taxes, & income in this game as there are in other games. A tax slider which affected morale & population growth would be a good thing.
I agree with the primary point of the OP, that expanding in the game serves very little purpose that is not self-justifying. As long as I can grab enough gold mines, I dont really need cities for anything else. I can prowl the map with a stack of heroes blasting anything in my path, and research everything in the tech and spell trees that I want, with just a very few well-placed cities. The only other significant reason to expand is territory-denial to AIs you are not currently at war with. But that can also be accomplished with Greater Raise Land, sectioning off whole parts of the continent. The AI never tries to destroy these barriers, or move things by sea. Any inconvenient cities that I let slide past can be instantly destroyed with Earthquake, resulting in zero negative consequences.
A bit off topic here, but seriously, 1 mana for Earthquake, which can take out a metropolis and all its troops instantly?! Or if you happen to find an AI sovereign anywhere anytime, casting earthquake on it will kill him/her, and the entire faction, instantly. This is utterly ridiculous.
Back to the main point. So, unlike other 4x games, I do not find expansion in elemental fun or rewarding, but merely tedious. I recently tried a couple "large" maps, but found that the added land only raised the tedium by an order of magnitude.
I guess I see it as a lack of attention to "need." In other games like Anno the player "needs" to expand in order to gather certain resources that are themselves "needed and essential" to expanding your population in number, morale, and prosperity in order to win the game.
In Distant Worlds, new 4x space game, you needed to gather at least 10 luxury items from different planets to move your population up to different levels (there's over a 100 different resources on different planets & moons), thus pushing you out to explore & expand that universe to meet your population's "need".
In this game, you only really need people for armies, and even then you don't really need people if you have enough summoned & hired champs or capture enough enemy cities. I guess what the OP sees as "self-justifying" I see as "lacking need." If there was a real "need" to expand, then expansion would not be "self justifying."
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