I find it tedious to place buildings. The UI for it is a little clunky and it's sometimes hard to distinguish where you are placing the building, and the system feels gimmicky as you can help units move faster through your empire by snaking out the cities.
Even in my first real playthrough of the beta, I found myself just clickng the BUILD button and letting the game auto-place the buildings. This felt like I was losing out somehow for not micromanaging the placement, so in the end I just started to not like the whole system that much. Also sometimes even though I mean to place the building, I click the BUILD button by habit from all of the other 4x tbs games and it auto-places the building. Then it's a hassle to demolish the building and place it again.
I just don't see the big benefit of this building placement stuff. I know a lot of effort was spent on making all the building tiles, but I feel like the Civ way of having the whole city encompass just one tile is the best way to go.
One alternative I was thinking was enlargening the city as it levels up, so that level 2 cities take two tiles, level 3 cities three or four tiles and so on.
I've no idea if I'm in a tiny minority here or not, but at this moment this is how I feel about it. Maybe if the buildings were more meaningful than all the workshops and inns and whatnot that give tiny bonuses, I would not think the same way.
I personally don't care for sliders and would rather build my way to victory.
I for one like that cities grow bigger, I do enjoy this feature, but I agree that buildings are hard to distinquish. I do not want them to get rid of this system.
I think what they need to do is, to not penalize random placement. I already wrote one post how to change it, so players are not forced to make spider cities to be able reach certain resources etc... The only thing which they have to do is to eliminate disadvantages. After that, everyone can use auto placement if they want to. And that will simply leave us with nice looking and big cities.
I think big cities are nice to look at and you can easily tell if city is advanced or not, just from its size which is good. Things which they need to sort out is movement over the city, garrisoning and influence grow. If they will tweak this. You will simply be able to use autoplacement, which will reduce micro and clicking and still enjoy nice look at the cities.
They simply have to change it so, cities are not used for free movement and building new buldings should not affect which way the influence expands. It should expand like in CIV 4 with level of the city (or make different resource for it) and one square all arround. problem solved.
+1 for 1-tile-per-city-level, and an extra one for the 'wall' buildingwould give useful and efficient visual feedback as to how valuable a city isalso would support a system where the number of buildings placeable per level is limited. At the moment there's no point to city specialization outside of the level-up building choice [which is a cool feature]. You just end up building everything in every city, the only priority is the order or whether to build troops.In Civ4, the reasons you specialise your cities are:- Strong variation in what a city will contribute based on the resources in its big fat cross. It has 4 different locational resources (food, gold, production and health] over 21 tiles. FE has two over one tile. - Buildings are more expensive, and the opportunity cost is high - with some early-mid techs you can trade all of a city's production for research, gold or espionage points. Or build units. The units in FE aren't always strong enough.- Buildings in Civ4 frequently don't contribute anything automatic. Gold bonuses will be +25% instead of +3 - though there are exceptions.- National Wonders, things like this were in GalCiv, buildings you can only have one each in your empire and two different ones in any given city.If city specialization is what we want, you need mechanics like this. Do we want it?
I have three cities. They are big and personally crafted. I have one small settlement that is growing. I have around 10 outposts. The core game is not designed to have dozens of cities. They would all be at level one and therefore need no micro at all. If you need more resources, build up some outposts. I get a really good unit every two or three turns from my cities. That is more than enough to control my territory. I see no problem with placing buildings on this scale. Of course, once the autobuild function is up and running, you are free to just click the build button.
Moving to a Civ style one tile per city is just not going to happen at this point in development. It would make cities bland markers instead of awe inspiring monuments to my civilization. There are flaws with the current system, but they can be solved without such a nuclear option. Some people like building cities and others don't. I do. City building is an important part of the game. It can be somewhat ignored if you don't like it (i.e. raze all enemy cities and only use the outpost for pioneers), but you will have to at least have a few to be competitive.
The system needs to be fixed, not destroyed.
Actually its not just one tile, only game being clever and counting all relevant tiles bonus on each tile. So what the game does, it sums up 9 different squares and show you what bonus you get on that certain square. But its still 9 squares together. However, there are still only 2 resources. Thats true. One for influence would help alot.
I would like to see more building based on certain conditions. Like different Resources, Terrain etc. That way, every city would be at least bit different.
Maybe they need to make the prestige / maintenance hit huge for building additional cities, so even your second city would be a huge investment. Outposts should be the prime mechanism for gathering resources, though there ought to be negatives from having too many of these as well.
Outpost are the solution to city spam. I don't think making them cost alot is going to help anything. They only bring in a small amount of resources in the first place.
The prestige system is meant to stop city growth. After a few cities it becomes nigh impossible to level them. You really need to get some level 5 cities before expanding. That is IMO one of the smartest limits you can have on expansion.
While I agree that there's probably not much use for the city building apart from what cheese tactics and Aesthetical reasons, I would be sad if it was scrapped. I like building my cities and watching them grow.
I'm actually quite surprised, but happy that there are a lot of people voicing their opinion against the tile system. Everybody seems to at least agree that it needs some kind of improvement to be kept in.
I'm beginning to be a big supporter for the 1-tile-per-city-level idea.
I'll take your word on that for now
You know, maybe a compromise would be good to try. Although I lean towards the one square city myself, I could see maybe gaining a square for every level of city. You would place that one square where you wanted it. Still smaller than nine, but bigger than one, so you can influence towards resources. Don't actually place buildings inside literally, go Civ style with that.
Also, I guess we would need some type of building rule, so there isn't really just a snake city. i.e. A string of tiles all in a row towards a resource, although with only 5 max, maybe that wouldn't even be so bad. I guess some cities along lakes and rivers may build like that naturally anyway.
Well, just an idea, anyone feel free to kick it around a bit if you like.
It's fun to build cities. But player have no motive to form square cities. Maby there must be some bonuses for square cities, or some penalty for "snake" cities. OR, limit the number of places where i can build - then, each time when i create new building, i can choose only from 3 - 5 places (that places will be generated in order to limit city lenght)
Sorry I over reacted a bit. Long day and all. Still, it seems to tie into what we were discussing. But I followed your suggestion and started a thread: https://forums.elementalgame.com/415796
This conversation was had during the weekend so it might've slipped past the devs. Therefore I make on after-weekend bump, even though it's probably unnecessary.
I agree in finding it tedious, while I can see why people like it, I think it's an unneeded feature.
I do think someone the tax slider needs to be accessible from the main screen though. Otherwise I forget about it.
Ok I get the fact that it seems a bit pointless to place buildings (2 clicks rather than 1). But the travel could be explained by paved roads making units able to move faster. Wouldn't cities spread towards resources anyway?
As one other attempt to make this feature a bit more balanced while keeping it simple - how about just reducing the defensive bonus for long cities - you could probably work something out based on the length of the city wall. This would make peaceful internal cities just spread out along roads/towards resources, but border cities would be tightly packed together.
I agree with...
"placing them is quite fun until you realise that it doesn't make any difference"
they should take the new tile logic used when founding a city and expand it to the buildings as well.
ps: would also like to see a tooltip telling me what building is what from a mouseover on the world map.
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