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've always felt this way, myself.
In addition to what Sir_Linque said, having a lot of really sprawling cities on a map makes the game world feel a lot smaller, too. Which I'm sure doesn't matter for a lot of people, but it's something that I can't help but notice.
This would be a pretty big change at this point but I think I agree. The whole your-units-move-faster-in-your-cities thing encourages ugly city sprawl.
I like the building placement option. This could be remedied with an options screen check box. Have auto place buildings an option.
I suppose it all depends on how crowded a map will get over time. If cities are covering 50% of the map, something is probably wrong. I haven't played very much of Elemental or Fallen Enchantress yet so I'll refrain from posting until I know how it works in practice.
Oh, I don't know... probably only a window to view the buildings in the city and a button to demolish them, right? It's not like they add anything to the gameplay.
I think cities should take up no more than the 9 tiles we gain resources from. Improvements should build up not out.
I'm with Sir_Linque and LightofAbraxas on this one. Even 9 tiles is way too big imo, but if only one or two cities got that big in a long game I could live with it I guess.
They are not going to change the building system. I doubt it would even be possible for them to do it with the way the game engine was developed. At least discuss things which are plausible.
Yes, the sprawling, snakey stuff feels gamey. I would agree with making all cities one square, or only bigger cities being more than one square.
May just need two rings. The current one for territory and a smaller one for building range.
Auto placement for buildings yay
Snake city sprawl map engulfers nay
Limit city size to the nine tiles yay
City buildings up not out yay
I wouldn't mind that too but I doubt it will happen
They said in the prebeta journal that they specifically want to change the improvements. While the building system is probably set, the 9 tile limit with more meaningful improvements is a good step towards a better system.
I can think of only three practical reasons to micro building placement:
Can anyone think of others?
I remember rotating buildings in EWOM and trying to make aesthetically pleasing cities. A few built around hills and mountains with key buildings placed in certain locations made for some really cool 3d zoomed in visuals. Unfortunately this was the exception and not the rule.
Thus, I would like to argue to maintain placement of buildings because I think it's a cool feature but I struggle to find valid reasons to do so.
Wasn't this argued in WoM, too?
Regardless, I agree with the sentiment that building placement really doesn't serve a purpose except to encourage the creation of snake cities to grab resources. I'd rather have a Total War system where a city is one square and everything you build goes into that one square. As cities level-up, one square perhaps should be allowed to become two squares, etc. (seems logical). This new system would eliminate snake cities, while making the visual distinction between a level 1 city versus a, say, level 5 city be immediately apparent.
I put alot of thought into my city design, but I would gladly give them up in favor of a tighter design scheme. Autobuild should happen automatically and be intelligent, but placing the building is not an option that needs to be specifically turned off. I would like to know more about what the devs are thinking in this respect.
I can see both sides of the coin here. I enjoy city building, but in EWoM I would just build out towards the resources I needed to engulf, then would build out from the city center to create a 'flailing starfish' looking, radial blob-like amalgam.
The 9 tile limit is a good idea, but imo it would still be interesting to place buildings where you want them.
I still think having buildings upgrade, which require leaving space for those buildings to expand, or building add-ons if you prefer, are the way to go if they want to add depth and strategy to city-building.
I've mentioned this in another thread, however I think all that's needed is location bonuses for buildings, so that placement has some inherent strategy to it and requires some thought. Instead of removing the concept, make it better.
So, for example, buildings are given a type - for example:
When two buildings of the same type are placed adjacent to one another, they receive a small maintenance decrease or small bonus to whatever effect they offer the city. When two buildings of differing types are placed adjacent to one another, they have a negative impact.
So, placing a Civilian Building next to another Civilian Building means both buildings pay 5% less maintenance. However, placing a Military building next to the first Civilian Building increases the maintenance cost of the Civilian building by 5% (to an adjusted total of 0% difference) and the Military Building now pays an additional 5% more maintenance.
The benefit is small enough that it's not worth dedicating hours to, however large enough that it could add up across a city.
For convenience purposes, when placing a Building the map should shift to an over head view and all Buildings colour coded to represent their type - showing maintenance adjustments on them - to speed up the process (Don't place Red buildings next to Blue buildings, etc.).
Thoughts?
I don't want to play sim city with building placement.
The entire system feels like the remnant of a design goal they had with WoM, which was admirable - to make each city unique.
But that didn't happen, and we're left with a completely pointless placement system that has no positive gameplay effects, and several negative ones (takes time for no reason, the weirdness of teleporting units through a long city).
They did have autoplacement in WoM if I remember right, no idea why they removed it here. I don't care what else they do with the placement system as long as I can ignore it while its not a gameplay feature, as it is now - simply an aesthetic UI issue that feels cludgy.
I agree with ZehDon and would like to see the building placement stay but with something added to it to make it worthwhile. The buildings themselves really look nice and placing them is quite fun until you realise that it doesn't make any difference.
Another suggestion to stop snake cities (or at least make them a choice not a necessity) would be to increase the maintenance cost of cites that have too large an area per building (by this i mean the overall area of the city itself) - thereby giving an incentive to build in a circle but still making the snake an option if you really want to do it.
Yes - increase the maintenance of a building based on distance from the city hub. I think something like this is implementable without completely changing the city-building mechanic. It is also simple and fairly intuitive, and will help reduce city sprawl and snakiness.
Edit: And maybe building your city a certain way can bring about certain new city improvements or champion skills (don't have any absolute ideas here, just throwing it out there.)
If they keep building placement it should be made more obvious that you're in "place building mode".
Hihglight the building maybe and flash a message across the screen or zoom in on the city.
Also when you have city icons turned on it's quite hard to place buildings because the city icon blocks a big part of the placement area. Would be great if the city icon was temporarily removed during building placement.
They're discussing the camera thing now. So, when you go into Build Mode the camera swaps to an overhead view of the city.
Yeah, I agree. The snaky cities can be ugly, and have strange gamey properties. Even if you aren't purposely manipulating them to fast-travel, they make it so you don't know how many moves it takes to go from point A to point B (not a great feature in a strategy game). If you aren't manipulating them to fast travel or block a pass, then it's a pointless feature.
sums it up quite nicely, lol
"placing them is quite fun until you realise that it doesn't make any difference"
I kindof agree on this one... Make it like Civ 4 where the improvement is automatically placed as it doesn't really matter where it goes. It's probably a holdover from galciv. If you're going to keep the same system, make it so there's a reason for placing a building in certain places (like a bonus for one building being next another).
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