I loved the way the cities sprawled in E:WoM, whilst I haven't got the beta yet (I am probably in the next batch) I would be very disappointed if it were dropped. Just from an aesthetic point of view, it looks amazing to see discover a sprawling city between a mountain range. A one tile city in comparison would just look a bit naff.

As for making it harder to mod, I agree to an extent, but the flip side is when it has been modded the results are far more stunning than a simple city tile mod would look.

I know my arguments are not based on gameplay, which makes them shallow, but honestly the uniqueness of the way cities behave in Elemental is to me a fundamental part of makes it stand out.

The largest problem, imho, is the sprawl and that you can enter it at any point. Perhaps we should only be able to enter the city in the middle tile. Or, if that is surrounded, one of the 3x3 tiles around the original tile. The other tiles would either be blocked completely from passing, or they'd just be "decoration", you can stand on them but that's it, it won't make you enter the town. Enemies attacking the city would be able to attack any tile though. Caravans would have to travel all the way to the core.

I think there is not a lot of interesting choices in level 1 and level 2 cities. It's mostly buildings that boost production in some manner. After that, and with some research, your options become much more interesting, and they're absolutely affected by the city's levelup bonuses. 

But at the end of the day, what does a city REALLY do? It has production. It produces tech, and taxes, and ZOC. It provides defensive bonuses to defenders, in various quantities. It can give bonuses to trained units. It provides a focal point for gathering world resources, and caravans. Also some buildings summon defenders. Edit: Cities also function as shops, with some items available from tech and others from improvements.  I think if we want to improve on what cities DO, we need to think of interesting ways to expand or improve on those functions, or come up with new ones.

To make the player not build everything in the game, the maintenance part of improvements needs to be tweaked. My logic is thus: if you can build everything, you will. If you are limited, you will only build what you really want. I would test something like 1 maintenance on all buildings, and 2-3 on those that already have maintenance.

Some ideas for new functions in cities:

- casting chambers and similar - improves spellcasting for stationed units, makes mana maintenance on stationed units half cost

- some sort of building that reduces wages for stationed units

- towers that increase line of sight around the city

- some sort of strategic military power, that allows you to attack approaching enemies at range @ la civ5

- buildings that reduce the appeal of the city to monsters and possibly AI. Ie, buildings that make a city look more powerful than it really is, or look LESS powerful than it is

- sieges, with a deeper upgrade system to city walls and defensive structures - perhaps you even get to design the tactical map yourself in a basic chess-like layout

- cities as event-producers or quest-producers or champion-attractors. Ie, having a city with an adventurer's inn gives a chance of random quests and champions appearing

edit2: city improvements that reduce the cost of gildar in the shop

Edit3: The point here is NOT to swamp the user with twenty more buildings that make you go SIGH, even more to place. These options would REPLACE current improvements. So instead of 8 buildings that increase food from grain, you have 2 or 3 and get something else from this list instead.

"cities as event-producers or quest-producers or champion-attractors. Ie, having a city with an adventurer's inn gives a chance of random quests and champions appearing"  - I really like this idea in general and would love for it to be added regardless of what else is done with the city system.

Imho, that's too drastic. I, too, enjoy the empire-building as it is in the game right now. I'd rather improve on it than throw it out. Fix the faults, keep the graphics.

Another option that I've seen come up in the past is simply making cities smaller. Right now, one tile consists of 2x2 citytiles. Some improvements take 1x1, and some take 2x2. The suggestion is to increase the number of citytiles each tile gives, so instead of 2x2 you get 3x3. What it means in practice is that you reduce the size of the city on the strategic map by more than half.

Edit: i wonder if such a solution could mean that it'd be possible to limit the city to only the 3x3 tiles around the core tile. Effectively you would have 8*9 citytiles = 72 citytiles. That should be enough, I think? E:wom vanilla without my mods had a cap of 50 and almost noone reached that, and there were plenty of repeatable buildings in E:wom.

Of course, there's the matter of having a river close by which will cause problems on an idea stage. I mean, it would make the tile unbuildable.

I didn't read through all of the posts, so I don't know if this was addressed, but the only advantage of "sprawl" that I figured out was enclosing your resources within the city walls. 

For instance, if there was a mine and a fruit grove close to one-another, I would build in-between them and build my structures towards both of them.  Once a structure is touching a resource, it then becomes encloed within the walls.  Thus, to destroy your resource, something would have to successfully sack your town.  I got so sick of wandering monsters (especially in regards to caravans--see that post), and it is a waste of resources to have to move army units to guard a resource.

I don't like the sprawl, muself, but that's the only good way I see to use it to your advantage.  I assume it's the same in FE.

I will jump in to defend the city building concept.  Regressing to the Civ "all-cities-are-one-tile" idea is a non-starter in my opinion.  The cities are beautiful things.

You don't need to go crazy (or throw a unique feature into the scrapbin) to fix the problem.  There are some really good ideas in this thread already.

I like the idea of penalizing cities for sprawl.  So the further from the city center the higher the maintenance.  (Can't find who suggested this, maybe I hallucinated that post)

ZehDon's idea: building harmony, where similar purpose buildings work better together.  Very cool, very feng shui.  (As long as there were UI hints when placing builds which tiles were beneficial and which were bad.)  It's also interesting because you could make subtle changes in the harmonies for the races.  Which would give cities built by different races a different look.

Heavenfall's idea: The 3x3 per square instead of 2x2 would probably help to keep the cities of a manageable size.  But at this point, I imagine such a change would require quite a bit of rewriting for the city-building/rendering code.  So maybe we're past that.

You should ask this its own thread.  Probably they did away with it because it didn't matter and they had better things to do with the space.

I would keep city building as it is and just fixed folowing:

- You have to manually garison units in the city. Only one group can be garrisoned there (or 9 units max, depending on research). If you take out your units they should appear on the same spot where you garrisoned them.

- Allow movement over the city. 

- Spread influence from city center. New building should not affect it. This way, you can make city which will be big, but you can have it just next to your  borders, which would make it easier to attack if someone declare war on you or from monsters. Also prevent you tapping resourcers. So people would not feel like they have to make spider cities.

- Reduce amount of improvements, make them more important. And maybe more situational based. Like more buildings which need river, sea, forest, different terrain or resources etc...so you would not build always the same buildings in the city.

(edit)

- Makes buildings upgradable (wanted to include it but forgot, next post reminded me it)

I like the idea of fewer, upgradable improvements and keeping cities small rather than sprawled across the map just so troops can travel a bit faster. Still doesn't make placing buildings more than an additional click as far as I gathered though.

That's just an awful idea. It adds a ton of micromanagement, the proposed balancing makes it either irrelevant or obligatory, and it forces you to plan every building in your city maybe hundreds of turns in advance. If you want maximum efficiency it will force you to create very oddly shaped cities, leaving gaps for buildings that you might unlock through research or leveling. Like Mtrixis said, we're not playing sim city here.

"I like the idea of fewer, upgradable improvements and keeping cities small rather than sprawled across the map just so troops can travel a bit faster. Still doesn't make placing buildings more than an additional click as far as I gathered though." -abomination5

There is an autobuild function that seems to be bugged in the .75 build. In WoM 1.4, we had it and it worked fine. With that working it would need no more than one click (the build button). When improving a building it would always just autobuild I think. No reason to click on the tile to build it since that is the only place it can go. 

Yeah, if I had a magic wand to change one thing about the game, it'd be the sprawling cities.  No offense to the devs, but I really, really hate it.  Like, really hate it.  I want 1-tile cities.  1-tile per city size is fine too.

And to top it off, I had assumed that clicking the Build button would have the game choose a suitable location for me.  It turned out that me moving the mouse cursor around on the left side of the screen where the improvements menu is resulted in the game thinking I wanted each improvement built over there.  As a result, over time I ended up with a long skinny city extending towards that side of the screen.  Grrr....

I honestly think its a shame that so much art and design time was spent on this feature, when it has literally no positive gameplay effects and plenty of negative ones. You can't even SEE the buildings with any clarity unless you zoom all the way in, which is pointless when managing a large empire.

In general, I'm in opposition to any change that would persist with the pointless building that exists now, or encourage _more_ city building micro. City micro becomes increasingly irritating the longer and larger a game gets - everyone knows how much fun it is to build up a new city from scratch in the mid-late game with dozens of improvements. Or capturing an enemy city that has a ton of useless structures built - right now there's no good way at all to remove those improvements, short of literally clicking on every single structure in the city, on the 3d map, to remove them.

edit: This has been true in pretty much every major 4x game ever for that matter. Even MoM suffered from this. Interestingly, Moo1 did *not*. One of its brilliant features was economic sliders that took seconds to adjust, allowing you to manage a huge empire with very little planet micro. Moo2 broke this by going to a civ-style building list, and made planet micro more irritating in large empires as a result.

I realize that the appeal here is the feeling of building 'your' empire up in a certain way, but the reality is that heavy micro in a game with many cities simply does not work well from a ui or gameplay standpoint - witness the amount of developer time coming up with automated governors or auto-build lists, all skirting the core problem that too much city development complexity is not desirable UNLESS you are restricted to a limited number of cities or that's the entire focus of the game.

ie, building up a complex city piece by piece? That's what the entire game of Anno or Sim City *is*. Doing so in a game with dozens of cities, many of which may be built up by an AI that isn't building cities according to your desires? Yeah, not so good.

Or, to put it another way - do you want to spend all your time placing buildings, or do you want to be managing your heroes, your armies, your research, your diplomacy, your exploration, your combat? There's too many other things going on in a game like this for a subjectively less fun task to be taking up time for no good reason (I'd argue objectively right now, unless you really get your jollies from uh, clicking 'place building')