Gamespot has some new pictures of Fallen Enchantress up that show off the new city specialization mechanic and new cloth map art.
http://www.gamespot.com/elemental-fallen-enchantress/images/
It's nice to see art for cloth map wasteland trees added.
Looks nice! Tanks DsRaider!
I really like the new cloth map... like, a lot!
Capitar is in the third picture...
Sigh, I actually really liked the original WoM cloth map. It really reminded me of a 'lord of the rings' grand adventure.
This new map takes away from that.....but they're clearly going in this direction....and it doesn't hurt the mechanics of the game...so I suppose I'll get used to it.
I can't help but be very wary of how the city tile placement system seems intact even after all the talk how it serves no function and needs to go / made meaningful. Starting to get concerned.
At some point it was going to be a one-tile town with a separate town window (in my opinion the right way to go obviously), but now they seem to have hesitated and pulled their punches, settled for this weird system where you still have the tile placement but upgrade improvmenets so the city doesn't grow too much. Some kind of weird mish mash of a new system and the old one.
Seems like a compromise, and how exciting those usually are...
Kill your darlings.
That was announced/discussed a while ago.
Weren't the devs talking about having one main tile and four districts, ie. a small clump of tiles? I don't think they mentioned that there would still be buildings built in the same way as previously - I think it was one main tile and a district for each level after level 1, so 5 tiles total - a centre square plus four adjoining districts. It was also implied that they would be a separate city screen for each city too.
Oh for f*** sake, like StevenAus and LNQ I'm perplexed by this. The tile placement system was going to be replaced with improvements being build 'internally', and have one extra district, or maybe one per level. There were some people arguing against it, but imo their arguments never went much further than 'It's original' and 'I like snaking'. I remember Brad posting that in light of the opposition against the change (which wasn't that overwhelming iirc) he would have another look at it, but that's it.
Honestly, sticking with the tile placement building is an awful idea. Like LNQ said, it's a compromise, those hardly ever work out. Unless you somehow restrict where buildings can be placed and how that affects borders and interaction with other objects, you'll still have snaking. With Derek saying he never wants you to run out of stuff to build and assuming there won't be 37 upgrades for each building, you'll still have city sprawl.
I like the tile placement and therefore city growing like it is in Beta 3. I hope it will not get cut down more, compared to WoM.
Let's just play the new beta first, before going all 'rabble rabble rabble!"
Beer in the sky for this ^^
Sincerely~ Kongdej
We will be getting actual beer remember - essence IS beer, as Frogboy said!
Remember how well waiting for the next beta to deliver the fun turned out with WoM? Every single time my fears have proven true with the Elemental project, so nowdays I'm just gonna air out the concerns sooner rather than later. Especially when there seems to be obvious backtracking on the initial plan going on here.
I hope it's going to be super fun. We'll be wiser in a month or so I guess.
Derek has yet to disappoint. I have lots of issues with the current city building system but the Beta4 preview has laid most of them to rest. True cities may still be a little bit snakey but that's secondary to other issues like city specialization and balance in general. Derek has mentioned so many fixes for issues with city building in Beta4 that I am very very very confident it will be a good system.
There is no tie placement in beta 4. But cites do se more than 1 tile but far fewer than before. This is because we found it visually easier to tell what a given city was specializing on at a glance.
Wow, lots of hot tempers around the forums lately.
Derek's Beta 4 post covers this best. But essentially, improvements now replace each other. So you won't see a study + school + library + university + whatever. Instead, you upgrade your research building into a better one and that replace it.
In doing so, a player, at a glance, can just look at a city and tell how good that city is in research or money making or production or what have you. A city that would have used say 30 tiles in beta 3 would use around 4 in beta 4. And construction works the same as training a unit, you choose a building and press a button and it's added to the queue. There is no tile placement.
That sounds good! How are external resources handled? Do they get auto-razed like before? If cities are smaller, then it will be harder to encompass resources into your city itself, so there must be some other compensations.
I, for one, welcome the compromise. I didn't like *either* extreme.
When are we going to see the next beta? My mouth is watering over those screenshots...
Are these pics part of an article?
Outposts no longer get destroyed, they get captured. External resources get disabled when attacked but come back online after n turns (this is subject to internal play testing results).
There are a few short articles kicking around. Like this one. None of them are very long and won't really reveal anything new to the people on this forum.
Alright, the screenshots were a bit misleading then. I am less wary.
Thanks for bothering to clear that up, Brad. Sorry for the commotion.
The new cloth map looks pretty damn awesome. I see on the levelup page there is still no way to examine the city prior to picking your upgrade. That is a bit dis-heartening. Suppose that is still something that could be thrown in easily enough just before release though. *crosses fingers*
Can outposts be razed? (if the player doesn't like the sloppy placement of the AI)
ps. I really appriciate that you keep your eye on these threads and our humble comments.
+1 Frog
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