If you’re playing Fallen Enchantress, which is best?
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Point of fact, the research for each level is 1, 2, 4, 8, 16. Of course that is not really the bonus we are looking for from city level. We want better city specialization, not better research.
Regarding the flexibility of Essence- I believe it's actually a problem. Essence bring more than the other resources, and has the flexibility issue, with little to no cost. I do believe that Essence should see a slight nerf in this regard.
Bingo
This. Essence of 2 or 3 on a tile pretty much demands a city. Unless you are missing the relevant strategic enchants you can shape the city to your will regardless of the tiles grain and materials.
The mechanic is awesome, as is the flexibility. I don't advocate changing anything major, but this is something will definitely need some tweaking in Beta 5 for balance. Right now the flexibility of Essense trumps all.
I would think, that one of the important factors here would be to make grain matter. Maybe making it a multiplier for research, production, taxes, etc etc.
So a city of 500 population would have maybe 2.5 or 5 times the value for each 1 research and production (maybe that's too powerful). But that's the idea, so a city of 5,1,2 could effectively reach a considerably more valuable state than it does currently, also it would make it more realistic for a city like 0,5,3. would only be slightly more valuable production wise than a 5,1,2 city, but it would product much less research and much less taxes.
I think of the choices presented, the 3/3/2 tile.
I also think that when it comes to essence, could look at having more essence tiles and ways to get more essence. To mitigate the fact that everyone is screaming how huge it is vs not getting any at all. I also don't think there's anything wrong with the flexibility. Essence is one of my favorite features about FE since it started appearing.
Lords of the Realm had an excellent system where armies diminished the amount of food available to their local region, making it possible to starve an opponent as their lands fed your troops; which still require sustenance once trained.
Grain only matters in as much as city levels matter. Since city levels don't currently do enough, Grain doesn't do enough. Since we are apparently sticking with city level as the main benefit of population, it would be untoward to see any new game mechanics that don't follow this design goal. If you want to add multipliers to resources, they must come from city level. It's too late to turn back now.
It seems that most people think city level up bonuses need to be bigger and the buildings probably need beefing up too so I imagine we'll see some big changes in this area come beta 5
So they buffed the bonus slightly in .952? Nice, but not even close to enough.
In previous versions (0.92 and before) the population gave 0.1 production and research per person, so a 100 pop (level 2 city) had 10 bonus research and production.
It doesn't matter if the bonuses comes from the amount of people in the city or the level up process, but they need to come from somewhere in order for it to matter.
I would just like to point out that in the current balance, basing city progression on level-up is flawed. As many people stated, bringing a 3 grain city (which is quite low compared to most locations) to level 5 is not very hard. Assuming the game drags to late game, most of your cities will be level 5, and have enough population for level 6 and 7 were they implemented. Thus I believe that the population should be the base, and level up be a nice bonus (say, extra 20% to the population bonuses per level and a unique building).
3-3-2 all the way.
4-2-2 could work if you plan to have your capital a conclave.
rest are ctrl-N.
my vote was for max essence,food is nice, material better, have found in some of my games a 3 essence, and very definitely GRABBED and defended as hard as possible these locations, the 2 essence gets good defence also the one essence also kept, one sessence also defended reasonably well but 0 essence gets the scrying pool and light defences only just to tempt the monsters to attack it (but they never do any more).
harpo
Even more than that, there are enough faction/local food upgrades later on that even were city levels of vital importance, it's not hard for long to get even cities with inferior gain counts to level up, especially if you dedicate the essence to that role temporarily.
I might put level 5 at 1000 and level 4 at 700. I like the food numbers, but city levels are a little too easy to get everywhere.
Really? For some cities, even with 5 grain and all buildings, I can't get to Level 5 without essence.
You might be neglecting Towns then. Each one adds a ton of Food to all your cities.
Each town by itself, or the global food buildings in each town that take forever to build?
And yes I generally neglect towns, as I have no need for gold income, particularly not as much as they generate (you don't need many or any troops right now as it is, so no maintenance). I neglect fortresses, as their unit production bonuses are pathetic, and when my front expands, their defensive abilities are no longer needed. Conclaves are the best right now.
And if you spam only Conclaves, you get no level 5 cities. Seems rather balanced to me. But in regard to the other things, obviously I agree about Towns and Fortresses being less good. They need, well, they need alot of work.
Population could be modified to also include the number of units within a city's zone of control; or to be decreased upon the death of a unit instead of the training of one. This would intertwine city and army sizes, making large cities as necessary as productive ones. Just a couple ideas worth mentioning.
I absolutely love essence and the fun it adds to cities. I live in fear that it will be nerfed down to impotence. Of course I'm confliced because nerfing it hard is possibly the only logical step for Stardock to take because of how powerful it is.
Anyway I agree that essence is way more important than the other resources, with materials coming second (because while you can increase your hammers per material there are very few ways of increasing your number of materials) and grain coming third (because there are more ways of getting food).
So 3/3/2 it is.
I agree that essence is currently the dominating stat for cities. I would still argue that it would be the best stat for your starting location even if the exponential nature of it were re-worked to something less min/max-happy. But I like having a strong cash flow more than I like being able to pump out my next unit one turn faster. I can't say if it's better in the long run to keep a ledger in the black and hurry a few things, but I like knowing that if a random rampaging monster comes knocking on my door I can pump out a strong defender in 1 turn regardless of what else that city was doing.
-shrug- I like 4/2/2 as-is. But, hey, if the devs decide to make it mechanically stronger because other folks argue it should be, I'll take it.
They should really have population tied to pioneers some how, I think Elemental is the only strategy game I've played where the settler unit doesn't effect the city producing it
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