OK.
Basing the entire economy of cities on special resource tiles makes these tiles less than special.
When I read that, once again, yet another resource would be seeded next to every starting position (a shard this time), I started to wonder... as time goes on and the game continues to be uprooted and re-planted, will there will be any room left for a city in the starter clump of these "special" or "rare" tiles?
One of the interesting things in the game is how the world is changed based on being in your area of influence. This suggests that the terrain is improving, becoming more fertile and productive, or whatever. Unfortunately, this has absolutely no affect on anything. It's just some pretty visual effect.
If you're going to add cool spells that let me wipe out huge areas of land using your touted deformable terrain engine, you need to make those changes worth a little more. If I destroy or screw up half of the land in your city's area of influence, I expect your production or economy to suffer. It got all pretty and green when you moved in, now it's all on fire. Both sides of this coin need a gameplay ramification.
This brings me to the title. The idea that everything is based on "special" tiles is, well, a bad one. I can only assume you did it to discourage city creep, but, well, it doesn't help. It's still most effective to spam cities. As long as there's shared pools of resources, each new city is another unit factory, and more of those means I get a bigger army faster, whether or not each city makes more than a gold per turn.
You keep throwing bandaids on the train wreck victim that is Elemental. A broken jaw, three compound fractures, and massive internal bleeding isn't going to go away with some gauze.
I understand you removed worker units at some point, which was nice to remove micromanagement tedium, but bad in that land essentially doesn't have inherent value. We can't improve empty squares, they're just... there. Only the special tiles matter, and that makes them necessities, not special rarities.
This is an expansion B suggestion.
Well Clame that this helps establish the bond of the sovereigner, and the bonding is what produces the sorce of resources.
Could go even further and if you lost the city with it, your area of control will contract slowly untill its only 1/2 of its maximum.
This was changed in a patch. Resources no longer use up space in a city.
Use proper grammar. It's "Sovereign" not "sovereigner", Kilsonx. Sorry, but bad grammar really bugs me.
I've apparently done a poor job expressing what I meant.
Territory doesn't seem to matter in this game. All influence seems to do is make the ground pretty and let you access special tiles.
The terrain around cities doesn't seem to matter. I expected that the ground turning pretty meant that I'd get more gold, or food, or whatever. You know, getting rewarded for "rebuilding" the broken world. I expected that dropping a city in a desert would make life harder than dropping it in a grassland, or in a forest. As far as i can tell, it doesn't.
I'd like terrain to matter.
In MoM, cities got certain bonuses for being built on certain kinds of terrain. You could screw up the surrounding terrain tiles through magic like Corruption or Raise Volcano. There were special tiles, and targeting them first was of course a good idea, but the buck didn't stop there. Given enough time, the entire area could be destroyed, severely crippling the city's usefulness.
In Age of Wonders, cities would gradually grow farmland around themselves which raised gold output. Certain spells could destroy that, especially Death and Fire-type, if I remember correctly. There were also combat bonuses on certain kinds of terrain, if I remember correctly. Undead, for instance, fought better on Wasteland and worse on Grassland.
In Alpha Centauri, citizens had to "work" the tiles around their city to generate resources. The tiles could be improved like Civilization, but they could also be messed up. Firing a missile full of xenofungus at an enemy city could render their terrain worthless, resulting in starvation and revolts. Raising and lowering terrain could change rain patterns, which screwed up, or improved, food production. You could even sink a city entirely if you continued to lower the terrain around it.
These are just some examples of how other 4X-es have handled terrain and its relationship with resource production.
Elemental is running into the Chekov's Gun problem. You're letting me change vast swathes of terrain through my magical influence, but it doesn't do anything. The land goes from broken to beautiful and my people are no better off for it.
This is why I don't like the current special-tiles-are-the-only-tiles-that-matter system. Every other tile is just dead, empty, worthless, boring space -- no matter how cool it looks.
In Age of Wonders: Shadow Magic, most races had terrain they "liked", giving a happiness bonus to the town and crops were more productive. Then some (Undead) had terrains they "disliked", which did the opposite. (Happiness prevented revolts and gave a chance each turn to finish the current item in the production queue early) Then not all races could farm all terrains (I think elves could not farm wastelands, but undead got a bonus in wastelands).
Didn't they add combat bonuses for what type of terrain you were in (for example, a Kingdom unit on an Empire terrain receives a 25% combat penalty)?
I think you've hit the nail on the head with why the surrounding landscape seems empty and boring: It's just *there* and we can't interact with it in any meaningful ways (except for arbitrary defense bonuses). Heck, there doesn't even have to be a huge graphical change as we can fill in parts with our imagination as you describe with your example of Civilization's use allocating labour to different tiles. To further elaborate, Civilization's case (the older ones), they just shows a little wheat or gold icon in the city window, but we can picture that there is a population of workers on the tile that are actively harvesting it and setting up shop and cities, dealing with global warming, radiation, etc... So long as we have a game mechanic that allows us to interact with the landscape, even on a basic level like you mention, would be a big step in making the world feel much more alive and dynamic.
Right now it plays like Galactic Civilizations with a fantasy setting dropped on top of it: It doesn't transfer over too well because Space is supposed to be empty with special resources to tap into, whereas land is something that we actively utilize for various purposes.
[e digicons]:grin:[/e] Bank robbers would leave all the gold and steal the bank instead.
I actually would like to start in a random area with no special tiles around me, and part of the journey to start a new city is to find that prime real estate to call home.
And 'old knowledge' would magically appear in that library?
You know, libraries are not solid metal or stone. Their primary point is to keep books. And books should be written by someone who already has the knowledge.
I kind of miss the days when you had to hunt around for a good spot. Resources were around, it was up to you to find a good spot to start. Yes, a la civ, but still a fun part...a part where decisions mattered. Too many resources IMO and still think it should cost essence to build a city...look a pioneer - with a city in a bag!
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