[FEEDBACK] The setting and needless micro

Hound

Join Date 03/2008

+10

[FEEDBACK] The setting and needless micro

I dig the idea of a post-apocalyptic world that is barren. It gives an empire building game a clean start.

But in this post apocalyptic world the mood is oddly cheerful. Adventurous upbeat music is playing. There are cute little inns scattered about the map with happy people in them, with enough gold in their pockets to send you off to do menial tasks like killing rats. This is a generic fantasy setting and not the gloomy post-apocalyptic Mad Max world I envisioned. I'd like to see more refugee camps and makeshift forts and less pretty buildings.

My second pet peeve is the over the top micromanagement. This includes the RPG stats for Sovereigns, the decimal level up increments to said stats and the tedious city building. I think a feat based sovereign build would be more than sufficient. E.g. picking feats like Combat training, Strong and Hardy to make your Sovereign a powerful warrior. Or Arcane Scholar, Fire Mastery and Powerful to make a caster who burns things down in lots of creative ways but is vulnerable in melee. Feat of Pathfinding instead of putting points into Movement, picking Charismatic instead of having a charisma score etc..

As far as city building goes, I find it tedious to build all these numerous food producing things and housing. Having to actually place them on the map is just overkill and serves no purpose that I can see. The squares also make the cities look blocky and I think looking good is more important than getting to decide where your 7th garden is built exactly. Food production and Housing are basic needs for every city that should probably be abstracted. And I think a couple of upgrades for buildings is generally better than having 3 or more different buildings for the same resource.

For me at least the fun is about designing units, researching spells, using them in tactical battles and waging global magical war. In the beginning its fun to explore and fight with your Sovereign. But I find myself spending most of my time on the city grid, placing down more gardens and houses and checking population caps and food production numbers. It's a little boring.

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I posted this idea that came to my mind about the housing/garden issue on another thread.

Reading through the threads it seems like a lot of people echo my thoughts about the tedious housing issue. The best idea I've read so far is to make housing not count towards the tile limit. I would like to take this further. Here's my idea:

1) You don't place housing manually around the city, they are placed automatically when you decide to build houses.

2) Housing buildings aren't separated to different groups at all, you only have one single 'Build Housing' option. This option starts building more houses each turn at a rate relative to the level at which your housing techs are (a bit similar to the 'Wealth' button in Civilization). As in during the beginning when you build housing you increase the population cap by, say, 5 per turn. When you are able to build better housing buildings, you increase the cap by 20 a turn. Graphically the houses are scattered around your city center, but take no room from improvements. Once your population cap reaches the requirements for next city level, you are informed and can build something else. Of course you can stop building houses earlier as well, to slowly increase the cap. In addition to making building houses less tedious, this would be much more graphically pleasing as your cities grow larger. Graphically there's nothing to prevent a couple of huts and such be quite far (many tiles) from the city center, creating a much more organic look to the cities, while serving no gameplay purpose.

3) Food production is displayed in max supportable population, not food unit production. This is required to make the building method of point number 2 more intuitive. This also makes it easier for players to understand how much one unit of food is worth.

Actually instead of #3 my current feeling is that I would rather just get rid of food altogether. Have housing include food production, let the citizens grow their crops, after all you went through all the trouble to make the land fertile, they can at least do something themselves. Prestige and housing seems like enough work to grow a town, I want to focus more on the other city/kingdom stuff.

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Not making the houses count on the tile limit would be enough in my opinion. You would still have the stregic interest of where to put buildings (and blocking places)

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- I agree about souvereign: gaining 10 points each level and having each one only inscrease a decimal have no sense: such low inscrease are too small to matters, I would prefer having only a few points to use but that each one has a true value.

Yes, this is very starnge since all stats have decimal increase, even essence and constitution

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Quoting Peace Phoenix,

reply 38

The popups that keep telling me that city XXX finished building a hut are a PAIN. I have to click on them to get rid of that thing wasting space in a part of the screen, and then it moves me to the city.
Are you speaking about popup or about icons that appear on the right of the screen? Have you tried to right click on them? And on the bigger icons categorizing the smaller ones?

Right clicking does what I want. The bigger button's not much help.

Thanks for pointing it out.

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Tridus

Join Date 03/2008

+110

Couple of things... the decmial increases do make a difference. It's not like 0.5 strength doesn't do anything, it does. People like round numbers, but I don't see a big problem there.

Another idea to fix the housing issue is to cap the number of gardens in a city. Growing beyond that would require actual food resources, restoring some of the original point of the system again. Growth should be limited by how much food you can get, not how many gardens you can build in a city.

Without the need for garden spam, houses just become something you put in the city you want to grow (and direct more food to), rather then in an outpost you don't care much about. So I think that'd fix it.

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