SavageBananaMan34

Join Date 04/2006

Needed Reforms to Elemental's City and Empire Building

I made this post as a spinoff of psychoak's in an attempt to make something a bit less incendiary and radical (though his ideas are great, I don't think Stardock is going to bite this late in the process).

I think many posters on this board can agree city building needs to be improved - right now it just isn't very interesting and city specialization is difficult. Here are my proposed changes:

1. Require cities to have roads/sea routes to each other to share resources:

This is the most immersion breaking thing about city building. I should not be allowed to make a city out in the middle of nowhere by an extremely lucrative food resource to feed 3 production cities on the other side of the continent. It is absurd and this fix is a simple one that is pretty important if we want to make city specialization possible. Right now it's not so bad because all cities are the same anyway, but if we want specialized cities this problem will be increasingly annoying.

What we need is to have the player's civilization divided into "pockets," with each pocket having its own pool of resources. This is not that complicated at all and the screen for it on the kingdom report would be incredibly simple. Just list what cities are in what pocket of the empire and what resources are available to that pocket. At the absolute worst this screen would look as bad as a screen simply showing every city's statistics, but for any competent player an empire of 10 cities might only have 2-3 pockets. The HUD of the city could also show its corresponding pocket's available resources for extra simplicity. And when a city is selected those resource counts would just be displayed on the top of the screen like they are now.

2. Remove the hard cap on gardens completely:

I should be allowed to make as many gardens or mini-farms as I want - but this should be at the great expense of my city's industry. Change gardens to be even more inefficient if necessary so that if I want to take a city to tier 4 or 5 without a food resource I will not be able to build almost anything else in the city. Why restrict the player's freedom here? Food will still be super valuable, because it's what will let you turn your cities into mega factories of knowledge and war as opposed to a large community of inefficient farmers.

3. Make the cap for the number of any other non-"wonder" improvements a function of the city's level:

Players who want cities that can crank out military units at a fast pace should be allowed to make them, provided that they aren't wasting all their tiles on crappy gardens just to feed their empire. If I want a city with 5 workshops, for instance, I should be able to make one. However, to prevent just complete spam and absurdity, force the player to grow his city to make those extra improvements. So maybe 1-2 workshops per city level? So a level 5 city might be allowed a maximum of 10 workshops and 5 studies, for instance.

Remember, the number of tiles available to a city each level is vital to the fun-factor in city building. This is something that should be played with extensively.

I don't think this is an absurd amount to ask for and these changes are likely trivial implementations. But they would make empire building magnitudes more interesting, IMO.

Please add your own proposed changes to this thread!

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duijver

I agree completely with the first issue. It just doesn't make sense that upon building another city all resources are instantaneously and automatically shared. It makes a lot of sense that caravans would do that work for the state. This would also provide another level of strategic depth. Right now, so far as I can tell, caravans provide a bonus income, but nothing else (aside from the resulting road speed travel bonus). If a caravan route is intercepted by bandits, monsters, or another civilization; causing the player to be short on resources it becomes vastly more important. I think it would be even cooler if another civilization could intercept the resources being moved along the route (so long as there would be a way for the player holding the route to cut the travel on that road). That would add a little more to the potential loots as well.

I could foresee a problem with shard resources, as currently these resources are mined and then "magically" transported to the sovereign for his or her use. Perhaps these resources should be stored in a city until a sovereign or unit come to pick them up (and in the case of a mule, bring them to a unit that can make use of them).

To me, it seems more logical, and it expands the values of caravans, which are fairly passive as of yet. To date in the beta, I use the caravan units to create roads (I guess they get me a little more income, but I'm really not sure...) and forget about them. It's a bit shallow.

As an aside, if I had my way, the command post would not be mandatory for all units, certainly not non-military units. A command post, to me, suggests a more organized, evolved, military; not pioneers, caravans, or even weak military units. Perhaps a statistic cap - which I think would be quite simple - on units that don't require a command post. This could be translated up the technology tree to more advanced buildings - a barracks is required to create units with metal armor or units that have over a certain number of attack and/or defense.

I don't feel as strongly about the other issues.

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Frogboy

Join Date 03/2001

+2399

What you describe is what we had in beta 2. Users hated it.

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I was going to post this in psychoak's thread, but I like the idea of a thread with more a feeling of constructive criticism, not that he was going for anything more harsh.

There are things I like, and things I don't like about the current city building set up. In a real town where you had a fortress, a palace, and a bunch of civilian housing typically the city would have a sort of layered structure. In a city with a hedge wall and a fortress and a fort, instead of concurrent walls inside the city you've effectively just got the one defense. I'm not exactly asking for the ability to build Minas Tirith, but it would be a lot more interesting if you could define things like where these walls are placed. And, instead of just having the outer defenses being breached and the entire city collapsing, it would be nice if perhaps your city could hold off an attack for a few turns, allowing for some reinforcement. For example you could have the outer wall, inner wall, and fortress wall to breach to get into the palace. Troops could be placed in each section of the city, allowing for the sort of huge cities and sieges that I for one find really appealing. It's a little anticlimactic to spend most of the game next to another large kingdom, and when you finally invade they hardly have any troops stationed in their towns. They may send a stack out to try to counter attack after you declare war, but when it comes to capturing even the largest cities I've seen the AI build, I just essentially walk over them. Worse, as has been pointed out by others in the past, I don't even have to walk up to the city, I can attack an outbuilding and instead of pillaging the resource for Gildar I actually confront the soldiers of the town, and take it over from the nearby hostler's place, or the lumber mill.

I also think that concurrent walls in cities would give you really fun things to use your magic on in the combat mode. Master of Fire? Turn the wall to slag. Master of Ice? A ramp to the top of that wall would be nice, it's really slippery though, you'll incur a movement penalty, so you may want to summon a storm to keep ranged troops off the top of the wall. I suppose much of this comes down to how the combat plays out once we get our hands on it, but I think there are some interesting possibilities. Master of Earth? I'm sure that the right kind of quake could trim those walls down to size. Flying troops are always amusing, the master of air can peel the enemy from the walls with lightning and send his troops to the top to defend the siege ladders.

Of course if they're planning a more HOMM style system (for the turn based battles), then they're sort of missing out on something potentially awesome, but they're also not likely to be able to change their plans for the battle mechanics this late in the game. Giving us the ability to layer the city walls would also make for unique city battle maps, based on the actual city layout. The market district will probably provide a lot more room for troop movements than the slums, of course, a few well placed fire balls or flaming pitch lobbed in the city before hand could burn away some improvements and provide plenty of room to get your bearings before advancing on the inner sanctum.

Of course I don't know that any of that would really help the problem of the fully developed city, which then is a more or less finished project you can almost ignore for the rest of the game, outside of having random issues pop up in the city which you can correct a number of ways, I can't really see what would keep you coming back.

I really love the way that cities are currently sprawling affairs, covering vast amounts of the game map when they're high level. I do agree that there is something missing in the current set up. Perhaps they've got something in store that will surprise us. And in case they don't, lets try to think of minimal work changes that could yield the most fun in terms of gameplay.

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Haha, well I think you're wrong Frogboy but there's no use arguing about this. So we'll work with the system we have now. What do you say about my first point, though? It's still pretty annoying to have that global resource pool.

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The global resource pool is what he is talking about.

It's not "annoying" it is an abstraction borne of the fact that it used to be the way you describe but people didn't like it, and more importantly, it didn't work for what the game is supposed to be, and that is ultimately not an intricate simulation of production chains (like the Settlers or Anno series).

That kind of thing just adds too much micromanagement that gets in the way of what the game is really about.

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I think food should be less abstracted. Population should be based off food and housing. A larger housing allows a larger population, but population can grow beyond your food limit and that causes starvation (negative prestige).

Don't make houses cost food, it doesn't make sense and it's far too arbitrary since - once you've got to a high housing bonus - you can feed a few hundred people on two food.

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Look at this link: I made a reply I think would work on page 2. https://forums.elementalgame.com/386232

And global resources are just creepy. Faction treasury, even materials and metals can be stockpiled in a vault, but food can't. Global food should be taken out, maybe you can send a food caravan that has diminshed effect after distance. But a city on one side of the world should not feed one on the other.

EDIT: Forgot to add the link. Oops.

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I surely miss something. Perharps it is because english is a foreign language for me, but how are you supposed to specialize cities if they can't use food produced by others cities?

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For there is siege equipment in I would like to know if it will be possible to cut a city off the global ressource pool?

I think something like this should be possible.

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Sieges have little to do with food being local to a city or global. IRL food production centers like farms were outside the walls. So the food production could still go to the civ pool. The only thing is a besieged city doesn't have access to that pool.

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