[0.95] Serious problem with new building system - you still want to reach a river / forest but have to rely on autoplacement

By LNQ on August 16, 2012 5:21:25 PM from

LNQ

Join Date 02/2006

+16

The new city building system has a massive flaw. I built my city two tiles away from both a forest and a river. The game still has Logging Camps / Docks that have forest / river prerequisites. You can build them if you have a building adjacent to a forest / river, but now since the game is in auto-placement mode, you're at the mercy of the AI tile placement.

Worst of all, I noticed that you you can actually game the system by putting a lot of buildings into the queue, and when one of the building gets placed to where you want, you cancel all the others.

I didn't test if putting units next to the city to block tiles affects the automatic tile placement. If it does it's even more cheesy.

I can't for the life of me understand why this tile placement thing has to stay in. You go through insane amounts of trouble to keep the system, and I don't understand why.

In advanced options you can toggle it to manual placement.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Oh, so the tile placement system isn't actually gone at all. Major, major disappointment. There's a HUGE incentive to use manual placement so this is not a working solution.

Successfully updated karma reason!

I use manual placement, you can't effectively snake anymore.

I do agree with your original point regarding needing to get near a river. Not sure the right solution for that.

Successfully updated karma reason!

irrigation (settlers & such?) or maybe a 'create river/stream',create pond/oasis, underground springs type spell

Successfully updated karma reason!

Manual should be default. It is/will be one if the first things people will change.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting LNQ,

reply 2

Oh, so the tile placement system isn't actually gone at all. Major, major disappointment. There's a HUGE incentive to use manual placement so this is not a working solution.

Just like with combat, you're welcome to 'autoresolve' your building placement for less efficient results. If you don't want to take the time, take the hit in efficiency. If they remove manual placement, then next they'll have to remove manual combat if they continue to proceed along those lines.

Successfully updated karma reason!

I built one improvement before looking for the manual button. I gave it a chance and then I gave it a toss. I am worried this gives an unfair advantage to the human since the AI is obviously using auto-placement. I would take away the manual option and update the placement AI to strive towards rivers and forests.

Successfully updated karma reason!

The problem I'm having on manual is that as soon as I click "build" it builds it where my cursor last was instead of then allowing me to click where I want it to go. The strange thing I don't think it was doing that earlier so that might be a bug. Is that happening for anybody else?

I'll see if I can reproduce the circumstances and if so I'll post a bug report.

EDIT: Disregard. The problem was between the keyboard and the chair.

Successfully updated karma reason!

I agree that allowing manual placement is too much of an exploit but also think the auto-placement is too much like a lucky dip.

Here's my solution:

If all placable tiles (each map square has the 2x2 tiles allowance) within a city are full, the system allows manual placement into another square. The new building takes 1 of the 4 tile spots in the new square so another three buildings are auto-placed before the next tile can be manually allocated.

That way you can still control the direction of growth of your city without ending up with the snakes.

Perhaps docks and other special resource tiles can be placed outside of the above restriction.

Successfully updated karma reason!

I do not want manual placement to be taken out. It is not an exploit. If you think it is DON'T USE IT. It really is that simple, but I have no problem with them fixing auto placement to make it better and leaving manual placement.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting BlackRainZ,

reply 11

I'm not sure why people keep using the 'just don't use it then' as a valid argument. I'm not having a go at you but something either works as designed or it doesn't. Simple as that. Given the choice to use manual placement or auto placement I'm not going to have the will-power to go with auto. Just being honest about that. Sure, sometimes having 'house rules' to make a game more challenging is the way to go but then the game isn't working as designed.

Players shouldn't have to punish themselves to make a game more challenging. The game design should cater for that for them.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Good and elegant solution that allows for both auto-placement and manual placement:

- Cities can only place tiles max 2 squares away from the hub
- You can place buildings into any of these tiles at the very start, no adjacency requirement
- Placed buildings are purely cosmetic; to attack the city you need to reach the hub tile

This way there is no need to snake out to rivers or forests, and there is no advantage / disadvantage of using auto-placement.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Could you just make it so as long as a forest or river passes through your influence region, the dock or lumber mill just gets created on/near those tiles? Why does there need to be a city hub adjacency requirement for those improvements?

Successfully updated karma reason!

That wouldn't make sense; you could potentially build a dock 10 squares away from the city.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting LNQ,

reply 15

That wouldn't make sense; you could potentially build a dock 10 squares away from the city.

You mean like your mines, shards, and food resources???

I think this is the solution as well. Treat rivers and forests like resources. If you want access, you should expand for it. Once it is in your zone of control, you can build it. But it has to be protected like your other resources that are outside the city walls.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting Kantok,

reply 16

Quoting LNQ, reply 15That wouldn't make sense; you could potentially build a dock 10 squares away from the city.

You mean like your mines, shards, and food resources???

I think this is the solution as well. Treat rivers and forests like resources. If you want access, you should expand for it. Once it is in your zone of control, you can build it. But it has to be protected like your other resources that are outside the city walls.

The Athenians had to build a really long wall (a few miles I believe) to connect the city to their docks, and they were a naval empire. If rivers were resources, then you could potentially do this with outposts as well, but could be limited by the devs if that weren't desirable.

Successfully updated karma reason!

In my Rivermod I treated rivers like world resources - each river has a "river with bedrock" that is particularly well suited to build on. Every other part of the river can't be built on.

For it to work with the way rivers are implemented right now, I think those world resources would need to have a smaller effect the farther away they are from their connected city.

Successfully updated karma reason!

I like the idea of rivers having resources that you build docks on.

"Maintenance: +1 per squares from nearest city (max: X) - Generates +Y gildar per turn" or some such.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting LNQ,

reply 13

Good and elegant solution that allows for both auto-placement and manual placement:

- Cities can only place tiles max 2 squares away from the hub
- You can place buildings into any of these tiles at the very start, no adjacency requirement
- Placed buildings are purely cosmetic; to attack the city you need to reach the hub tile

This way there is no need to snake out to rivers or forests, and there is no advantage / disadvantage of using auto-placement.

I think that is a very good solution and it should reduce the size of the cities, too.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting Frogboy,

reply 3

I use manual placement, you can't effectively snake anymore.

I do agree with your original point regarding needing to get near a river. Not sure the right solution for that.

Sounds really good your thinking about it, my advice would at least do river and forest buildings less potent, then of course remove some of the forest-removing stuff (Meaby a lvl1 earth spell to plant forests?, or water/life spell)

Can include a water spell to bash up new rivers? or soak the terrain in more water to might meaby crack some water up, etc.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Successfully updated karma reason!

I vote for being able to build forest/river buildings that are not attached to the city, but are within the city's natural ZoC. You still make them from the city screen and the buildings appear on the map, but they're not destroyable like resources. Seems simple enough to me. Plus it would give a little more visual pop to cities by spreading them out, rather than having everything clumped together in a square.

Successfully updated karma reason!

I don't think the "city must be next to river for docks" argument to be valid. New York's docks are not in Manhattan, but those docks are associated with that city.

Make it so that if the river or forest is in the ZOC of the city, you can build the special resource (docks or lumber mills). No snaking, no need for manual placement. Just get away from the whole placement thing altogether; it's a silly mechanic at this point, serving no purpose. Buildable land is precious enough that less than half your cities will be near a river or harvestable forest anyway.

Successfully updated karma reason!

Quoting Das123,

reply 12

Quoting BlackRainZ, reply 11I do not want manual placement to be taken out. It is not an exploit. If you think it is DON'T USE IT. It really is that simple, but I have no problem with them fixing auto placement to make it better and leaving manual placement.

I'm not sure why people keep using the 'just don't use it then' as a valid argument. I'm not having a go at you but something either works as designed or it doesn't. Simple as that. Given the choice to use manual placement or auto placement I'm not going to have the will-power to go with auto. Just being honest about that. Sure, sometimes having 'house rules' to make a game more challenging is the way to go but then the game isn't working as designed.

Players shouldn't have to punish themselves to make a game more challenging. The game design should cater for that for them.

Similarly, as someone who likes being able to place my buildings, I don't see why "it's not challenging enough" is any more valid. If the game is not challenging enough, then they should increase the general difficulty or improve the AI. Don't strip features out of the game that some people actually want just because some people don't want to have to choose not to use it.

I mean a maintenance system that creates incentives to build consicely is more logical, but honestly I'm rather annoyed with the plethora of games that simply use purposeful incentives against growth to compensate for an AI that doesn't know how to grow intelligently (cough, Civ 5, cough). I've found a good bit of pleasure in having a city curve around a mountain or follow a river, it looks natural and more interesting than all circular cities everywhere. I like my empires to be epic and have epic cities, thank you very much.

Successfully updated karma reason!