The use of essence in building large cities
or: how to build your fortress “Sauron style”
Elemental Forums
As of now, we don´t know how many city levels there will be or if the developers are considering some special options for “high level cities”.
But when I think about the Worlds of Middle-Earth or Westeros, one of the first things that come to my mind and which fascinates me the most about these Worlds, is how impressive and unique structures like Barad-Dur, Minas Tirith, the Eyrie or Harrenhall are. And I have to think about how much it would add to the world of Elemental if the player would have the option to build cities or fortresses that are similar in its status in the world. After all, as the developers mentioned time and again, Elemental is about building a fantasy world.
If you look at games like Civ4, Fall from Heaven 2 or the Total War series, when you’re nearing the endgame, all of the settlements become more or less the same: they all reach the highest level, they all have many of the same buildings in them and more or less the same population. The player, at some point, can afford the best defensive buildings for most of them. They all pretty much look and feel the same, and the best way to defend them is mostly the same. There’s not one city which particularly stands out.
From what i´ve heard and seen in the Beta, the way city improvements are build lets you individualise your city at least to some degree. But what if there could be at least a handful of cities per game that are truly different from the others? I think that would be great.
Of course, there’d need to be some sort of limitation, so that the player won’t be able to “upgrade” all of his cites like this. This is where essence would come in. I really dig the idea of essence as a finite resource that must be used carefully and which forces the player to choose between several options because he can’t afford all of them.
My idea is to take the “you have to use essence to start a city” concept one step further, and allow the player to use a rather large amount of his essence to “upgrade” one of his “end level” cities. One of these options could be to make the city just “bigger” by boosting your prestige, giving it more tiles to build upon and a higher population limit. To have a city like this having a lasting game play effect and to make the essence spending worthwhile the player could also get a boost in his diplomatic relations with other factions of his race, due to the fact that a city this big would become a cultural centre for this race.
Another idea would be to change your city into a giant fortress like Barad-Dur, one that would be nearly impenetrable due to its high walls, deep rift (remember the Barad-Dur from the movies?) and resistance to magic (no volcano’s to be cast upon), only to be conquered by brute force. A player which plays defensive could place this at the border of his kingdom to fend of host after host of enemy forces.
The “in world” logic behind the use of essence for these structures could be, that building a castle on the top of a mountain or to build a fortress that big wouldn’t be possible without the use of magic. Remember that Sauron used some of the One Rings power to build Barad-Dur.
These are only some examples of course, one could think of several different options to upgrade one of your cities with. I just used the above examples to sell the idea. Am I the only one who would think that a feature like this would enrich gameplay and further sell the idea that the player is playing in a living world?
Obviously you could make a city defensible through non-magical means, but the economical expense would be gigantic, and it still wouldn't be "as" good. I mean, flying units wouldn't have to worry about the walls and mountain paths ... just any anti-air towers you have in place.
I've been posting about that for months!... well, not really. I don't think I've mentioned it for at least a month, but still!