[Suggestion] City building (wall of text)

from Elemental Forums

Is the current city building model a place holder? It feels rather cumbersome, and a bit uninspired as it is.  I found myself just tossing down buildings without much thought other then, I want a bigger city, spam houses/estates! So I sat and pondered it for a bit and these are the thoughts my brain produced on the matter!


POPULATION


Food = optimal population
    Food production is based off how much agriculture you dedicate in your town as well as how much it recieves from other towns.  A town will only trade food if it has more then its population needs, and is traded to towns based on need.  If a town has a population lower then its optimal, there is a food surplus.  If a town has a population higher then the optimal, there is a food shortage and starvation becomes a concern.
Prestige = population growth
    Prestige increases based on what you have built in your city, what resources it has direct access to, and the overall statistics of your empire.  The more prestige you have, the more people want to live in your city.
Tiles = population capacity
    The number of tiles increases based off your prestige, the number of tiles will determine the level of the town. Each tile that becomes available increases the pop cap of your city and you designate which tiles get cleared and what their purpose will be.  The tiles purpose determines what improvements can be placed within, each tile can only have 1 improvement.
Civility = population happiness
    Civility represents how happy your population and is determined by a combination of what improvements you place in your city, your pretige, population issues and events in the world.  If a cities civility becomes unstable from lack of food, or other circumstances, it will impact the towns research, prestige, and economy negatively.  If a city has an abundance of food, the right improvements and other factors, civility will increase, impacting income, prestige, and research positively. Extremely low civility would represent rioting and rampant crime, and extremely high civility would represent an utopian city, where no citizen is left wanting and all are content.


TILES


As a town grows, the number of tiles available increases, a a player you can clear out the tiles you want to shape the city to your liking.  When you do this you also choose the type of tile it will be, which in turn determines how that tile affects your city.  You can redesignate a tiles purpose at anytime, but any improvements built on that tile will be lost when its changed unless its a universal improvement.  Each type of tile provides some sort of bonus to the town and does so with very little to no upkeep on its own.


Agriculture:
    Agricultural tiles represent the amount space set aside to be farmed for food.  As cities grow larger, they can replaces agriculture tiles with other uses as long as they can bring in enough food to feed the current population from surrounding settlements. If agricultural tiles are placed on fertile land and other related resources, the food produced is increased.
Community:
    Community tiles are where the people live, representing parks, town squares as well as homes.  These tiles affect civility and house improvements that often deal with increasing and maintaining civility.
Economic:
    Economic tiles are where the merchants, craftsmen, and artisans setup shop.  These tiles affect income and can house improvements such as smiths, merchant guilds, and inns.
Research:
    Research tiles are where universities, alchemists and mage towers are located.  These tiles affect the amount of research your citizens do, and can house specific improvements related to research and magic.
Resource:
    Resource tiles are built on a specific resource, including mines, lumbermills, and quarries.  The tiles provide the resource to the town that owns it and can house improvements that affect resource gathering.
Military:
    Military tiles are where training grounds, barracks and workshops are built.  These tiles relate to how quickly a town can develop citizens into military units and house improvements that affect the strengths/weaknesses of the units produced.


IMPROVEMENTS


Every tile can hold a single specialized improvement.  These improvements have specific advantages, bonuses and even penalties they apply to the town they are in.  Each improvement can only be built in a tile with the same type as the improvement.  Universal improvements can be built on any tile.  Some can only be built once per city, once within your empire, or even once within the entire world.  Others can be built as much as desired, limited only by the number of available corresponding tiles.  Almost all improvements require some sort of upkeep to maintain and most improvements will affect prestige in some way.

EX:

Dense Housing, inscreases population cap significantly, decreases civility marginally, low upkeep. Unlimited. These homes fit alot of people into limited space, which causes some unrest as neighbors step on each others toes.

Merchant Guild, increases income, prestige and caravan speeds significantly, high upkeep and consumes extra food. Limit 1 per city. The merchant guild will bring you wealth and attract people with the jobs it represents.  But the guild masters have rather expensive tastes and are gluttonous pigs!


FINAL THOUGHTS


Prestige determines population growth and capacity, the population determines how civil it is, and civility in turn affects prestige.  Untouched by the player, each city would naturally balance itself based on what it has within its boundries.  A smart player can manage his town to push it outside of that state of equalibrium, but will need to maintain the town with improvements and and a watchful eye, or else it will fall back to its natural balance point.  This makes not placing improvements as important a move as building them.


Not all the ideas represented here are very far from what is currently present in the mechanics, I essentially left food and prestige for instance with basicly the same purpose.  But the overall mechanics are a bit different in their relation to each other.  I'm looking at more of an abstract city layout system with improvements being just that.


Mind you I've written this at 2am, so it might not be as fleshed out as it could be.  So if something doesn't make sense, there is a hole in the idea I didn't see, or you have something to add, please do.  If it makes sense and you like it, please sing your praise. :)

edit: maybe this should go in the ideas forum? though it did spring from my time spent fiddling in game trying to break it...I guess its up to the SD guys.

4,267 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

POPULATION:Civility

I would expand this system a little bit, as it's basically the new thing to the Elemental's city system, thus it deserves more attention. I will thereby present a couple of my suggestions regarding this system. The first thing I would to is to scrap the whole prestige and rename it civility! If prestige is only to define the city growth, than we can safely put it into civility. There is no need to stick with the original game design if we are to change it so much. Now, to the point!

Here are a couple of things that make your citizens happy (increase the civility):

  • Surplus of food
    Even if you send the surplus of food to other cities, the citizens know that they always have more food, so in case of city's growth, they will have something to eat.
  • Bonus tiles
    Citizen should consider themselves lucky if the city is surrounded by number of bonus tiles (mines, plains, etc.).
  • Prestige buildings
    In contrary to what you proposed, I suggest that the happiness (Civility) is the effect of prestige. Therefore the prestige doesn't only increase the population increase, but also the Civility. This is very important, as it adds even more reasons to rise up the prestige. What I mean is that players can now forget about prestige, due to the fact that a few-turns-difference between max city size in case of low/high prestige is 'neglectable'. On the top of that, (IIRC) Frogboy stated that the population size will also have an impact on the city's growth.

    I would also add a few notes about civility buildings (CivB):
    • The only representatives of CivB shouldn't be better houses. There should be things like theaters, arenas, etc.
    • I would like the CivBs to be more than just Civility/prestige boosters. Every one of them should have some purpose. A theater rises the research ratio, as it rises the intellectual level of the citizens. Arenas, apart from providing a joyful slaughter for the public, should rise the experience of soldiers trained in the city. Betting houses should provide some additional income for the city. And so on...
    • Most of the buildings should have a prestige bonus attached to them. I see prestige as a level of development of a particular city. The more various buildings you have, the higher the prestige. Of course it would require some balancing; for example a theater would have a higher prestige bonus than a library, but the research bonus would be greater.
    • The better the building, the more resources you should spend to built/support it.
  • Positive spells
    There should be some 'positive spells' in the Sovereign's arsenal, which could temporarily increase the prestige in a city.
  • Techs
    In the civilization tree, there should be techs that would add a constant (preferably small) increase of prestige in every city.

Due to being lazy, I skip a list of negative factors impacting prestige, but you can imagine that a city without buildings, bonus tiles, and a huge army knocking at their gates wouldn't be a great place to live. Did I forget to mention that there is a blight spreading? Apart from that, there should be buildings that decrease (or only slightly increase) the prestige.

Ok, so when we covered how to increase your prestige, what are the pros of having high prestige?

  • Increased city growth (I don't think it should be 1:1, as it doesn't scale, imho. Something like 5:1 is more appropriate.)
  • Increased city income (A % bonus to gold income.)
  • Higher city's productivity (More food, iron, crystals to be used/sent to other cities.)
  • Bigger research boost
  • Troops trained faster (People are eager to train, fight and die for their empire/kingdom.)

Tiles

I would just stick to the system that is already in the game. You build a building and that's all. If you want to build something else, you have to first destroy or upgrade the previous building. For example: building any research type building occupied by any other research building will be named an upgrade (even if - in fact - it might be a downgrade). As an example let's take a university. If you put a university on clear tile you will have to spend 20 turns to build it, however, if you will build it on school you will only loose X turns. X = 0.2*O - Y. "O" stands for school build time, and "Y" stands for university original build time (20 turns in our case). The worst scenario is when you want to build a new building on a unrelated tile - university on a mine (if it will be ever possible). Now the time will be like: constant_time_to_demolish_a_building + original_build_time. Let's assume that the constant demolish time will be 5 turns.

This way players will not be able to switch city's output (research, money or military) in instant. It will take time & money to make the switch.

FINAL THOUGHTS

Population size = power of the city. More it can produce, more it can develop, more it will earn, more units can be trained, etc.

Civility = quality of your city. Better units it will train, it will give more money for every citizen, it will develop more per citizen, etc.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

hmm interesting thoughts red :)

I would just stick to the system that is already in the game. You build a building and that's all.
End of quote

Part of the reason behind having tiles and improvements seperated for me, was to make improvements more meaningful and something you need to consider thoughtfully since each improvement would have postive and negative effects on a city. For instance, a community tile, represents where people live more densely and spend their free time and day to day lives.  It would increase the population cap more then other tiles, and increase civility.  If you add the dense housing improvement for instance, then that tile increases the population cap more, but in turn negatively impacts your civility.  Where as if you placed a church improvement on that tile, civility would increase but income might be impacted as your citizens donate to the church (conceptually that money goes to improving the community and is how it raises civility).

In the end, all tiles would increase a cities population cap, because people would live there even if its mostly farm land, or theres an archery range.  You live where you work basicly, its just that each tile would provide a more specific function, and its improvement, if any, would enchance that function at a cost of some kind.

scrap the whole prestige and rename it civility!
End of quote

What you say has merit, however, I do disagree and feel that prestige should remain, and civility should be seperate.  The reason is that civility has nothing to really do with how impressive your city is, it can certainly be a factor, but it is much more.  Prestige should show how impressive your city is, attracting people to come and live there, with civility impacting that precieved prestige on a percentile basis.

For ex:

A city has 1000 prestige, it is impressive, but its civility is terrible, and in turn causes the precieved prestige of the town to be 500. Basicly the low civility lowers the towns prestige by 50% due to being an unpleasent place to live, if the civility goes up, the prestige of the town could go back to its true score.  Man, that place has everything, but becareful the citizens there will cut you for blinking funny!

A city has 100 prestige, its nothing special to look at, but its people have a utopian like community, and in turn the precieved prestige is infact 500.  Being so wonderful to live in, free of crime and strife, the high civility of the town increases its prestige by 500%! My home town is small, and doesnt have much to do, but everyone knows you and are like an extended family.

Both cities would have a prestige of 500, both would attract the same number of people (from prestige at least) but for entirely different reasons.

 

For me making the tiles more abstract, with specific improvements being a strategic choice feels and sounds better.  Spamming houses to get a bigger city just feels unnatural.  I'm just hoping that building and designing my cities becomes more then what is currently in place. And I feel that the condition of your populace should be an important concern.

Farms should be able to be built anywhere, and not just fertile or food resource tiles for instance.  If you want a grand metropolis in your empire, you'll need to create smaller farming towns around it to supply it with the food it needs to support such a large population.  This in turn would give opposing players the option of taking out the smaller cities to starve the metropolis making it easier to capture. You could also produce balanced self-sustained cities, which would make such tactics useless.  The trade off being that a balanced city simply couldnt grow as large and produce as much.

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