My impressions of building a city in the Beta 1G

I had a similar experience although for me a farm and orchard was insufficient food to get me to the max city level...

I agree. Too much housing and farming. It's not really fun to put together a city that's nothing but farms and housing. I just don't get it really.

Recognizing that this is a beta and the whole process of city building could change substantially later on:

Glad I'm not the only one who felt that way. The city building process still rubs me the wrong way. The "five tiers" of cities feels just a bit too simple, with every city feeling like it was mostly a duplicate of the last one I built: mostly houses and one or two specialization tiles.

There was no variability to them: either they were or were not able to max out, and no matter how centuries passed (in game turns) once they hit their respective limit, that was it. They stopped growing, became stagnant, and effectively had only one purpose after that: a fixed resource that produces x number of units a turn. While new technologies might create new buildings, the only reason to visit the city editor after it hits the max growth point would be to demolish an old building and build the better one in its place.

Farming can be enhanced forever (infinite tech) So the only real problem is the housing one. At the moment there isn't really enough ways to get enough houses. Appartments take too much place for too little population inside.

But devs talked about battles with 10 000 men. And 10 000 need to come from a city. So there will be ways to get a 20 000 or 30 000 population city.

It seems like there's a tier or two of housing missing from research right now. You start with huts, then houses, and go from there. But at the higher settlement levels there doesn't seem to be anything after apartments. I'm sure that'll get fixed.

They might not all be from the same city, but they're also not coming from your 5 cities of 500 people each.  That is, any forces you marshal should always be proportional to your population. So far, Elemental handles this with unit wages and (I believe) by taking a unit from your population for each unit trained.  So his point is good: if we're going to have armies of such a size, then the city populations need to be fine tuned to make that reasonable.

Your troops don't die of old age. The turns continue to pass and you can keep on recruiting troops from your cities that keep growing population as long as they have room from gowth in the city...

I'm not sure what you're championing here. Should your mobilized military forces possibly be several times larger than your entire settled community?  That doesn't really pass the sniff test, does it?  Who would feed and pay the soldiers? Fortunately it's already taken care of in Elemental (yes, it may change) by the unit wages, as I mentioned.

What i'm saying is that each soldier comes from a city.

If you can't grow your cities up to 1000 citizens then you'll only be able to train units with 500 soldiers.

If you train a unit, wait citizens to replenish, train a unit etc.. it will take forever.

And huge army need maintenance. If you don't have a strong economy you won't be able to maintain a 10 000 soldiers army.

Well said.

This thread is only an analysis of the current 0295 build, and how I felt about it. I hope that cataloging my experience is valuable to the developers as feedback.

I'll discuss some points you raised, separate of how I felt the system is coming along.

The infinite tech issue could be a good reason why farms don't matter, but I have a few reservations about it. Your starting cities and the intitial to mid-game cities currently require 2 (and only 2) food tiles. From there, you need to do about three research levels deep and you have access to the last city level. This means that as of 0295 the only place where you will hit max level with a city is where there are 2+ food tiles.

It might be possible that with enough late game tech, you could get to the point where you can have a max level city on one tile, but the "future tech" gets exponentially further away. Whether you hit the real cap of research (to the point where tech is always 200+ turns away) before getting to the point where 1 fertile land could support a max city is something I didn't test. In either case, I don't like the outcome: either you get city-spam on every fertile tile after hitting the tech point, or cities remain locked down to locations that can hit two fertile spots and everything else is outposts, neither of which sit well with me. The current farming system is still an issue to me personally no matter whether the tech can give you more or less farms.

This comment I wanted to discuss a bit as well. As it currently stands as of 0295, city populations grow so fast that "losing people" is basically meaningless. The longest part of creating a 500 strong army is not waiting for the population to grow, it's waiting for the production to finish. Once in the field, they do not require food resources and basically serve as a a "free" population group that does not die of old age and requires no upkeep beyond that of gold.

Elemental would need to add multiple kinds of upkeep (food and people) to each large sized army in order for them to impact the cities they are stationed out of, and tweak the population growth substantially. They can do that but they haven't done it yet.

An important consideration: If they did do that, it would raise the question of what to do about single-troop units. Should they cost food? 1 food? If they cost 1 food, should 500 people troops cost 500 food? (that's more than a city can sustain.) Should they cost a fraction of one food?

What about people? How many people should single-troop units cost per turn? Should they be 1 per turn? (meaning a standing army of five hundred would be a constant 500 loss on the city upkeeping it) Or 1 per X turn? How would this cost integrate into a city? Would all the fractions be totalled up? If you built a hundred 1 troop units, where would the UI tabulate the cost for the city?

I'm not arguing against having troops come from cities, or having them cost maintenance, in fact I love both of those mechanics. I'm just raising some questions about how to do it in the game, because it's complicated.

All those conerns are numbers related, and will surely be tweaked before the final release. The only "gameplay" problem is that units don't die of old age. and so you could get more and more and more people in your empire by buying units and letting your cities refill. That's a weird behavior, but it is encouraged by the game. Maintenance will be a good way to prevent this, but there's techs to hamper that.

A hard way to prevent that would be to let the soldiers used be in the total population of the city.

500 pop ? You create a unit of 250 pop ? then your pop will still remain 500, but it would be displayed like that : 500 (250 soldiers) So you could only build a new unit if the city has new units. And the food maintenance would be the food maintenance of the city.

One has to assume the 5 tier system is in place to actually curb the whole 1 humongous City build process, from which vast hordes of troops would spill out of to defend itself or rampage across the land.

Seeing as the Huts currently auto upgrade to house, it seems logical, and obviously not activated at this point, that House would Auto upgrade to Apartments thus keeping the growth alive and preventing the stagnant factor you mention.

Palaces, and the higher tier buildings shouldn't provide more Pop as they are built for other reasons. Peasants don't live in Palaces, they work in Palaces. The few, the rich, the don't die yet types do.

And let's not overlook the Prestige factor a City will have. I would assume (I know, I know) that many of the sundry buldings, those beyond the Army building ones, Taverns, Libraries, Schools etc. will all contribute to growth and Pop cap increases via that mechanic.

Oh and I meant to ask. What was the Max. Pop of a Level 5 City? I have not bothered to attempt that yet...

It's still early in the development cycle, but I hope the final version is tuned so that magic and battles are the focus of the mid and late game stages, and not city squares, farming, and housing. In the early stages these things are important, and agree with that as a focus of effort in your strategy.  But, it would be nice if there is an Advisor to automatically build housing and farming as needed, once you get to a certain number of people/buildings/battles/magic to manage. 

I also don't quite understand limiting the placement of squares of a city so closely.  Use the financial or resource limitations more than the space limitations--financial makes sense.  If someone builds a house three hexes away from city limits, it would be harder to defend, but it seems illogical to need to destroy houses to build rental buildings; just build the rental buildings elsewhere.

Finally, I don't quite understand the limitation that you must build a city close to a shard/orchard/mine to harvest a shard or an orchard.  Maybe it's a required game mechanic, but quarries and orchards and etc. are often outside a city.

These are probably concerns that will be addressed eventually, but kind of hard to look past in the current version.

House --> apartment can't be automatic, they don't use the same surface : a house = 1 tile, an apartment = 4 tiles.

That's how it is in 0295, and part of my complaint about the system, because I spent most of tier 4 demolishing houses and building apartments. Felt like busy-makework.

Hmm.

Hovel=10 people (size 1)

Hut = 20 people (size 2)

Cabin = 30 people (size 3)

House = 40 people (size 4)

Duplex= 50 people (size 5)

Apartment (4 squares) = 300 people (size 4) -> two story apartment

Grand Apartment (4 squares) = 600 people (size 5) -> four story apartment

I like that idea.

It would force you to balance, high-density, low cost, low income producing housing districts, versus low-density, higher cost, higher income producing areas.

To further expand on the idea, the unit type(s) from (proportionally) "richer" cities  could be different from the "poorer" cities, e.g. richville produces a few cavalier(knight) units while poorville produces a lot of pikemen or swordsmen units.