I wonder how Las Vegas would exist in a local resource system. Talk about a poorly placed city.

No matter what system we use, there will be people who disagree.  

Re roads: the point of a game is to have fun. This isn't Sim fantasy civilization builder. It is a strategy game. Roads will be in Elemental but we want to stay away from the situation where players are feeling like they're a construction czar or something. 

Moreover, requiring the player to construct roads in order to tap into a global resource pool doesn't make the game more fun. It just adds an additional step that gets in the way of the general strategy (not to mention I could imagine the game becoming about destroying roads which is definitely not fun).

I can only imagine the fate of Sins of a Solar Empire if each planet system had to be "self sufficient" and players had to juggle the resources on a per planet basis to build things.

I don't find local resources (or local resources unless player jumps through hoops X, Y, Z) to be realistic or fun.

My personal opinion is that some people are thinking about scale when looking at the cloth map.

On the cloth map this:

might seem to be far away.

But in the actual graphics engine it looks like this:

And when you look at things like that, the idea that city A and city B can't share food or metal or what have you unless they build a road or something seems absurd.

Anyway, I've said my part on this.  

Really? Did I somehow miss the part where build times are completely eliminated and you can throw up 40 tiles worth of city and population in one turn?

As opposed to the traditional method of simply quick building all your improvements 1 per turn because you have a massive treasury.

Your city would still have to grow (i.e. get people to your city).  In the traditional TBS with local resources, players simply queue up several improvements that they can quick build with money without worrying where the resources came from.

I noticed that Elemental doesn't have a "instant-build with gold" option. That is a lot more realistic  than someone who can simply pay money and conjure some huge building or some mega unit?

Why is it OK for gold and research to be global and instantaneous but not iron or wood? I'm digging the new system because its consistent.

@Frogboy

what about an idea that rose up : organic roads.

They are created by the trade between cities. If two cities are close enough a roads starts to appear. First it's just a trail that shows where will be the roads, then as turns passes the roads become more and more visible. The only thing a player could do to change the way roads are built would be to add some kind of "postal relay" or something like that where the traders would prefer to go because that relay would provide some protection and food for saddle horses. So you could "influence" where roads are built, but not decide excatly where they pass.

Moreover roads would be built between towns of different nations, unless there at total war. The hundred-years war didn't prevent Great Britain and France to trade.

The last thing would be to flag some places as "dangerous", so roads would avoid that nasty forest filled with robbers. But .. if a caravan is destroyed somewhere, the game could automatically put that flag.

Everything would be behind the scene, and just logical things would appear : automatically creating roads, avoiding dangerous places, trying to connect safe places.

I really like the Global resources so far, and when the new road system is in and the seiges cutting off resources system is in im hoping it will be even better.

The good thing about the global resources is there's lots of options to add little simple systems here and there to make it more 'realistic'

There's plenty of beta to go yet.

looks like my post from before failed to submit 3rd now, global will be fine if a city is able to get access to ressours like in civ 4 they had roads and ports to be able to connect other citys to be able to use it,wouldn't make sesnse if you had another city far inland on another conteint that is able to use resources that had no logical way of getting there, magic would be a lame way to fix that but it would make sesne to build roads smartly or repair, would also be good if you were required to move ressouces that are not currecny when you where giving it to a freindly.

How would you get it to your ally if they are inland on another conteient and the enemy controls the entire coast, it would allow other nations to cut an enemy supply lines, which happens in most modern wars. it may seem not fun but it would allow you to think what trade lanes you need to keep safe as well as plan to enfore before you go to war with some one, islands of other nations are easier to take then the conteniet that they are based on, islands could sevrve as a key point to build up forces or a point to fortify in war if your enemy is coming from the sea.

you need a system that is fair and works as well as logical.

I want the pencil to draw the roads. If they give a strategic advantage (like faster unit movement) I would like to control their setup and design since that's part of the strategy for me.

For things like resource and trade sure let them be automatic, there's no choices being made, nothing strategic.

Which implies build in one turn lots of thing on a new founded city isn't really the same than

And how is it different from the Civ series with the quick buy feature when you have enough gold?

How global ressources make 0 sense while global currency make sense? After all, as soon as you found gold in a goody hut at one side of the map, you can use it for building an improvement in a city on the other side. Same for income generated by improvement.

Actually no, you can't instantly build a massive level 1 city, either. You can queue up .. about 8 buildings, but they're not built, and won't be for many turns - and even once you've built enough housing to advance to level 2, you still have to wait for population to accumulate at the normal rate. I don't mean to insult your intelligence, but your posts make it sound like you can't tell the difference between a completed building and one that's been queued to be built 20 turns later. All you have the turn you found a new city is a 1 population city that's starting to build a single building, and a list of things it plans to build in the future.

With your first city you: 1.) build a few buildings, 2.) wait for resources, 3.) build more, 4.) wait for population, 5.) advance to level 2. With a future city supported by resources from other cities, the only difference is you can skip step 2.. so it takes you 30 turns to hit level 2 instead of 35, I guess I don't see the big deal. Why shouldn't an outpost of a productive empire grow slightly faster because it's supported by gold/food/other resources shipped in from your capital? The other options are moving resources around manually, i.e. caravans (same exact effect in the end, it just increases micromanagement, what's the point?) - or making resources strictly local, no possibility for a metropolis to be supported by a nearby farming village, which is absurd and not the way real cities work at all. I vastly prefer global resources to either strictly local or local with the option to move resources (micromanagement hell), but if there's a better way to make local resources work out I'd honestly love to hear it.

the way germany doomed themselves was by attacking the ussr that was giving them most of the ressouces to build weapons and tanks as well oil and food, if we cannot stop an emeny from getting an economic lead then whats the point of even playing?

in starcraft you need the right balance between economy and your army as well as countering your oppents units and slowering their economy.

This is going to be off topic, but I can't resist.

In the years before 1920, artesian wells in the Las Vegas valley shot water over 6 feet in the air.  Early settlers had no problems with growing enough food for themselves and their livestock.  In the early years mining was an important industry (and actually still is active, although not as important as in years past), as well as services to travelers to southern California. (In a rational world, mining would be a more important industry than it currently is, since just to the south west of Las Vegas is the only source of rare earth elements in the U.S.; the mine was shut down in 2002, and since then all the rare earth elements have been imported from China).

In the 1930s the construction of Boulder Dam led to a big increase in population, but could have led to a great increase in the water supply, if not for the unfortunate (for Nevada) history of the negotiations for the water rights to the Colorado River. 

In 1922 seven states met to negotiate the rights to distribution of the water of the Colorado, but the representatives from Nevada were all from the Reno area, leaving Las Vegas unrepresented.  The story goes that the California representatives plied the Nevadans with whiskey until they were too drunk to participate, leaving Nevada with a pitiful share (4%) of the Colorado water.

The subsequent history of the growth of the gaming industry is perhaps better known.  I do not dispute that it left Las Vegas overwhelming dependent on the entertainment and hotel industries, with the ups and (currently severe) downs experienced by all tourist destinations (Hawaii is currently experiencing a similar decline in visitors), but is that qualitatively different from other one industry towns like, for example, Detroit?

In fact, I would argue that with the absence of an income tax, and a state government far more business friendly than its neighbors, Las Vegas is far better positioned to recover than a city like Detroit.

Getting back to Frogboy's point, while I think I've established that Las Vegas could have been a successful, self-sustaining small city absent outside support, there's no doubt that the real world "global resource" system, where food and other goods can be imported, was the only reason the city was able to grow as large as it has.

Note: technically, Las Vegas is not actually all that big.  The whole southern and southeastern part of the valley is the city of Henderson, where I live, and the "Strip" and a good part of the central and western part of the valley are in Clark County, but not in the city limits of Las Vegas.  Again, the growth of the Strip and the relative decline of the downtown Fremont Street businesses has a lot to do with the lower taxes and looser regulatory regime of the county versus the city.