Hound Hound

[FEEDBACK] The setting and needless micro

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[FEEDBACK] The setting and needless micro

from Elemental Forums

I dig the idea of a post-apocalyptic world that is barren. It gives an empire building game a clean start.

But in this post apocalyptic world the mood is oddly cheerful. Adventurous upbeat music is playing. There are cute little inns scattered about the map with happy people in them, with enough gold in their pockets to send you off to do menial tasks like killing rats. This is a generic fantasy setting and not the gloomy post-apocalyptic Mad Max world I envisioned. I'd like to see more refugee camps and makeshift forts and less pretty buildings.

My second pet peeve is the over the top micromanagement. This includes the RPG stats for Sovereigns, the decimal level up increments to said stats and the tedious city building. I think a feat based sovereign build would be more than sufficient. E.g. picking feats like Combat training, Strong and Hardy to make your Sovereign a powerful warrior. Or Arcane Scholar, Fire Mastery and Powerful to make a caster who burns things down in lots of creative ways but is vulnerable in melee. Feat of Pathfinding instead of putting points into Movement, picking Charismatic instead of having a charisma score etc..

As far as city building goes, I find it tedious to build all these numerous food producing things and housing. Having to actually place them on the map is just overkill and serves no purpose that I can see. The squares also make the cities look blocky and I think looking good is more important than getting to decide where your 7th garden is built exactly. Food production and Housing are basic needs for every city that should probably be abstracted. And I think a couple of upgrades for buildings is generally better than having 3 or more different buildings for the same resource.

For me at least the fun is about designing units, researching spells, using them in tactical battles and waging global magical war. In the beginning its fun to explore and fight with your Sovereign. But I find myself spending most of my time on the city grid, placing down more gardens and houses and checking population caps and food production numbers. It's a little boring.

8,702 views 55 replies
Reply #26 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Hound, reply 23

Quoting Sir_Linque, reply 17


Quoting SpartanFry,
reply 15

Having random encounters where a building becomes unique would be pretty badass, the oldest school +2 research points and +2 prestige... Or some cool stuff that would make a few buildings unique would add a nice touch.  


I love this idea. Have random events that make some buildings in the cities special. The effect doesn't have to be anything superb, but to add flavor. "The annual festivities at your market become better known around the world - now the market provides +1 prestige in addition to whatever it provided before."


This had me thinking that it would be cool if we had ruins of destroyed cities on the map to explore with random rewards or hazards. Finding lost knowledge, unearthing some ancient artifact of power or discovering a statue of an old king that would give a new city a prestige bonus... or unleashing a horde of vengeful spirits.
End of Hound's quote

 

Does elemental have artifacts? In Sins artifacts were like crack to me.

I really hope that there will be artifacts around giving you some nice boosts.

Reply #27 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Sir_Linque, reply 22
Placing huts and gardens is interesting in some cases from a tactical perspective, but the vast majority of the time you just spam them away. After all it needs to be interesting for more than a couple of first times. When you build up city number 15 in game number 100, will the rare occasion of being able to block one path between mountains really worth all the micromanagement you have to do to achieve it? With other improvements this is alright, but housing and the gazillion gardens, not so much.
End of Sir_Linque's quote

Exactly, 

the reason I am so concerned about playing epic games on huge maps. Can you imagine making all those towns?

Sins of a Solar Empire II
Reply #28 from Elemental Forums Top

After playing a couple of games I noticed I only have it in me to manage my first city properly, juggling the gardens and houses. After that, I've had it with the tedious garden micro and can't even touch my conquered towns knowing what I have to do to make them grow.

The cities also need a clear breakdown what buildings have been built. It's too hard to tell what is what by just looking.

I really want those people to grow their own food and build enough houses automatically. And where doesn't matter either.

Reply #29 from Elemental Forums Top

the level of garden/house spam is to the point that i purposely march around until i find a site that will provide optimal food income via a farm/apiary/orchard/oases. on those "punishing" maps that have little or none of said optimal food squares, the garden/house tedium would be frustrating.

Reply #30 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Viaschivan, reply 21


quote quoting="post"
As far as city building goes, I find it tedious to build all these numerous food producing things and housing. Having to actually place them on the map is just overkill and serves no purpose that I can see.
/quote

I do not agree here. Building you cities allows for instance to block areas which enemies can not ignore (coast or valleys). That makes the game much more interesting. That's what I did in one of my games.

Via
End of Viaschivan's quote

 

 

Quoting Sir_Linque, reply 22
Placing huts and gardens is interesting in some cases from a tactical perspective, but the vast majority of the time you just spam them away. After all it needs to be interesting for more than a couple of first times. When you build up city number 15 in game number 100, will the rare occasion of being able to block one path between mountains really worth all the micromanagement you have to do to achieve it? With other improvements this is alright, but housing and the gazillion gardens, not so much.
End of Sir_Linque's quote

But your argument only covers the placement of cities/towns not the issue of having to manually place the gardens and huts.

 

I agree the hut/garden spam gets very tedious.

 

Reply #31 from Elemental Forums Top

What about a mechanic that rewards you for managing your housing and food, but doesn't require it.

I'm not sure why "houses" is a tech you have to rediscover (people in this world can build Inns out in the wastes, housing can't be a huge stretch), so if those first three levels (slums, huts & houses) were functions of city prosperity (education, wealth and prestige) that your citizens built automatically then basic housing could be ignored. You'd then have three options a) ignore housing entirely, allowing your populations to be a scrabbling rabble b) build prestige and educational buildings to let the people build houses, being happier and more productive but taking away from the tiles you could otherwise build (since you built educational, etc.) c) take even a few more tiles and build high-quality houses. In fact, you could capitalize on high-quality housing by making it a requirement to attract talented adventurers or such (or making for a discount in their price), etc.

A similar mechanic for food would work (if it were per city or you didn't have caravans running), lowering the output capacity of your city, lowering prestige and (if it were bad enough), actually causing starvation die-off.

As for setting related things, e.g. nobles, inns, etc... Well, nobility isn't money it's power and those who had power before the cataclysm and whose family maintained their power would likely still hold on to titles and local spheres of influence. In fact, I would welcome some of them challenging your authority (and I seem to recall "neutral" city-states being a possibility).

And of course inns would exist - in fact, they might well be a nexus for founding small villages and such - as would any number of common structures. Along those lines, rather than random Inns scattered about, if they were villages and/or estates (that would eventually fall under your sway if/as your territory expands and preferably named), I think it'd make far more sense. I wouldn't be surprised if calling them Inns was an intentional beta thing (rather than giving away info from the campaign).

Reply #32 from Elemental Forums Top

+1 for ditching decimals in leveling.  It's tedious and not very fulfilling, I usually just put them all into one or two stats anyway.

Reply #33 from Elemental Forums Top

i was thinking about this some more, someone correct my math if ive got this incorrect...

 

gardens provide 2 food

huts require 4 food

 

therefore you need 2 gardens for every 1 hut, right?

 

i propose increasing the food provided by gardens to 4, this way you only need 1 garden for every 1 hut

this would reduce garden/hut spam by 33% - that's huge!

 

or going the other direction you could make gardens provide 8 food and make huts require 10 food - hot dog & hot dog bun style.

Reply #34 from Elemental Forums Top

Stardock said they were toying around with the idea of having building provide adjacency bonuses.  What if building a house next to a garden cut its food requirement in half? Or having a tech that would merge 4 single tile houses into a larger complex that gives a population bonus?

I usuallly don't have a huge issue with housing/garden spam.  I create one or two cities to provide food and use them to build up my other cities.  I also build just enough housing to get to the next level and what ever research/industry i need for the city per level.  If i have a few extra tiles i might build some more houses to get a head start on the next level.  But after level 5 it doesn't matter.  I often have cities with 10-19 extra tiles that i don't know what to do with.  Prestige doesn't really matter too much since heroes seem to disappear from the map after a while and there is no diplomacy right now.  I'm sure more buildings will be put in with the other trees, but right now i have trouble keeping many of my cities full of buildings unless there is an industrial or strategic point to it.

Reply #35 from Elemental Forums Top

+1 for everything OP said.

 

Particularly the micro of building the city and stats points.

 

I hate the stats decimal point system. Everything should be a round, rounded number for the purposes of both mechanics and display. 

Reply #36 from Elemental Forums Top

Seems to me that people who find it "tedious" to have to place structures "on the actual map" (the horror, the horror...) should be playing Civ or TW instead, where the whole city concept is abstracted to one tile. City management, if anything, is already too easy in Elemental. Please, Stardock, don't dumb it down any further.

 

Reply #37 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Hound, reply 12
Yeah the feats / perks are actually a stronger RPG element than ability scores, if they are looking to give more character to the Sovereigns.
End of Hound's quote

Not only the sovereigns but the heroes and regular units would also gain character by this.

I like the AoW2 style design of units, where a lot of abilities (for all type of units) were listed as "feats". From simple things like strike, block, archery, to powerful immunities, teleportation, fire breath and such. Stats (ability scores) can still be there, but fairly dry if they are all that distinguishes different units.

Reply #38 from Elemental Forums Top

The popups that keep telling me that city XXX finished building a hut are a PAIN. I have to click on them to get rid of that thing wasting space in a part of the screen, and then it moves me to the city.
End of quote

Are you speaking about popup or about icons that appear on the right of the screen? Have you tried to right click on them? And on the bigger icons categorizing the smaller ones?

 

Reply #39 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting gapper4, reply 36
Seems to me that people who find it "tedious" to have to place structures "on the actual map" (the horror, the horror...) should be playing Civ or TW instead, where the whole city concept is abstracted to one tile. City management, if anything, is already too easy in Elemental. Please, Stardock, don't dumb it down any further.
End of gapper4's quote

Considering how many enthusiastic beta players have voiced their concern about this, I'm not sure ignoring them is a good idea for the general appeal of the game. No one so far has said that the citybuilding should be abstracted to one tile. I for one like the idea of bonuses by having different structures adjacent to each other, but I would like to have a preset area into which I can build regardless of my current layout.

Here's a really rough example of something that I'd like at least better to the current system:

Another option would be to let you 'Buy' tiles of land to build on each time your city levels up while letting you to place any building anywhere on the tiles you have bought. This would retain the tactical aspect of extending your city to block paths while getting rid of one of the more annoying micromanagement part of extending your city building by building.

This won't help with the gardens + houses spam though, but will help the city micromanagement.

Reply #40 from Elemental Forums Top

@feats/ perks at leveling up:

i strongly agree on that note, if you want interesting feats look at dnd, fallout or medieval II total war (including mods).

you should have both though, increasing stats every level and choosing a feat every x levels.

Reply #41 from Elemental Forums Top

@ leveling:

The decimal system seems a bit hardcore for a strategy game, but I don't mind really. The only annoying thing is that you have to click 10 times instead of 1.

@ city building:

Agree with the OP. There should be some sort of auto management available. And I don't see why the city itself has to be the thing that blocks the AI. You should have the opportunity to build walls and towers within close range of the town as defense.

In general, I want more war gaming and less city building.

Reply #42 from Elemental Forums Top

I agree with the people who want to skip the decimal system, it's just annoying. I also think a feat system would be nice but I agree with tesb, you should be able to increase the stats every level to.

I like the city building, but I think it's to many buildings that does the same thing, especially the research buildings. I also think that it's to hard to overview which buildings you have built in your town.

Reply #43 from Elemental Forums Top

Some ideas:

- when creating a new city, randomly chose from a predefined set a city background/history that come with a description and a small bonus for the city, this was done in Heroes of Might and Magic V.

For exemple, you might create a new city and find that it gets a small +10% gold bonus (or maybe the bonus could be fixed or change with city size, such as +1 gold per city size per turn.

Creating a new city with a bonus to units construction or science could give you a reason to specialize each city and give each one more flavour.

- I agree with the fact that house buildings is not fun currently, and I dislike the fact that one at the metropolis size, population doesn't seems to matter anymore, encouraging to scrap any excess house. Maybe some buildings could get a bonus depending on population (tax/science, or even a general +XX% in all productions for very high population). Another solution could be to have new slots automatically opened for construction each XXX population after reaching metropolis size. Combined maybe with some automatic house construction, it could give cities a more organic evolution.

- I agree about souvereign: gaining 10 points each level and having each one only inscrease a decimal have no sense: such low inscrease are too small to matters, I would prefer having only a few points to use but that each one has a true value.

Maybe you could have not all level come with a choice from the player:

- have the souvereign creation be all about "perks" instead of numerci values, and have those perks effect increased with the level.

If I chose "very strong" as a perk, the souvereign could start with +50% attack (same as 15 strength in the current system), and each level gain +10% (or maybe each other level, as he could have other perks increasing too)

Some perks could only be chosen at creation (and having champions with them could make them more unique), while some other could be gained at some levels (maybe one bonus perl each 3 levels, or you gain one "perk point" each level but most cost several points so you have to wait).

Note about champions: have some perks reserved for them.

Reply #44 from Elemental Forums Top

Another problem with the house/garden spam is that it isn't a effective way to stop city development. Given time every city is a level 5. It vould look and feel much more real if you had a few big cities and some smaller once. As it stand there are almost no reason to not build the biggest city I can.
.

Reply #45 from Elemental Forums Top

I think there should be a population cap in the world that would effectively limit city sizes and discourage city spamming.

A population cap would also make it more of a competition to raise prestige and get the people to come to your city instead of an enemy city.

I would also like to see people migrate away from your city if there is another city with higher prestige.

Imagine the joy of casting a Plague spell on an enemy city to lower their prestige and get the people to migrate to yours.

Reply #46 from Elemental Forums Top

The thing is other games provide rewarding city building game play. This game doesn't. This game isn't about city building imo. People keep saying not to dumb it down as the needlessly placing spamming building and click after click, town after town is indepth gameplay?

Reply #47 from Elemental Forums Top

Started on Beta 2.  Did my first game and got killed right away (didn't read any instructions, just wanted to run it and see).  After two 'learning' games, I can see the points made originally.  For the decimal, they just need to multiply everything by ten and suddenlly people would be ok, we just don't like decimal.  I do like RPG within a strategy game.  So keep the abilities update (just make sure it has an impact) and add feats every X level as a target to achieve if possible.

Quoting Hound, reply 45
I think there should be a population cap in the world that would effectively limit city sizes and discourage city spamming.

A population cap would also make it more of a competition to raise prestige and get the people to come to your city instead of an enemy city.

I would also like to see people migrate away from your city if there is another city with higher prestige.

Imagine the joy of casting a Plague spell on an enemy city to lower their prestige and get the people to migrate to yours.
End of Hound's quote

Great idea, but don't cap it as much as make it dynamic.  Maybe slowly grows at first then a bit faster as world gets civilized, but drops when war are waged.

Quoting gapper4, reply 36
Seems to me that people who find it "tedious" to have to place structures "on the actual map" (the horror, the horror...) should be playing Civ or TW instead, where the whole city concept is abstracted to one tile. City management, if anything, is already too easy in Elemental. Please, Stardock, don't dumb it down any further.
 
End of gapper4's quote

We each have our own definition of fun for those type of games.  Some people like to micro manage and get the maximum out of their resource, other prefer the discovery aspect, other the war, etc.  So I agree, don't dumb it down, but also provide a 'manager' that has a general goal: food, population, research, soldier, etc. (more work for the AI guy).  Advantage of micro managing or revising once in a while would be to destroy and put better house type maybe?  If AI takes care of it, he might bring your city level down by destroying huts for house and when would it update slums?

Reply #48 from Elemental Forums Top

Posted in this in a different thread, but it'll get over looked, so this seems like a good place to restate it...

 

Quoting Sushikawa, reply 123
I'm probably in the minority here...but I like the current city building system.  I can make the cities the way I want them.

My first city does follow the standard formula...Workshop, Gardens, Hut, and Study and that does get a little annoying. Perhaps the first city you found should have a unique center that's 4x4, turns out 1 research, and one material, one prestige, and has enough food/housing to make it to lvl2 on its own.  This is the first bastion of civilization you've founded in the wasteland after all, whether or not you choose to build your palace there it should hold some significance.

I really don't understand the complaints about having too many buildings to place. The process while a little clunky is simple and effective. After my first 2 cities were built up, I had enough food production to create a city between a coast line that stretched up onto some hills, consisting mostly of housing, research, military and economic buildings.  You know what? It looks pretty. Having that fortress plopped as high up the side of the mountain as I could get it with the the chain of estates leading from it to the town center was a rewarding end before the beta crashed out.  

But what I do get is frustration with the UI. Its very hard to tell what buildings I have already placed. Civ's cities while boring, and having cluttered UI's, presented all the info when you clicked on them. I could tell in a few seconds exactly what buildings such and such town had.

End of Sushikawa's quote

As for the Sovereign stuff mentioned in the OP...I agree with that. 

 

Reply #49 from Elemental Forums Top

Sushikawa - I too like being able to build my cities, and I don't expect (or want) that to change. I think the quest here is just to reduce the amount of times you have to go back and build a garden or hut.

Reply #50 from Elemental Forums Top

I like city building too and specializing my cities for different purposes.

What I don't like is being forced to build mandatory buildings on repeat that involve no choice.

The only way the current house/garden juggling minigame would make any sense would be to have the option of building a fortress without a big population and get benefits from it. And even so getting your population up should be far more simple.