@Vhorx
"As far as making cities more "interesting" I didn't mean to make them into this unique entity that you care about as much as one of your champions. If the potential of a city was determined by it's location, it would make it so that all cities had a little something different. More hills, more grasslands, no grasslands all swamps, etc... this could affect max population, production and research potential."
It depends. From a city building perspective, yes, cities are different. From a gaming stand point, it results in even more counting tiles and picking the spot that (as an example), has 1 mountain tile for basic production, 2 forests to for mats, and the rest plains for food and gildar. And you look for spots with only some variant on that. It also tends to discourage unique cities similar to that in real life - there's not really any way in Civ to mimic Las Vegas or what have you. As a player, one tends to just ignore certain areas (or rush tech to grab those areas first - you rush Axe in Civ so you can chop forests and jungle).
And yes, the counter would be 'well you don't have to play like that' and that is also true. But we can't ignore the effects of game mechanics on the dynamics of the game and thus the relationship the player has with them. If the game encourages something, players will do that unless they're actively trying to self limit.
Again, it's not that the Civ system is bad. It isn't. I just think we can come up with a system that works for the intended game play and aesthetics that Elemental is trying to achieve. And at the same time, we also don't want to use a system to fix a small issue where a small adjustment will do. Making food plentiful and terrain resource-rich just to get rid of a 'feeling' doesn't help; we need a fix or a system that works to enhance the aesthetics, not spite them.
"Yes, I agree with that point. Although the part where you say "They don't know how", that's a little false. You can on the first turn, build a farm on your food node next to you. So I guess they do "know how to farm". And to reflect the apocalyptic world, obviously you can't make a super efficiant farm (like the SRs) but with tech and research, you could turn 1 square of grassland into somewhat farmable land. Not 8 or 6 food per turn, but 1, 1.5, 2?"
They know how to farm fertile land. They do -not- know how to farm land that requires work. You can easily buy potting soil from the Home Depot and grow a garden. It's not nearly going to be that easy to take a 6 acre piece of land and grow enough food over the course of several years to feed yourself, your family, make profit, and pay a tithe. The technology you research is about the scaling of food production to feed people; about making farms more efficient and allowing better storage of food. The same piece of farmland at the start of the 20th century now, in the 21th century, can feed exponentially more people.
But also, remember, that progress and technological advance do not happen in a vacuum. You need infrastructure and resources. You need to be able to re-route rivers and mass-produce farming goods (and be able to repair them) along with the animals or machines to use them. You need technologies that allow people to spend the same amount of time doing -more- work. You need to factor in waste disposal. These things and more are part of farming not just 'land'. Land gets you a start but it's only the beginning.
These technologies are not what Elemental has. They're just starting to re-domesticate animals and develop basic farming technology. They do not have the ability to turn any piece of ground into a farm. They may eventually develop that technology but it's a slow process. If anything, I would see such a thing being a high level spell combined with high level resource and costly; it'd be an investment of time, essence, technology, and education.
I understand that you want to make terrain matter; but I don't think this necessarily makes it any more interesting in the long run nor does it really support the fiction and feel of the game. I think part of it is just an overall lack of strategic level things you can do. You move units and... that's pretty much it. There's no interconnected world beyond that. Even with terrain resources, it's not really adding much other than more resources. Without strategic level mechanics, you can have all the cities and all the resources you want, and it's still fairly meaningless.
For instance, I can build a city in Civ in a mountain pass. But between movement mechanics, city mechanics, and what have you, that city is about as meaningless as can be. It'll drain money, be worthless strategically, and have no real significance unless there's a strategic resource near by. The only real benefit is hammer production but you can produce more hammers in non-mountain terrain. I certainly can't turn it into a fantasy style city like Helmsdeep.
That's I think a route Elemental needs to take. Not try to mimic Civ but try to mimic and allow for the 'quirky' cities we see in fantasy worlds. What if there was a type of faction that could -only- build in forests (treetop villages like stereotypical fantasy elves) or only mountains (dwarves). What if we could actually build great walls and such (again, Helmsdeep or the actual Great Wall). Fantastical things in a fantasy world and the game mechanics to back it up rather than just trying to Frankenstein a solution from other games that are trying achieve a different game design goal.
