Spamming Cities & Enchantments

There should be an hard limit on enchants, I've never stumbled upon it, but I'm sure I've readen so in the forums. As for city upkeep, nope! Feel free to spam Lev 1 settlements, they won't cost you nothing unless you build huts or market (not merchant) in it.

(I hate city spamming!)

You have to defend them all, that is one downside.  Though if you have enough there might not be anywhere outside of your area of influence for random mobs to spawn lol.

Spamming Cities is actually quite awesome. Firstly, no random mobs in your influence, and secondly, every city can build a caravans to each other, so roads, roads, and more roads.

Massive expansion is always best in most 4X games (with variations based on difficulty).

I would suggest just funneling all your caravans to your capital. Then welcome 500% bonus food production.

Cheers,

V

Actually.... No.

If your maps are like mine, I have large swat of barren land between clusters of resources, so city spamming allows me to cover the area between my cities in influence.

Then I can leave those cities empty, they are far from borders and never get attacked, and even if they get, it's just a settler I lost, they are not part of my economy just some bonus (+1G, +1AR, +1TR is all they produce).

This is one of the things that bother me more in elemental, and I refrain from using this strategy.

mmmh, Tasty! I never tought about this!

I really wish caravan's would trade other goods.

I'd like a cavaran of peoples to grow 1 city full of empty houses to it's max and empty the other one

It's rather senseless that it increases food production. If anything you would think that it would need to be linked in order to receive it's food. Rather then increasing the production of food in the target city...

Anyways, I'm not debating the game's logic anymore, I'm an old man who likes his oldschool 4X games. And I guess times are changing.

:/

@searro go to bed troll!

I didnt even trolled tonight you old man !

Oh tell me what you think in the post about techs.

the biggest dislike of no increasing costs per city means there isn't a soft 'limit' meaning each city is less special.  Why do I care about city (x) if I can make 35 more for no cost increase.  Idk how this would be implemented, maybe 1 city per civilization/empire level and additional cities over that incur increasing penalties? idk.

Maybe they ought to put limits somewhere along the lines of:

3 max lvl5 cities

5 max lvl4 cities

7 max lvl 3 cities

ulimited lvls 1-2 cities.

?

True, but we also have to take in to consideration the general size of the maps. On large, even 12 fairly spaced cities won't take up more than a quarter of the map if that. While spamming in general should be discouraged, we also don't want to penalize legitimately large empires (whether through conquest, good economics, or both). And, to an extent, barring a really harsh penalty, some spamming will still be possible especially once you hit a critical mass where the cost of a new city can be soaked up by a significantly large empire.

Such limits are stupid thing. Do not want.

Food already limits city development, there is no need for hard caps.

food doesn't limit development, even if you don't multi route to the capital with caravans, get to lvl 5, destroy houses, repeat.

Please. Fix.

(Hope it is a bug)

On the enchantment spamming, I think (hope) that the devs are working on a major redesign of the magic system and that some or all enchantments will shift from essence = slots as a limit to mana upkeep. Hopefully, that will keep enchantments reasonably limited in early and mid-game but also enable 'good spamming' in late game, where super-powerful magic was once intended to be intentionally 'unbalancing.'

I don't mind that city spamming is a strong strategy so much as I dislike that you have to have 30+ cities just to have a reasonable income of the various materials you need.  Assuming you are not just going to abuse the current poor AI, you are forced to spam cities, which I hate to do.  I just wish they would add something to make playing a game with only 2 or 3 cities actually possible without abuse of current game mechanics that are will change in the near future.

The problem with food limits is they encourage even more spam of undeveloped level 1 cities (as would any system that limits large cities but allows limitless small ones). Either way it would just exacerbate the current problem, which is covering the map in lots of cheap level 1 cities. Then caravans make it worse; all those level 1 cities can send a caravan to the capital, meaning that they generate more food than they use! Of course this is a problem no matter what caravans generate; if they increased gold instead, you'd have absurd gold generation in the capital, it's bad either way.

The funny thing is, Elemental had a decent solution to city spam in beta: your first city cost 100g to found, the second 200g, the third 300g, etc. (I may be misremembering the exact numbers, but something along those lines). There was also a greater emphasis on powerful resource-generation buildings that required higher level cities to build, rather than the current random map resources that any city can harvest. This meant that at a certain point, it became more worthwhile to invest in developing your current cities instead of founding another increasingly-costly level 1. City spam was still a problem back then, but at least it stopped being so good after a certain point (roughly 5-7 cities). Why they removed the founding cost, taking two steps backwards in progress against level 1 city spam, I'd love to know.

[I'm not mentioning the "destroy houses to recover food" thing since that's an obvious bug and can't be an intended part of the game mechanics - hopefully it gets fixed sooner rather than later.]

As a person who first played Elemental after release (no beta test), I can hardly understand why such a balanced system was forfeit in favor of the actual moronic city-spam mechanic.

Please, make headache go away. Explain.

Anyone know how to make it so that tab doesn't select caravans that are already trading with towns?  It's so irritating.

Sorry but... I think this is the wrong thread for such a question.

Anyway no, you cannot esclude caravan ATM. Use space to set their moves to 0 for the turn.

As far as I'm aware every enchantment takes "enchantment slot for the caster, so it shouldn't be possible to spam them indefinetly.

Plus, due to low mana regeneration, it takes a lot of time to enchant all cities, if even possible.

.

Now, there is one disadvantage of level 1 cities, and that's that they can only have 2 tile borders.

Considering that level 1 cities cost you nothing (0, nada, niente), that's quite a nice disadvantage... Imagine if they also expanded borders lol

Civ handled this with city maintenance, which I hate, but at least it prevents city spam.  Kind of a bad oversight... 

REX has been a known exploit for most 4X games for a long time.

PS: a quick mod of the pioneer pack (requiring gold (200), material (50) as well as up the training time (+10 turns)) has helped immensely with city spam. I still can't believe it's so cheap and fast to train a new city... ~_~