Isn't this war of magic and not war of city builders?   Magic is the focus, I would hope.  I've not waited all these months for a civ knockoff with magic added.  I'm afraid I'm not savvy enough to know exactly what it should look like or how it would work, but I would not want to spend alot of time with city stuff. 

And that's something they need to fix too. IMO the game needs a focus, the one thing that it does indepth and does really well. The other pieces are there to support and drive that.

The development team simply isn't big enough to do everything in detail at once.

Sanitation just for the hell of it is a silly idea.
It must have an actual influence on the game and the cost / upkeep of the building must be in the same range as the benefit you get from it. Otherwise there is no choice and the building becomes either useless or dumb micromanagement because you must have it.

Effects are easy to come up with so why doesn't anyone bother?

Base healing rate in a city without sewers is -10 to +15 %,  -1 % per city level.  Units can actually get sick and die in such a city.

Random chance for plagues to break out.

Random chance for 0 food production for one turn.

Random chance for newly trained units to be sickly, permanently having -10% hit points.

Higher chance of criminal elements, reducing gold income of the city. (wretched hive of scum and villainy)

Reduced morale of units stationed / defending there.

Random chance for a unit to receive a "disease" debuff, costing a small amount of HP for several turns.

Lower population growth.

Lower influence. (stench doesn't count!)

The problem is, you can't have both. What would you have the "focus" be?

The game was designed to be both a strategy game and a RPG. Focusing only on one will degrade the other. You can't just have "magic" otherwise why build armies or city improvements? Can't have just armies, otherwise why hire heroes?

For better or worse, this is a 50/50 game. I think that both elements can be improved upon (hell just about everything can be improved upon in its current state), but you can't have a focus "winner". 

It does seem like there's a near complete absence of trade-offs when it comes to settlement improvements. The only apparent questions are whether you want to try to make a site large or spend that food on another site's pop growth.

But then I'm typing that with no real idea how the post 1.1 versions will play out...

p.s. Re sanitation: some folks might call it stupid micro stuff, but it really does seem like an aesthetic/historical gap if nothing else. Folks rant all the time about how Rome ruled with roads and steel-armed legions, but the aqueducts and public baths were just as essential to their civilization. So far, all the Elemental factions seem like stinky barbarians in comparison. Even New Pariden, and Procipinee just seriously seems like a ruler who'd appreciate regular baths for staff and retainers as much as for herself.

Methinks that you're drastically underestimating the value of hybrids. TV shows, restaurants, novels, and films all have strong 'hybrid' examples. Why not TBS games?

Mind you, I'm the original NotMoM guy, so I very much appreciate complaints that Elemental has strayed far from its aspiration to be MoM's "spiritual successor." But I'm a very greedy user, so I want to have my cake and eat it to. Without needing to eat mods.

Especially given Brad's increasingly frequent talk about multi-threading, I don't see any reason for a game NOT to have multiple focii. The real rub is that the devs need to learn how to provide inobtrusive AI support for players who want to largely ignore a given focus, and so far Elemental completely lacks anything like a trainable royal council or whatever.

Maybe. But this isn't a new game. It's an overhaul of an existing one. I don't think there's another two years to get it right. With limited time, limited developer numbers, and a lot of things that need doing, I think the chances of success increase drastically if you pick a focus and make the game really good at that. Trying to do more things at once then you have the capacity to do just results in weak implementations across the board, and a game that excels at something is better then a game that's mediocre at everything.

Multithreading is great in that it lets you use a lot more complex math and lets the AI do more things at once, because of those extra processors. But user attention doesn't multithread. If you're going to take Dawn of Discovery's production system, add in quests as complicated as something like The Witcher, throw in a spell selection as good as MoM, and pile a sophisticated combat system on top of that, you're going to be demanding that users pay attention to a very high number of things at once.

While some hardcore types would certainly love that, you're also going to chase off a lot of people who simply either can't keep track of that many complex systems at once, or only find some of them fun and can't tolerate the slog through the rest of them.

Incidentally, if I said that I'd be alright with quests disappearing entirely so attention can be devoted to adding depth (and yes, complexity) to the other parts, would I get lynched?

They heal slowly, and if they have hundreds and hundreds of damage to heal, you might as well forget about them.

You'd still have the Spell of Making.

It'd probably also be possible to create an economic/science victory condition by having some very highly developed cities and gaining the knowledge to construct a new Forge of the Overlords, rather then having to cast one into existence.

(And yes, I meant an online lynching. )

At some population the city prestige could be lowered and some sanitation buildings could be raised to counter the effect. The buildings should have some kind of upkeep.. but with all global resources that would be just annoying 'another building'.

Screw sanitation and screw city builders. This is a STRATEGY FANTASY WARGAME you IGMO's. We don't need no stinkin (pun intended) toilets or sewers or wastewater treatment plants in this game. If you want that CRAP go play SIM CITY any edition. That's the problem with a LOT of games today they try to put TOO MUCH MICROMANGEMENT into them and they become dull and boring. I want to play the good stuff. Creating armies and fighting battles and discovering hidden treasure....that's a STRATEGY FANTASY WARGAME!

Well, having some building that reflect some level of "sanitation" (I don't know why people think about micromanaging, it will only give BONUS and you dont manage your city, you build it and forget it) I would like to know what you consider micromanaging in this game?

In fact, the red cross was funded in the medieval time by the knigth in the field. Don't forget that the lore is there was some really big city BEFORE the cataclysm and we want to rebuild this empire.We've lost the technology but it didn't mean that we didn't have it. We don't know how far the technologie was before, but assuming that there was some really big magical city, it should had some "healing" place to help the big army (300 HP +) to recover faster than 5 HP/turn.In fact, if it was 5 HP/squad member it would greatly increase the speed of the game.

"funded" in the medieval time?   to what are you referring?  Last I checked the Red Cross wasn't founded* until near the end of the 1800's which is certainly well after medieval times.  Also, Red Cross wasn't originally about giving medicine, it was about providing food and safety to wounded soldiers by removing them from the battlefield. So that does not contradict my statement at all, even if they were created in medieval times (brief scan of the first few pages on google's results for 'red cross history' supports that the were from the 19th century, not pre-17th century)

The concept of 'medical', 'civilians', or even 'clergy' on the battlefield and exempt from combat is a concept developed late in the Renaissance in Europe when formalized warfare was created (prior to that it was pretty much free game in terms of killing civilians or religious figures) so therefor red cross would not even work since they would have just been killed when trying to help the wounded.

I would totally be for a red cross organization that helped heal, increased population (because the people who don't die would thus have children in theory), or healing units away from the city during or following a battle.  I would NOT support it being used to help sanitation, since to this day that is not really their job. 

I liked the idea that the previous civilizations were very advanced, but apparently the cataclysm is now just the reason the game doesn't start with a bunch of cities (as apparently there were tons of people who survived it scattered among the hills and forests) so it would appear the only technology really lost involve magic and lost artifacts/dungeons/quests.