1.09n Wild Improvements Taking Build Queue

When a city expands to border an unimproved wild improvement, attempting to build the improvement will take up the city's build queue.

If this isn't classified as a bug, it ought to be. This is incredibly stupid, as literally the only effect is to require the player to temporarily tetris their city placement to avoid connecting until after the improvement is finished. Hooking them up afterward is usually trivial and entirely beneficial, so this mechanic/bug doesn't actually discourage chaining to improvements. It just makes for an unintuitive, immersion-breaking, and almost entirely meaningless alteration to the order in which you place buildings. Well, unless you don't understand the mechanic, in which case you just get penalized for doing the logical thing. This needs fixing.

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My idea: maybe have improvements built on an empire scale, not a city scale?

So you can build a wild improvement (would still require pop from city though), city improvement, and unit training?

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That actually has been a feature of the game from the beginning. And let me respectfully disagree there is actually some strategic choice here and with the new implementation of shards seems to have been fully embraced. (Outlying improvements actually have a number of disadvantages and connecting them even later on into your walls is very worthwhile but not trivial with big cities / areas of infulence and quite some ground to cover...)

The anger about it might be warranted but that is mostly due to bad documentation (as so many things...) which makes the game virtually unacessible for new players and might be the most hazardous thing for getting a broader audience (not least because there is so much niche-concepts without huge gameplay impact... that is recipe for frustration).

When you know about it / the game evolves it gives quite a twist to city building I personally would loathe to lose. (There is much potential here too. Wait until the bandits / wildlife not just goes ravenous for your cities but for your improvements as well. Might be even be a substitute for the more or less missing AI and give the player short term-goals like defending outlying improvements...)

Build-times and scarcity of resources makes early-game-metagaming this feature (snaking and connecting later) unfeasible (not least because controlling zone of influence takes a bit of investment in terms of time and resources, more than is to be gained from it mostly so imo not really worth it). So it seems to work alright early in the game where it belongs.... (later on when it becomes mostly trivial the games focus shifts organically so this might be one of the features where imo they nearly got it right allready)

So to add a dissenting voice to the chorus: Don't nix the feature but massively document it in the coming manual / hieragamemnon and tooltips so it is actually understood...

One thing though: the 50 building limit either has to go or to be raised at least double thanks to the possibly far bigger cities possible in the new concepts...

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Think logically for a second. Why the hell would bringing a construction zone closer to your population base slow construction? It wouldn't. There is absolutely zero justification for this. None. At all. Nil. Zilch. Nada. Nor is there any imbalance that would occur from changing this mechanic to be intuitive. At least the 50-building limit has a metagame reason to exist (it prevents, or limits, the construction of a single huge chain city allowing free instant teleports to all corners of your empire).

The point that I'm trying to make is that I didn't buy a fantasy empire building game to play tetris. I bought it to play a fantasy empire building game. That's not an abstract subject, so I'm not going to accept abstract mechanical defenses that exist for no internally-logical reason. If you want to add depth to city construction (and I do feel that it needs more depth than it currently has), there are myriad ways to do so without contradicting the logic of the game setting.

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you are knocking down walls around bits of your town and building walls around the resource? speed is the same. just not done concurrently.

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Quoting Blackmantle_,

reply 2

One thing though: the 50 building limit either has to go or to be raised at least double thanks to the possibly far bigger cities possible in the new concepts...

Make the building limit a function of city level? Maybe level squared times five?

5 for a lvl 1 , 20 for a lvl 2, 45 for a lvl 3, 80 for a lvl 4, 125 for a lvl 5?

Housing and bonus resources would not against the limit.

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