I wish the landscape worked like this...

I think this is a great idea!

Yeah, this kind of stuff is in MoM, so why not Elemental?

Oh man I wish this is how it worked, I hate how there is no real strategy to city placement/terrain atm.

 

This works amazing with the lore as well as you have this world 100 years after a cataclysm just now recovering. You are able to take advantage of surviving resources such as lost libraries and clay pits but in the long term you will want to establish your own mines and lumberyards and such as your civilization grows and needs increase, this is only natural. This works real well with the scarcity of resources we currently have. You should only be able to construct things in your ZoC like current improvements. Seeing as your channeler is reviving the land as your ZoC spreads.

Some examples of what might be availible:

 

Forest tiles: Lumbermill

Plains tiles: Farm, Pasture, War Horse  (kingdom: horses)

Hills: Mine, Warg Den or Warg Training Pit (Empire: wargs)

Marshlands: Plantation of some sort, maybe some kind of alchemy thing for +arcane

Mountain tiles: eh probably hard to build anything on them as they are impassible

Water tiles: (yes elemental has water) Fishing boat style improvement

Desert tiles: no clue, maybe some sort of trade outpost

 

I can think of a lot more as would be easy to think of more abstract things that could get you more tech/arcane/diplomatic capital/gold. I think you should really have the ability to make something mid-late game that produces things you need but are rare such as Horses. All of the above could use up population from cities they are linked too so we have a decent pop sink between that and city improvements. I'm sure some people find it frustrating that you can build units like caravans that use horses but have no way of getting them unless you are really lucky or have snagged an enemy city that has them, I know they get rare enough use in all the games I've played unfortunately. Honestly if playing as kingdom I seem to have seen more umberdroth and warg pits in my ZoC than horses lmao.

 

My ideas above started me thinking about Civ and come to think of it Elemental completely lacks rivers...thats a little odd.

 

It might also be nice if when you settle a town if instead of setting up buildings you could choose to upgrade it to a Fort or Castle using materials/gold. With a different set of upgrades increasing its ZoC and ability to defend an area where an invading army would have to besiege it to pass perhaps.

 

I love the idea, I guess the only issue I can find with this is that we can currently raise and lower the land so in a sense for certain resources city placement wouldn't matter too much as you could just alter the land to get the resources you want... Of course if they increased the amount of mana these spells cost then it could all still work.

Love it. This would add a lot to Elemental. It could still include some resources, but they wouldn't be as important to finding a city, just an added bonus if you found em. 

Great post!

Not a bad idea. The reason Stardock went with the way resources are currently found is (IIRC) that they wanted to avoid city spamming like in civ4. The best building strategy there is to build your cities with each 'fat cross' next to the other and then building improvements in all tiles. Eventually the whole world would be build upon, something they wanted to avoid in Elemental. But I agree Elemental went to far the other way, because now most tiles have no function at all (beyond possibly a roadblock for mountains and water), except for building your next study (another major issue). Still I would like to avoid a situation where the best strategy would be to fill the entire world with cities surrounded by adjoining patches of resource gathering tiles.

Your idea could work, but I think only if either those improvements are so expensive its not worth building a new city just for them, or make building cities so expensiveits not worth building a new city just to gather a few more resources. You could also have a limit on how many of those improvements could be build for every city, but that feels very arbitrary and gamy to me, and would still promote city spamming.

I believe its because they had difficulty implementing them. Rivers were in the first beta's, but they had a lot of issues with making them look good, and getting them to end at the coast.

Civ also went crazy with specialists and bonuses to said specialists that just reinforced city spamming. I agree that Elemental went the other extreme route though, but it could just be due to the current lack of content.

unless there is some strategy to city design, then what purpose does it serve? couldn't it just as easily be represented by an image that simply grew tith city size? if nothing else then we'd stop running into the city tile limit all the time.

which raises another questions: is the city tile limit supposed to be a tactical gameplay restriction, or is it just a performance thing to save memory? i mean, if it's the former, than it's a pretty lame mechanic, and if it's the latter then why are there so many buildings seemingly designed to push us closer to the limit? (2x2 slums i'm looking at you) why do walls even have to have a footprint at all?

Aside from resource gathering, doesnt city placement have a lot to do with strategic access of enemy troops? I agree that the resource tiles in CIV were overdone.

I don't own EWOM yet.

As the OP said, terrain could be used for resource gathering, but without the built in bonuses of CIV.

Just the fact of being mountains, you could build a mine.

How about the amount of resource gathering would be based  on your mining skill, for example. That way you would choose your city locations based on what kind of race you played as, for example Dwarves would be good at mining and would want to have cities near mountains.

This would be tied into diplomacy, because you could trade with Dwarves for ore.

Apparent definciencies in the magic system aside I would very much like to get EWOM.

It appears to solve some of the issues I had with Age of Wonders. That magic system might have been more detailed than EWOM, but required a lot more micromanagement, which I didnt care for.

 

Nice I like the idea.  Actually your suggestion reminded me of the city building in an old game I used to play, Conquest of the New World.  I think it was made by Sierra.  Anyway, in it, you placed resource accumulating buildings, and they received bonus multipliers based off of what tiles were nearby (i.e. a lumber mill with lots of forests and a river nearby would give you more wood then one in the middle of a grassland).  It worked quite well, and it stressed importance in placing cities in spots that could take advantage of it.  So I think it could effectively combat city spamming by only making cities worthwhile when they are placed in "good" spots that have appropriate terrain, and it also makes cities highly specialized based off of what's available.

I love this idea! It adds a lot more depth to city building.

Add me to the 'Great idea!' list.

In early beta we could place lumberyards in woods, kinda along the lines of your suggestion.  This was removed.  We could also place numerous gardens to grow food (but not limited to certain terrains like you suggest), again, removed (but now 1 garden per city).

Having city layout be more attuned to the landscape would greatly increase immersion and the feeling that we're recreating a real, living world.

I'm not sure I like this. This makes it so that you can get an abundance of resources from every part of the map, instead of having to focus cities on the few resources that exist.

What is there to stop this deteriorating into another case of "spawn a city every 5 tiles apart" aka city-spam?

I am with Heavenfall. Whilst this idea is a good idea on its own merit, i am not sure this is the direction I'd want E:WoM to take. It would take some of the originality out of the game and push it towards being more like Civ etc. I do wish the City Tile Limit was relaxed, or at least easily mod-able. (maybe it is I suck at Modding). But I really don't want any more encouragement to city spam than there already is.

Also I am not sure it is in keeping with the setting and fluff. This is meant to be a destroyed world with few resources that everyone fights over, the moment you make every square a 'mini' resource is the moment that this is lost.

I think it's workable if we introduce city-level limits on the buildings needed to harvest normal landscape tiles (i.e. not resources). For example, say you can't build a fishery until city level 3 - justify it by saying that only larger cities have the infrastructure to support large-scale harvesting of local resources or somesuch. You'd have to balance the numbers carefully so cities without resources never become self-sufficient; make sure that fisheries produce less food than it takes to get up to the city level where you can build them, or city spam results. A limit on how many such buildings a city can have would also help; say for example you can't build a second fishery within 3 tiles of another.

Now it's not worth founding a city along every available stretch of coast, you need another food resource to actually get your city up to level 3 to build a fishery or two. Then these mines and lumber camps and fisheries could just be an extra reward for an already established city, and a reason to pay attention to the landscape, but not justification enough to found a brand new level 1 city without any other resources in the area. It might actually discourage city spam, by rewarding larger cities.

Incidentally, landscape-harvest-buildings that unlock with higher city levels would give us something to do with those bigger cities rather than spam studies. Most resources are accessible from level 1, which unfortunately doesn't leave you much to do at later city levels, and doesn't give you much incentive to develop a new city (aside from capital) too far once you already have all your local resources tapped. "I need to get to level 3 so I can start harvesting fish, giving me enough food to get to level 4 so I can start mining that nearby mountain, and perhaps by then my borders will have expanded to include that forest, etc." seems like a great incentive to invest in an existing city rather than founding new cities wherever there happen to be resources.

While we don't want to copy Civ wholehandedly, we also should recognize that Civ does, in fact, do some things well (and possibly, right). We shouldn't be afraid to take cues from Civ and twist them to fit Elemental. After all, if you want to be picky about it, Food in Elemental is exactly the same thing as Happiness in Civ 5, save for the fact that Food is a hard cap and has no secondary benefits.

 

That said, terrain does need to be a little more 'alive' in the sense that it at least partially influences city placement and development. As is it, there's no real choice or decision making in city placement. It's merely 'find resource, drop city'. There's just no incentive to expand vertically or horizontally; bigger cities don't get you anything special and more cities are -always- useless unless you're spamming them (which is essentially the same as spamming buildings in fewer cities). While the game has limited the ability to city-spam, it's still also not rewarding city building either. Anything you'd really want is available at city level 3. It's not that 4 and 5 level cities are hard to get... it's that there's no reason to get them. Right now, I can build 4 cities with 2 workshops a piece and be pretty much set for materials for the majority of the game; there's no pressure that I need to expand. I have no reason to expand (and even things right now like maintance are easily overcome - I have one game where I'm spamming buildings and have 0 gold mines, merely a swam of merchant champs.

 

I'd say that one place to start off would be to give terrain some trickle flow of production, resources, as well as population/housing modifiers and prestige. Building a city near mountains or woods might give some modifiers to unit and building production while plains would allow for 'bigger' houses (modifiers to how much each hut provides). Resources might not be a profit persay (you gain X) but rather, a sort of discount to existing buildings (so you have to actually build something to get something). So mountains might provide a bonus 0.2 material so workshops (or what have you) produce 1.2 base instead of 1; not much, but a heavily mountainous region combined with a high level city and a handful of workshops will probably get you a heck of a lot more material with a far smaller cost than simply spamming workshops. No one really likes living in a swamp (even if the houses are nice) so prestige might drop by 0.1

 

Then also decrease the amount of stuff resources give (maybe even a dramatic decrease in how much each resource node provides but a slight increase in how many of them there are) and increase costs and upkeep. Make production times higher. Also add in high (4 and 5) city buildings that really help out with an associated very high costs. Perhaps even some nice unique (faction or world) buildings that depend on both high city level and terrain. Make existing high city level buildings provide better percentile bonuses. Move more buildings to rank 4 and 5.

 

Heck, one could even have effects related to combat. For instance, swamps might decrease the effectiveness of soldiers trained there... but provide access to unique units. This is another thing that Civ5 does well; there's cool resources that let you do neat things. More of these types of 'special' resources would help as well - if there's a neat special resource out in the middle of no where, should I drop a city there even though that city really won't be good at anything (and take a while to get to a point where it's making some sort of profit). By special, I don't just mean crystal and metal - I mean fancy cool things like the currently rare horses and wargs. "You found an shrine to an fire elemental. If you build X, Y, Z here, he'll power the forges and people let you produce soldiers that have a flame aura!". "You found a hidden glade in pre-Catalysm forests. The magic here is strong and you find that soldiers who train here become almost bear like. You now have access to Bear-zerkers!"

 

This would be a start to making cities feel different and also, in part, make terrain influence city development. That city in the middle of the plains (ie every capital city in every fantasy movie ever)? Yeah, it's gonna be huge with a big population. Those highly productive but slummy mountain towns (again, in every fantasy movie ever), likewise. Do I place a city here and get a little more production and defense... or do I place it over there and get more prestige.

Wouldn't it be easy to combine this with what we already have?  Just have mines spawn by/in mountains.  Old growth forests actually spawn in forests.  Clay pits spawn in swampy areas, etc.

There's several ways to handle city spam -- spacing limits (as we already have), pop limits, increasing cost of founding cities (vs outposts which wouldn't affect said cost, as long as they remain outposts), increasing maintenance costs (increasing bureaucracy required for increasing empire size), etc.

There's no need to neglect this interesting feature for something that can be easily controlled (and should be implemented -- the lack of increasing costs for increasing large empires is a surprising omission).

Now this is a good idea,

I guess the issue is that the Elemental world is supposed to have been destroyed, so there shouldn't be any resources. On the other hand, 1) players wield magic tthat is supposed to be able to reinvigorate the land and 2) it WOULD be a fun mechanic and would add some depth to city placement.

I think the resource system currently in place is fundamentally good, just turned down way too low right now. It also needs to be more "cool", ie, something like what Ahrimahn suggested.

What I want to avoid at all cost is ending up like CIV games where every tile of the map is a farm, a mine, a market or some supposedly "rare" resource (that is identical in every way to the next generic "rare" resource). It's one of the ugliest and most boring features of the game (thankfully, you could literally ignore it in Civ5 with automation).

I loved how 2k games promised they would eliminate the "cottages" to only have them replaced by trading posts....lol

 

Anyway... Combining the two forms of resources would be great. If the "revived" land could possibly trigger the mines/fertile land, it would be even more spectacular. Right now there is just a small combat advantage for fighting on your turf (I guess Tarth likes flowers and Yithril likes mud?)

Way too much like Civ 4 if you ask me.

 

I hear what your're saying, but isn't EWOM like that now?  Spam cities all over the map?  ...what I'd like to see though, is a system where I have to think about where to build the cities.  As it is now, barring there being a resource (of which there are far too few IMO), it doesn't matter where you build at all.  The terrain is meaningless.

 

I also understand what you're saying about the cataclysm, and the world is supposed to be empty and barren.  But my idea is that after your influence has spread, and you've healed the land, then you can use it's resources.

 

I just think this game needs some serious work as far as the empire building aspect goes.  Where you build your cities, and how the cities use the land has to matter.

I tend to agree; using the current system, Elemental encourages a City to built near the resource locations.  Under the proposed system, one would theorectically build Cities every 16 tiles to maximise revenue.

While I like the idea, and it's in the right direction, it needs refinement.
Off the top of my head, those additional buildings suggested should merely compliment the primary Facilities and the additional buildings suggested should be limited to one type per city - further providing aspects for specialisation per City.  A Mine built on a hill, for example, could add a small bonus - a very small bonus - to it's owning City's production of Metal only if the City was already producing Metal.  This would encourage someone who would like to have the most amount of Metal to position the City closer to Hill.  Building the Mine(s) prevents the building of a Fishery or Logging Camp.

Great post and love the idea because I also have felt that the land has no value which I have expressed in other posts.  Also this is not about the Civ games because like someone else said MoM had this also to a degree.