Let's make city specialization better

I'm all for city specialization, but I'm not a fan of its current implementation. Making one city with 20 +1 research buildings and another city with 15 +1 arcane buildings and another city with 10 +1 workshops and great mill, etc., is just not all that interesting.

Here are some ideas to make it more interesting:

Cities specializing in research could do something like this:

+1 research study (applies to general research ... this already exists today)

+1 civics research study (bonus applies while researching the civics tree only, think of a better name and have this apply to all tech trees)

+10% schools (general % uplift across all)

+10% civics schools (bonus applies only to one particular tree)

If prestige worked a little differently, you could have prestige attracting certain kinds of heroes. For example, a college might create "research-type prestige" which would increase the chances of a scholarly hero hanging around town wanting to join.

If heroes worked a little differently, you could employ that scholarly hero in the college (not just the city) to give that building a research bonus.

Each of the resources could have alternative buildings too. For example, instead of harvesting a shard for mana, we could put a lab on it to study it for arcane research. Instead of mining stone, we could put a lab on it to increase weapons research, etc.

Anyway, just some ideas to spice up city specialization which I really like as a concept but don't think any game has really ever implemented it well. Most of the time city specialization just means "build 1 kind of building and don't build any others".

You could do something similar for cities specializing in magic, troops, materials, etc.

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Great idea, one question if there is no limit on the amount of research studys which apply across the board why would I choose to build a building that give the exact same bonus just but only to one tech tree? now if the civic studies were worth +1.5 or +2 i could see the point. I think that more interesting cities will come from the future balance of a number of factors.

These factors in my mind are as follows

a population cap that we have to think carefully about and the limit can be reached if not carefull with how we build.
a system that allows for both "city spam" and "one great city" play styles that are equally viable.
more choices in building we can build with interesting bonuses... where my master stables that allows armored horse?
an adjustment on the city build limit... like the current limit but i feel that we should be able to add more city tiles at a cost (this cost would have to be balanced) TBH surely population will work as a building cap anyway?

I see these as the corner stones of interesting citys... I think alot could be done also if they gave us options on how certain things look... eg when we build city walls we can choose different styles each with slightly different stat bonuses.

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Well, if you want some "city spam/one great city" style of play, I think the ultimate things to do is remove the tile limit per city but add a global tile limit. For instance, let's say that you can have a total of 250 tile. You can build a gigantic city with the 250 tile but wont expand the ZOI, have 5 city with 50 tile (what we have now) or maybe 10 city with 25. You see the point . I think for this kind of viable strategy their must be a global limit, since you have a limit on the city tile. For the specialisation, it is indeed goods ideas.If the hero could gain "level" on their bonus, that could even be better.I would love to see the "specialize" prestige too.

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