A lot of people have mentioned that building isn't fun in FE, and that you can't really specialize cities. Even the devs recognize this. This thread is all about how to fix that. Cities should feel unique and be interesting.
City Specialization
Before anything else in order for cities to specialize there has to be a reason not to or inability to just build everything.
Different things would work here: a large increase to building upkeeps, tile limits based on city level, or increased building costs and build times. I think I favor tile limits, although buildings should have a noteworthy cost as well. Some buildings like walls shouldn't count towards the limit.
Secondly, there has to be different paths to specialize in.
For our purposes that basically means resources. Local resources are excluded for obvious reasons. That leaves us with metal, mounts, mana, crystal, gold, and research. You could also specialize in troop production.
In the current system it would be very odd and difficult to specialize a city towards mounts, crystal, mana, or even metal. Sure you could build a building or 2 that produces them but you wouldn't specialize an entire city around them. You could change it so you had to but that is not something I am personally going to discuss in detail here. So we are left with gold, research, and troops. That's not many options...
We could specialize each of those cities more by breaking them down. For instance you could have to choose between improvements that boost military, magic, and civics research. For Gildar cities you could have gold mine, tax, and trade cities. For military you could have archer, mounted, and foot improvements. However this still leaves something to be desired. I propose we bring back the materials resource. Materials were a resource used to produce basic goods like leather and wood. This would allow you to make workshop or factory cities.
Tech Tree
There is only one real path to take down the tech tree and this limits building options as well as play styles.
This path is to rush down civics because only civics produces research. To fix this you need to add research generating improvements to the other trees. A magic one that requires crystals, mana, or converts the intelligence of a garrisoned champion into research. A military tech that allows you to gain research from killing, conquering, or razing. A miltary improvement that only produces research when you are at war. Having multiple branches on the tech tree grant more research would allow players to specialize much more.
Story Telling
Cities aren't very interesting, more things have to happen in them.
Cities with high unrest should rebel and players would lose control of them. A rebellious city with a garrison would lose its militia and instead depending on the size of the population produce militia and peasants to attack the garrison. If you beat the uprising it would lower unrest for awhile, giving you time to implement other options.
Some buildings might allow you to purchase new items from the shop for champions.
What are your guys ideas for making cities and city management more interesting?
