Terrain and World Building
Elemental Forums
One of the main areas they are focusing on in FE is making the world interesting and fun to explore. However I feel that the present limited amount of in game terrain hinders this. Maps in FE don't feel like worlds, they feel like random maps. They can be fun to play on and have some interesting stuff in them but immersion is limited because they still feel like random maps and not like true fantasy worlds. In fact I would say FE is far inferior to Civ5 and HoMM3 when it comes to world building. They both have many more types terrains you could build cities in, and Civ5 maps have poles and climate zones.
In the current version of FE there are only a few terrains and they aren't very interesting. Basically there is grass and dirt spotted with the occasional desert or swamp. While volcanic and snow terrain exists they are solely used by Wildlands. Late game even the dirt is slowly replaced by either purple or green grass until the entire world is one type of terrain excluding a few areas you can't build on anyway. The problem here is the fertile land mechanic. It really limits terrain diversity since cities can only be built on fertile plains since both empires and kingdoms spread their own unique ZoC art. The whole reviving the land and different ZoCs is a cool mechanic but its current downsides can't be ignored. The mechanic shouldn't be removed but it should definitely be expanded.
Right now both the dirt and grass tiles are actually one type of tile called plains with different fertility values. I strongly suggest adding more types of terrain that can be built on. For instance you could add tundra and savanna, with tundra being cold and savanna being warm and dry. Or tundra and savanna could be the fertile versions of desert and snow. Of course for players to build on these terrains they would need different graphics for different fertility values and different ZoCs, but I think that it would definitely be worth the effort. These types of terrain would have unique resources and monsters in order to differentiate them from plains. Tundra could have lower average food and savanna lower then average production.
To further develop the world you could designate directions or map edges as poles when maps are being generated. On small maps there could be only one, but there could be two poles on opposite ends of larger maps. Tundra and snow would spawn close to poles, while desert and savanna would be more likely to spawn far away from them. Thus you would end up with much more varied terrain that feels much more like a world instead of a randomly generated forest island. You can't tell me the world of Elemental only has one type of climate. This would also help each game to feel more unique because you wouldn't be starting and building on the same terrain every single game.
