Looks nice! Tanks DsRaider!

Capitar is in the third picture...

I can't help but be very wary of how the city tile placement system seems intact even after all the talk how it serves no function and needs to go / made meaningful. Starting to get concerned.

At some point it was going to be a one-tile town with a separate town window (in my opinion the right way to go obviously), but now they seem to have hesitated and pulled their punches, settled for this weird system where you still have the tile placement but upgrade improvmenets so the city doesn't grow too much. Some kind of weird mish mash of a new system and the old one.

Seems like a compromise, and how exciting those usually are...

Kill your darlings.

Weren't the devs talking about having one main tile and four districts, ie. a small clump of tiles?  I don't think they mentioned that there would still be buildings built in the same way as previously - I think it was one main tile and a district for each level after level 1, so 5 tiles total - a centre square plus four adjoining districts.  It was also implied that they would be a separate city screen for each city too.

I like the tile placement and therefore city growing like it is in Beta 3. I hope it will not get cut down more, compared to WoM.

Beer in the sky for this ^^

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Remember how well waiting for the next beta to deliver the fun turned out with WoM? Every single time my fears have proven true with the Elemental project, so nowdays I'm just gonna air out the concerns sooner rather than later. Especially when there seems to be obvious backtracking on the initial plan going on here.

I hope it's going to be super fun. We'll be wiser in a month or so I guess.

There is no tie placement in beta 4. But cites do se more than 1 tile but far fewer than before. This is because we found it visually easier to tell what a given city was specializing on at a glance. 

Derek's Beta 4 post covers this best.  But essentially, improvements now replace each other. So you won't see a study + school + library + university + whatever.  Instead, you upgrade your research building into a better one and that replace it.

In doing so, a player, at a glance, can just look at a city and tell how good that city is in research or money making or production or what have you.  A city that would have used say 30 tiles in beta 3 would use around 4 in beta 4.  And construction works the same as training a unit, you choose a building and press a button and it's added to the queue.  There is no tile placement.

I, for one, welcome the compromise. I didn't like *either* extreme. 

When are we going to see the next beta? My mouth is watering over those screenshots...

Outposts no longer get destroyed, they get captured.  External resources get disabled when attacked but come back online after n turns (this is subject to internal play testing results).

Alright, the screenshots were a bit misleading then. I am less wary.

Thanks for bothering to clear that up, Brad. Sorry for the commotion.

Can outposts be razed? (if the player doesn't like the sloppy placement of the AI)

ps. I really appriciate that you keep your eye on these threads and our humble comments.

+1 Frog