Benefits of enabling the "choose your improvement placement for cities"

from Elemental Forums

So is manual improvement placement in cities important? Only thing I could see it being used for would be placing your non-forest based buildings like merchants in tiles that are not forests, that way you can build a logging camp on the now available forest slot. Anything else it helps with, or is the AI smart enough to not auto place structures on forests that don't need them?

7,681 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

it's unsupported, i.e. the game is intended to be played without it. but it used to work that way in older betas and some people liked it, so they kindly left it as an option.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

I think the primary use for it is you can expand your city always in one direction and get closer to a mana node that is outside the bounds of your city this way eventually.

 

Not sure if that is still true.

 

Mike.

Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

It helps with travel somewhat. When you pass through one of your cities you travel instantly to the other side. If you have stretched out your city in a long direction the distance you can travel in one move can be significant. It also seems to help with getting to things like shards and other resources faster.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top


at higher difficulties it's useful to manage the cities "Zone of Control" to ensure you don't anger nearby laired monsters.

 

 

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

You can also use it to deliberately widen your city, to cover gaps in terrain and restrict the movement of monsters and enemy troops

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

I find it very useful to quickly connect resources with a settlement (which prevents them from being destroyed by rampaging monsters and enemy armies) and to block off parts of the map by stretching the settlement between mountain ranges. It also speeds up connecting the zone of control of new settlements with the rest of the kingdom/empire (to avoid the +15% unrest modifier).