Demiansky

[quote who="Scoutdog" reply="2" id="2549664"]When you said "radically different food sources" I immediately thought of the Fallen and.... other Fallen. But aside from that... errm... avenue, this sort of system would really make things interesting when it comes to protracted wars deep into enemy territory: your cities filled with your citizens are doing just fin on their wheat and oranges, then you take over a Fallen town and your occupying army gets to feast... on grubs and the oc

In most strategy games, a piece of land is generally equally as valuable to everyone. Think of Master of Magic. A gold deposit, river square, or ocean square had the same value to everyone. All resources were equally as easy to exploit by anyone. So why not shake things up a bit? I was thinking of all the different types of food resources that could exist in the game and what it would mean for expansion. For instance, one civilization might start out

Lol, Sean, I'm pretty sure Real Life doesn't apply in Elemental: War of "Magic." Yes, if a game purports to be realistic then I am offended when a soldier is struck 30 times and still fights on. But I am not offended if, in a magical setting, a soldier had such power. If Elite Soldiers bite the dust after one sword blow, then so will heroes and so will sovereigns which means we lose a significant area of the game. No one will try to pursue and level up heroes if they h

Whoa, okay I think we're misunderstanding the original poster. I think he was suggesting that new cities get their first growth from immigration from your other cities, but your big cities get immigration from the wastes? Either way, it doesn't seem to fix the problem of cities eventually expanding to fill every corner of the map. Sure, it might slow civilization expansion down, but that's only one part of city spamming.

[quote]I like Demiansky's and Tasunke's ideas. They seem to solve city-spam while making cities themselves more memorable and valuable, and provide a large number of soft targets so warfare is less binary. Since some people seem to be having trouble understanding those walls of text, here's my own formatted TLDR-friendly version:[/quote] Excellent synopsis :-)

[quote who="Tasunke" reply="28" id="2547611"]It would be cool if a Certain Dungeon or Quest required entering an Astral Plane to defeat some Demon or Wraith that has possessed something or someone ... alot like the relevant "Fade"-related quests in Dragon Age: Origins. The first time that sloth-demon entranced me into the Fade world ... that was quite fun. You can only use your Channeler, or a Powerful Mage, and its more about spell usage and Transformation (transformation was much

[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="10" id="2547247"]After re-re-reading your post, I see that I didn't understand you. Sorry. Now, I see you propose the same system as MoM. Generalized food. Max population limited by food nearby. That worked good for anti-city-spamming, but ... the empire building thing was too dull because there were no way to control land without a new town. The map was so empty. And starting points could be too harsh sometimes. It could lead to unfair starting points

[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="148" id="2547235"]@cauldyth. humm .. you're right about unit producing. But in the long time 5 cities will be better then 2 cities. But for population growth you forget to add the prestige bonus ! A city of 500 and a pop growth of 10% would get 50 more pop and a percentage due to prestige. And prestige doesn't automatically grow. So 5 cities will get you more prestige than one city, unless you build a lot of prestige buildings in your only town. Another thing als

[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="8" id="2547208"]Before spaming cities, you have to spam outposts And more cities also means more population : with one city you have the prestige bonus and the growth bonus. with two cities you have twice your prestige bonus and the growth bonus. So, a high level in prestige will let you have a lot of population (and gold and research) with the more city you can build. And the sooner you build your first outposts (that will be cities someday) the soon

[quote]It can be very hard to tweak the numbers just right, and it is hard to prevent having lots of smaller cities rather than a few big cities.[/quote] It's actually very, very easy to prevent city spamming if there is a food cap. Just make larger cities more efficient per citizen or have greater synergistic benefits between industry when inside a city. One school would give you +10 research points and +3 for each additional school. Just an example. If food l

[quote who="vieuxchat" reply="5" id="2547186"]Food won't discourage players to spam 5 cities with 100 pop in it instead of two cities with 250 population. Same population, but in one case you spam cities, in other you try to stay at least grouped. One thing that would force players to stay in few cities would be the harsh living. If you know that your low level town could be easily devasted by natural raiders, by trolls, or whatever, then you would reconsider the buildin

[quote who="Tridus" reply="3" id="2547173"]The more I think about it, the more I like a food based solution. Food is already in the game, it makes logical sense (with the land desolate and lifeless, food would be pretty scarce & valuable), and it opens up a lot of options without being complex. It's easy to understand that you only have enough food for 5000 people across your empire, and it's easy to understand what you have to do to improve that (capture more food sources and research im

[quote who="MagicwillNZ" reply="1" id="2547143"]Though I think this idea is generally good, it does give particular advantage to people who happen to spawn nearby several food sources. In order for this to work, you have to make it prohibitively expensive to have more than, say 3 towns with considerably less benefit. Beyond a certain point the production of the town should become so expensive per-unit that the town has to get scrapped. [/quote] You are absolutely right, which is

Here's my simple, intuitive approach to limiting city spam: Tada

So we all hated the city spamming that took place in Civilization. The problem with Civ was two-fold. Food resources were generally evenly distributed across the landscape, meaning you had cities everywhere. To make matters worse, food could never move so cities always popped up around food resources. Not only that, but by late game virtually any landscape, almost deserts even, could support a worthwhile city. With my solution, there simply isn't enough food exis

Stopping city spam should be easy. The devs only have to do 2 things, which I'm surprised not many people have mentioned yet: A: Make food limited and localized to specific types of landscapes. B: Make food fluid and moveable. Basically, food would be limited to certain fertile pockets or crescents along rivers. So let me illustrate (don't get hung up on the numbers, this is just hypothetical.) The vast majority of regions on the map would have a dive

[quote who="Wintersong" reply="4" id="2546356"]Hmm Forum ate my post without Egads... So... I like the idea but I like Courtier heroes too. Or that type that doesn't go frosting/flaming/slashing people while sigthseeing distant lands but stays at home and faces other kind of challenges. But I like the idea and "urban heroes" are nothing but a wish at this point (and out of topic ). [/quote] Lol, sorry about that Winter. Yeah, I like the idea of courtier heroes to

So some of the devs have bounced around the idea of having heroes as governors, but I personally would not want them to sit around in a city to give them bonuses. Instead, I had another fun idea to throw into the mix... If a hero is governing a city, the city gets benefits based on the heroes exploits. Basically, once you get high enough on the adventuring tree, there would be a monum

Well, I've got a fun idea to throw into the mix... If a hero is governing a city, the city gets benefits based on the heroes exploits. Basically, once you get high enough on the adventuring tree, there would be a monument dedicated to that hero in the city. For instance: Billy the Ranger has completed numerous wilderness quests and has managed to capture all manners of unique animals. His monument gives bonuses to all rangers and animal tamers trai

Problem I forsee is cities capping out too soon. Because a city it limited to a certain number of tiles, and your city is basically your buildings, you'll be unable to grow in power without gaining more cities which means... you need to build as many as you can... and if you can't build them to due to essence useage, then the emphasis of the game turns toward... conquering new cities. And now we're back to the same problem we're trying to avoid. Cities need to be able to gro

[quote who="tenchifew" reply="1" id="2543258"]It could work and would probably be better than the current system, but would be far more difficult to balance. For example Instead of simply abstractly having people come roaming in from the country side, they would be in roving, survivalist bands at the beginning which the sovereign must court. Eventually, these bands run out, and you must rely strictly on fertility rates. this would probably work ver

Uhm, I would say that Civ 5 is in fact a substitute product in relation to Elemental, so yes, those with limited budgets may have to choose between the two. I for one will buy both.

So after one of the recent dev posts, I have to say I'm disappointed with the way that cities are turning out. Granted, we don't know exactly how it will turn out until future betas. The devs always promised that Elemental would be enveloping and feel like a living growing world. Having authoritarian control over where to plop every building in your city--- right on down to where "huts" go--- is not very organic. I think so far what cities are sorely lacking is

[quote who="SpardaSon21" reply="477" id="2542969"]If America wants to remain a superpower, it needs to ditch Obama and the Dems who want to turn us into Eurosocialists, it needs to drastically reduce its debt and deficit spending, and it needs to step far, far away from cap-and-trade. Europe can cap their carbon, and we can go ahead and outproduce them. [/quote] Lol, eurosocialists. Like I said in another post, independant studies in demographics has shown that the "e

Want proof that CO2 causes a rise in surface temerature? Go spend a weekend on venus...