LoL

This video just reminded me of a conversation I had with Scott waaaaaay back in Beta 1. I told him,

"Hey, I think it would play a lot better if you could build stuff anywhere within your sphere of influence.".

Don't believe me? Go ask him Truly Awesome, well done. I can't wait until you guys put this up.

Good stuff, but I say it again: The cities are way too close to each other. The whole map is covered with cities. There is almost no open space between the settlements. It just looks wrong, but maybe it's just me who finds it annoying.

That being said, I hope that we can modify the min. settling distance.

Hello, i am allmost deaf and cant understand the guy in the video. Could someone please tell me the changes in Beta 3B? After reading the comments alot of people are saying that they like the changes...

thanks in advance

monsters are cool

also the influence looks promising, hope we can test it this week

@darkreaver: here is my summary from the video (this is almost a word for word transcript):

1. Area of control matters a lot – you can build on anything in your area of control.
2. Your cities, other than a handful of early basic thing (like arcane lab) don’t generate your own research/money etc. Rather they improve on what resources you have.
   1. Ex) you have a gold mine and that is then magnified by your markets etc
   2. If you want tech knowledge you need to build on lost libraries scattered around maps
   3. If you want arcane knowlegeg you build on temples on the map
3. Thus you need to specialize your city to associate it with whatever is around you.
4. This makes the area control on the entire map more interesting, cause now there will be turf wars for control of the areas.
   1. This results in the early game moving a lot faster
   2. You cant just build a billion cities to get a lot of resource stuff now because the cities themselves aren’t generating the stuff
5. So in some games you may wanna go military, magic or other route depending on what resource you can get the best control off. This makes the game more varied

Looks awesome!  Nice work, cant wait to test it out.

These changes sound excellent. My territory actually means a lot more to me when I can build on any improvements in it.

I'm curious if the number of building slots has changed. If Frogboy wants to keep with the , "no duplicates" for non-housing buildings, I would think the number of building slots would decrease. In 3A, almost all of my cities were identical (of course like he said, the resource buildings only magnify which would stint that problem on its own).

I also really like these changes, and agree that forts and watchtowers, methods to exert control as distinct from cities, are now a must!

Also, I am curious if trade has been changed with this new system?  For example, you build a city to specialize in trade, magnifying the effects of all trade routes to and from the city?

Awesome Sauce..

That's good in theory, but in practice what happens is people get the wrong kind of start, think it's a "bad start from the random map generator", and just start a new game until they get what they want.

edit - Hopefully there's enough stuff out there that people don't need to do that. The preview looks good overall, can't wait to try it.

Thanks alot bagglewag25t, this realy sounds way better.

but wouldnt this mean even more city spamm? i mean to get it all, you need to build citys everywhere, so you can get all bonus for yourself?!

Agreed, when I start a game I'm going to have a path I want to follow in mind already, nation and sovereign choice will reflect that as well. If I get a horrible start for that playstyle I'm going to end up regenerating the map repeatedly until I get the things I want for the type of game I want to play. How the game plays should be my choice, not the choice of a RNG.

i guess theoretically, but as stated in the points this leads to land squirmishes for control thus forcing you to confront potential enemies and fight them for desired resources instead of hiding away in some corner and building city after city. this in turn forces you to incrase your fighting power before you attempt your land grab most likely, unless you have an easy AI. at least thats what i get out of it

I just recently pre-ordered EWoM and downloaded Beta 3A, can't quite describe how excited I am for this update!  (and even more so, the final release)  So glad the resources have been changed.  In my few play-throughs that really bothered me.  I like to play games aesthetically, not placing my theaters near my slums etc..  But also, with the whole research thing, I found I almost ran out of things to research by turn 200.  I guess not all the research trees and stuff are in yet, but I like the idea of maybe quickly gaining lots of basic stuff in each, but to get to the really good improvements or spells you have to actually devote some time and resources.  

Can't wait to see tactical battles, somewhat new to this genre of games (usually RTS/RPG player) so I want to see what they're like.  Also, I like the idea of being able to fortify your border with forts and walls and such... maybe they expand like cities, or maybe just have border cities built and fortified at key points.  

Ohhh, and I hope there is more to the character customization at some point, be fun to be able to change the body type.  Have options like a slider bar for height and "weight" and maybe a few options for how the fat/muscle is carried "body shape" (like how you have different face structures).  I've always wanted to play myself in a game, but I'm a big dude, NFL football lineman big.  Anyway, just a thought.  Can't wait to see everything yall've put in Beta 3B.

Nope.  The way this works is larger cities put out dramatically more influence, and city size is dictated by available food.  So you could have enough food for 5 level 3 cities, or one level 5 city, but they are able to control approximately the same amount of territory (at least this is how I see it going down).

I always like city specialization of its production.  However, this design begs a question, is production specialization the only way?  If yes, that means gamers do not have a choice.   There should be 2 ways for us to choose, specialize vs generalization. 

In the game, can generalization (i.e. most of my cities produce almost the same stuff) provide some benefit that specialization don't? 

Maybe, generalization do not provide the quantity and quality of a speciallized empire; but generalized production provide great flexibility because products are always spreads evenly across the empire, so supply line is short, products are usually close where it is needed.  Thus it is more tolerant to disruption of supply line.

A carefully designed pros & cons of generalized vs specialized production model is crucial.

===

Another crucial missing piece from the video is that there is no mention of how 'area of control' is determined.  Is it by a contest of 'prestige'?  

===

Agreed with Tormy that the map look crowded.  And it does not have a  'fantasy' look.   

===

I see that there are building can be built on steep hills.  Pls make sure there tall mountiains should be very common in most maps, so that there are plenty of natural choke points.

I always thought this was how it was in the beta (regarding zone control + world resources). Guess I'm galciv-damaged.

One way to make forts/outposts used (I see them working like they did in Kohan) is to make  their cost stay the same.  You'd use them early game to claim territory, and build citiies later when your econ can support it.

Keep cities escalating cost in, but make the forts a flat 50 or 100 for each one.  A city's ZOI would override a fort's though, though an enemy fort in the ZOC would be a combat bonus for that civ. 

Am I the only one that reacted to the fact that some of these resource points were more or less larger than entire, supposedly well-developed, cities?

This is a an interesting and promising direction on cities and resources. I can't wait to play 3B and see how it plays!

still not going to show us the dragon that you were debugging its quest?

So will we be able to deny an enemy a resource in their area of influence by stationing a unit on that tile or do we have to beat the city down enough to remove the influence?  I would think that if I can garrison a unit--even in your area--on a resource you shouldn't have access to it.  This would add to the ability to siege a town.

Yeah. The idea behind the system is sound, it just might need some tweaking to make sure all of these are within "reasonable" reach. It's fine if the map ends up making one "path" slightly easier than others, but it should never shut them out completely. Nothing more annoying than starting a map then 50 turns in after scouting everywhere around you finding out that you've got no gold mines so you can't even recruit an army, and you've been doing a bunch of War research and your Sovereign is a crappy caster.

This is going to make the game hugely more enjoyable and interesting for me, great job!

As for the idea that players will reroll maps constantly to get the perfect start, well that is their choice. I used to do that but committing yourself to play the game with whatever start you've got is much more challenging and interesting, and means you will be playing varied games rather than the same one over and over with a similar awesome start position.

I like this change, especially if it allows the computer players to figure out how to build farms.  Most of the games I have played no one ever attacks me and I find out why when I discover their cities.  They don't build on the food tiles.  They try to get to them, but they fail.  The computer is not good at snaking cities.  They also don't seem to be very good at choosing where to build a city right now.  Some of them drop down pioneers in the middle of no where.  This all leads to them not being a challenge to take out.  Weak opponents = less fun.  I'm sure this is all already fixed, but I'm wondering if anyone else noticed this happening.

Also, will it be possible for you to connect caravan routes to other players cities that you have non-aggression treaties with?  I have been unable to do it so far.  The caravan gets to the city then I get a window asking if I want to station it there, which does not result in a trade route.  If this can't be done it would be great to get a treaty that allows me to share a few food per turn with an ally so they can beef their cities up a bit and get stronger.