Hmm, perhaps a specialist could cost 10 population ...

I just wonder, how would you re-calculate slot-availability after military recruitment?

OR would you simply not be able to recruit from used slots (makes sense).

Also, will we see any real sense of population growth? Or will be arbitrarily limited to 1 or 2 pop per turn??

I've never actually been able to buy that sword. Before 1.08 I was rolling in cash due to monster farming & I was able to afford all the nice stuff from the item shop for my champions: they all had ceder longbows, armor, 5 or 6 amulets each. I easily spent 2000 per guy on all that fun stuff. The best I can do now is travelling boots & whatever those 10gb & 50gp amulets are. All the rest of my cash goes to armies & buildings. Getting the mint of Ruvenna helps a lot as far as cash, but its still not as good as monster farming. . It's too bad because there's a lot of cool stuff in the item shop it's just A) overpriced and B ) money is better spent on other stuff like squads. If you run into yithril soldiers you'll see them armed with that sword (read the descrption on the gif) and it has a ridiculous magical first attack (does like 30/40 damage from a single soldier's blow).

I typically make a beeline for market & mint tech, this help a lot with funds, also adventure tech sometimes shows additional gold deposits. I've seen new gold mines suddenly appear after researching some adventure techs. Seeking out gold mines & food sources are priorities for my pioneers as are crystal sites which can really beef up design-you-own squads with magical equipment.

I was an ASL playtester back in the early 80s for "advanced" squal leader (replaced SL, COI, COD, and GI). The game still exists & you can play it online via the VASL engine which is an online version of the game. It's still popular & people can buy the physical modules through MMP (Multi Man Publishing who lease the game from Hasbro who bought out the AH game company in late 90s). I play VASL occasionally, but I recently got a new computer so I need to install the VASL engine & all the boards over again. There's over 12 modules currently including the pacific theater with Japanese + Chinese & eastern european (axis minors). The North Africa theatre & desert has also been out for a couple decades. At last count there are over 52 official geo mapboards now. There is most definitely a hard core ASL community, players never lack for ASL opponents.

Make population limited and global.  Make us compete with other sovs for the limited population.  People become the determining resource.   This would limit city/troop spam.  Make putting people into armies hurt economy/etc. and make the loss of troops hurt so we don't throw them away heedlessly.

Elemental is a strategy game.  Learn to adapt your strategies.

For your point -- garrison cities so you don't need your killer stack to move back and forth to put out fires.  Have multiple stacks instead of just "...my army...".  Don't make such a huge and far-flung kingdom when you lack the troops to defend it.  Grow at a sustainable pace.

You use a sloppy/careless/simple strategy then complain when the game isn't dumbed-down enough for said strategy to be fun/effective.

Instead of lobbying the devs to lower the bar, improve your game.  That's what a good strategy game does -- demands we improve our play.

For a new building or troop you need sufficient unassigned people.  Even if you have the gold/tiles/materials to build a troop/building, if you lack enough unassigned people you have to wait.

Of course I could be wrong...

edited in after seeing froggy's second post -- Yeppers, I was wrong.

I understand the impact on troop spam, but would it really stop city spam, I wonder? Wouldn't making more outposts still produce more prestige and thus attracts more people to your side?

I wasn't thinking of a hard-coded people limit, but a soft-code (rule of diminishing returns, as that's 'realistic' and a useful game principle).

Yours is a good point tho -- if not done right it would increase the benefit from early city spamming.  What would be a good counter -- make pioneers expensive population-wise (the people invested into pioneers would be unavailable to build up their city and make troops, so a new city would slow things down substantially for the short term)?  Or slow to recruit?  Or...?  Or go back to an essence requirement for non-revitalized lands?

The end result (if done properly) is the same -- 10 equal choices.  Only difference is you lost your easy no-brainer choice that you took because it was too powerful.

If you were the one who had to assign scarce resources to improving the game, spending real time&money, would you take the 1x or the 9x path?

You need to imagine your wearing froggy's hat and see the big picture.

Well personally I've tried a lot of things with pioneers. I made them expensive, I made them take longer to train, I made them cost Elementium (and gave each faction a 0.1 Elementium income per turn), and while I have been very successful at slowing expansion (sometimes to a crawl), I've never been able to actually dissuade a spam strategy with just a modification of pioneers alone. If it's still best to make as many cities as you can, it usually ends up happening regardless of the actual rate of how fast you can make another city. So I think the same will be true for the essence requirement solution as well.

The only thing that I can think of would work is to make building up your cities better than building new ones. For example: instead of training a pioneer and building a city in some wasteland to get 1 prestige from an outpost. Allow that pioneer (or something of similar cost) to make something in your base city that would produce more than the benefit that an outpost would provide (in our example, more than 1 prestige). That way, a new city would only be built if they need something that you can't provide (like a new build queue) or to claim an area of land. Ideally, you would still raise the cost and training time of a pioneer , but now you have a real choice on what to do instead of just go ahead and build an outpost whenever you can.

If you start with 1, that's not true.

A settlement having a base 1 slot would make logistical sense.  One unit to defend your city.  Once we have an AI that actually attacks, we'll even need to defend our cities.

I'm not even slightly sold on this specialist stuff, but who knows.  Maybe further iterations on the subject will do what the global mana pool did, make me not so scared of it and eventually decide it's an improvement on what is.

This shit would have been a lot easier to solve if you'd just gone with an employment driven production system and realistic farming in the first place...  You'd build infrastructure to employ population instead of filling slots up, and your "specialists" would be the peons that weren't stuck feeding themselves due to a patch of land being productive enough to support extra population.

Just curious, but then how will you ever build a new city? They will never grow... considering they will never be able to compete with your capital.

If a city always starts with 1 specialist slot, I'd definitely spam outpost. Not only does the pioneer only cost 1, the new outpost just gave it back?

Making population limited sounds interesting, but what happens in a long drawn-out game that has taken the lives of all your citizens in battle?  What you end up with is a stalemate with nothing to do because your population is gone.  This might work as a map option (armageddon mode?), but not for the base game.

I disagree with the global population idea.  It wouldn't be fair to plop-down a new city right next to your enemy and start spamming a massive army using citizens from the other side of the world.

This is what will happen by default if Pioneers take up several slots to build under the new system.  We are dealing with population as form of currency here.  You are basically buying your improvements with your population slots, so in exchange for not spending a Pioneer you get to make something in your level 5 city that your new level 1 city cannot make if you were to make a Pioneer instead.

Balance is good.

Poorly thought through changes are bad.

I'm still on 1.07 because 1.08 sounds a bit dodgy but going on what people have said they have dropped the gold received from monster hunting. That's fine, I wanted that change BUT at the same time they needed to make monsters start to drop items. So instead of killing monsters to get gold to buy horrendously overpriced items, you instead kill monsters to find cool items.

Doing one change without the other is bad and missing the point completely.

This is what I have said in numerous posts recently. Tinkering with one mechanic at a time isn't going to markedly improve the game, there needs to be a higher level blueprint for how all the game elements should fit together.

... I think you are taking what I'm saying in this way out of context here. My point regarding pioneer cost not doing enough wasn't a reply to your idea regarding specialist slots. I addressed that problem very specifically in my earlier post here.

When you found your city, you'd get it back anyway...  If units don't return specialist slots when they "die" then the game would never get anywhere.  This would be game play suicide of spectacular proportions, vastly more broken than even the worst alpha states the game has been in over the beta cycle.

It's not a net gain to have one specialist if you need to use one specialist to defend your one specialist producing object.  A pop zero settlement would effectively be null in value, requiring it's own output to protect itself.

I realize this is the core mechanic now, and that's how specialist works. If you read my other posts, you would realize this. But their whole idea depends on pioneer consuming specialist, and my point on this was that EVEN IF you manage to do this with some other mechanic, returning it right away is counter productive. I'm not sure how else I can explain it.

So in other word, you would still be able to build in 0 pop outposts, and these buildings would then produce... something? Because if it's still the same workshop/market/study thing we have now, even a 0 pop outpost would have value. As such, the 0 pop outpost would just be to prevent a multiplicative of troop training queues, and not city spam itself as a tool to gain resources?

I mentioned in a subsequent post global pop being soft capped, not hard.  Rate of pop attraction would be a function of your pop -- so as your pop decreased from unit loss, all else equal, your pop attraction rate would increase, helping to replace your losses.   You wouldn't be stuck with an ever-diminishing pop base (unless one played stupidly and ignored prestige/etc.).

Second, your scenario would be harder to pull off than it is now, as currently there is no limit on recruitment at your new city, whereas there would be with the idea I mentioned.

I'm not saying it's a good idea.  It may stink.  I'm trying to come up with ideas that are:

-based in part on lore as much as possible

-balanced

-create relatively hard choices

I'm not wedded to any of my suggestions.  Better alternatives are welcome!

Yes, 10 equally useless choices. And choice which does not affect anything is NOT a choice.

Traits SHOULD be powerfull, otherwise there is no reason to have them at all.

Human resource?  Is slavery next?  Merchant caravans carting poor slaves from one city to the next?

It seems to me that using limits on a Pioneer to control the number of cities isn't the way to go. There should be another mechanic that keeps the number of cities in check. For example, in Civilization 3 / 4, the mechanic was corruption. The more cities, and the further away from your capitol, the more corruption ate at your gold. In Civilization 5, the mechanic is Happiness.

I'm sure there are a number of mechanics that Elemental could use to limit the number of cities, that work with the lore. Perhaps bringing back the Essence requirement in some way, since you have to transform the land. This could reduce your maximum global mana pool. This is just one example.

Kids these days...

This ain't rocket science...

Told you it's not rocket science -- it's lexicon.

1. Many stuff has been changed in the last 2 years. What is the problem with "spamming" cities? I will tell you: nothing is wrong with it...especially in EWoM, because you can destroy a city with 1 spell. Also, you can spam cities in all tbs games. [AoW-SM, Civ 4 etc.] I am not saying that the ability to spam cities is a must have. No. We need some logical/fun system to prevent city spamming. Elemental: War of Magic. What was my suggestion back in those days regarding this? -> SD's original idea was good enough. 1 essence was needed to create a new settlement. There was 1 problem with this. It was only possible to gain essence @ lvl up. That should've been tweaked to make essence "gain" more easy [we've posted many ideas regarding this]. = No city spamming, and creating a city would be tied to magic basically.

2. What was the problem with the original ideas regarding the eco system? That system was close to perfect imo. What was the only limiting factor back in those days? The size of the city + resources. It was perfect. "Hard limits" = bad. Thankfully, v1.09 will have some good changes, but it still won't be as good as the original concept...I guess. Let's wait and see.