It is in the game, but as the editor (so far as I can tell) will not allow you to modify the effects of triggers, it would be a complete pain as you would have to put quite a bit of work into each as it would need to be hand written. Even if the editor worked, it would still be a pain to create each and every lair with events. May I suggest working out a way to define lairs in their own xml file (like quests and goodie huts) so that they can be defined once and then just dropped into a map?

I will be posting about it in the idea board.

I understand creatures were never supposed to be the basis of the economy. However one must keep in mind that they must give a moderate amount of gold especially as dungeon master is currently a selectable trait. There can not be risk associated with losing troops and improvements while things are rewarding 2 gold per kill when the worst of monsters can take a 50g improvement down.

I think there is a fundamental problem with the in game economy. I still have a bad taste in my mouth from the complete lack of iron in 1.08 so my evaluation is still heavily based on that patch. City spam is currently encouraged because of the way merchants and caravans are handled. Until this changes I don't know how you can have a decent AI like GalCiv II unless you allow it to cheat. The AI simply will never be able to control a vast empire as well as an aggressive human.

About the release date of 1.1. I suppose I could be wrong about this but I remember the big content patch being talked about as a September thing. This may have been before these things were actually numbered.

I think a post needs to be made that discusses what we can do to fix the economy. There have already been constructive posts on damage calculation and food management.

Whatever happens with the mechanics, I"m hoping the AI appreciates them the way players do. For example, if the AI doesn't care that outposts cost one food, they're going to build outposts to claim resources just as they are now, to their own detriment.

I have no problem dialing back my force multiplication because the AI can't deal. I don't expect the AI to play at that level, and self-imposed challenges can often be fun.

But when the AI's only discernible strategy is gather resources as fast as it can, every time, every faction, every setting...you're going to get the same game every time, and the minute you can't keep up, you'll fall back on force multiplication, to even out the AIs knowledge and resource cheating advantage. 

How the AI chooses to approach the game is a larger determinant of how I'm going to play than any mechanics. It's understood that Elemental is a battle for territory of sorts. And yes, the fact that with enough research a new city costs you absolutely nothing, and therefore never really hurts you....but it's on overkill right now, and is going to be on overkill, both for players and the AI, as long as the AI keeps setting the pace and tone of each game with its behavior.

I've made the largest maps I possibly can, and the longest I can go before the AI is knocking at my door is 75 turns, so I get about 75 turns of "playing it my way" before I settle in for 150 turns of building cities directly in the AI's path and then working backwards until the whole map is covered. 

So I'm glad that mechanics are being revised to give PLAYERS a reason to slow down their growth. I just hope the AI, which is allowed to cheat and run deficits, understands those rules and tries to obey them as well. Because it's the reason I'm playing Elemental in a way I don't necessarily enjoy right now.

I have never understood the requirement for the ring of influence to affect where you can harvest resources.  If I have an army big enough to take the resource, why can't I harvest it?  Seems like a limitation imposed for some balancing reason, which I'd like to see removed.

I can see where it has a little value for "trespassing" concepts but not for resources...

Be nice if this was moddable...

Suggestion- why not have those sort of resources (monsters guarding them) , be some or most of the resources genned up by resource-discovering adventure techs.   

Another idea:  How to work around the sovereign being used as a settler issue, yet allow essence to  be used.

a) Sovereigns get a seed of life/death spell, costs 1 essence, creates a seed.  This seed can generate an outpost.

The seed is an item that can be carried by either any hero or any unit.

For military tech that mostly depends on the rules in the actual tactical battles.  Right now there are no rules so the tech that "adds the most points" is automatically and always the best.
Without more rules for tac battles, the tech tree cannot do anything but vertical progression.
Some techs also don't offer alternatives but instead multiply each other's effects which doesn't help matters.

Well, without more rules for the magic system (like a resist system that is not limited to physical armor) that isn't going to happen, either.
If these fire giants had a weakness (like water magic or spells protecting units from their fire...) things would look differently.

Right now the unit with the best magic resistance is a company of peasants with full plate armor. Kinda meh.

Fast travel or gates with some limitations built in - sure.  Even Teleport isn't automatically game-breaking when the unit has to travel for a few turns in "hyperspace".
But instant travel? No way.

So far the only one I really liked was Warhammer - Shadow of the Horned Rat. Had a quite similiar setting. Infantry, cavalry, bows, some rather inaccurate artillery.
In that game the battles were the game. And they did it right.   The rest were frontends for buying / reinforceing toops and such.

this is the crux of the issue i think. food USED to be the prime determinant of population growth because of the cost of housing and the scarcity of food. however, because it was a hard cap it caused frustration; people bawled about never having enough food to build that one extra house they needed to reach the next level, and so the limit became compromised.

and it's a fair complaint to my mind; why should someone be doomed to level 2 cities until they're destroyed, just because they couldn't find another food resource?

with food as a hard limit, you end up with only two possibly situations: either i have enough food, in which case i will spam settlements and my total population grows in proportion to my number of settlements; or my civilization stagnates because it can't grow anymore. neither of these possibilities is fun, which is why i suggested a softer more nuanced approach. it's symptomatic of the wider problems with the game; either i can't do anything at all, or i can do things to an obscene degree.

there are just far too many can'ts in this game.

i can't cast spells until i've built a research building and discovered them, i can't have 3 guys fighting together until i've researched it, i can't kill a LEVEL 1 BANDIT with my MIGHTY sovereign (really, i reloaded three times) until i've bought him some equipment that i can't buy until i've researched it (and even then i likely can't justify the expense), i can't build a merchant until i've increased my food supply, i can't form a worthwhile economy without a gold resource, i can't recruit cavalry unless i happen to control the one resource per map that allows it, i can't complete the quest because the objective spawned on the other side of neutral territory, i can't negotiate with anyone because my power rating is too low, even though i walk all over them in every fight, repeat ad infinitum.

fun games are built around softer controls that empower the player and show him the sorts of things the game can do from turn one. softer controls limit the extent to which players can do things, and the power of the decisions that they are able to make when they make them; they work under the hood, guiding the players hand instead of boxing it in and continue to affect him throughout the game, instead of having no effect once requirements have been reached.

you say you're not going to reform the economy fundamentally because it requires balancing from scratch. i personally don't believe that under the current arrangement it will ever be balanced in a way that is fun. i can't imagine this will be anywhere near as tough to balance as specialist slots, which if anything will only highlight how broken flat pop growth / city is: the importance of population will only encourage more settlements because more settlements is the best way to get more pop. so long as you have the food. and if you don't the game will be reduced to scraping by in a way that is fun for no one.

i will not pay for any additions to the game until i feel the economy has been seriously and fundamentally reassessed. this is not intended as a threat; it is just what i have resigned to because i just don't find the game fun at present. unfortunately my experience with GC2's economy does not lead me to believe this will happen. we will probably get a whole new set of arbitrarily different tech trees and random events before that happens.

I'm not sure why people seem to think that 1.1 was going to come out at the end of September.  Maybe I missed a post.

1. The game released August 24. 
2. Stardock has been patching to regularly in the month it has been out (now at 1.09).
3. Brad's post on the release schedule was on September 21.

Absolutely essential - the basic structure of an outpost (i.e. a new outpost with no buildings) produces population growth (1 person per turn) and access to a second market/workshop/etc. If people are going to be a resource then you need some cost to offset this. 

This is exactly the same reason as why settlers went from 1 pop to 2 pop from civ 2 to civ 3.  A new city had the centre square woked plus one additional square (equivalent to 2 population working) and losing only one population from the original city resulted in a net benefit from city spam.

If you had 1 food provides a basic outpost, and 1 food provides the housing sufficient for an outpost to grow to a second level where the population grows at 2 per turn then you might have a workable system.

Regarding caravans - it doesn't make much sense to me to have caravans produce extra food - gold yes (simulates trade, efficiencies of production specialisation) - food no (why would more food come out of the ground by putting it on the back of a wagon). 

There is a way of producing the development effect that caravans produce in a different way.  To be able to get to level 3 a city must be connected with 3 other level 2 cities, to get to level 4 it must be connected with 3 other level 3 cities, to get to level 5 it must be connected with 3 other level 4 cities.  By connected with I mean receiving caravans from currently.  Of course the numbers need tweaking, and it might only be applicable at the higher levels, and you might want to allow cities 2 levels below etc.  but this gives the feel of expanding an interconnected empire rather than just putting down another city

I don't agree as I like lots of cities in my games. It was possible in MOM though there was a 3 square rule which was fair and I enjoy MOM very much. So, continue with the large amounts of cities on the map and be sure the AI continues to spam/build them also. I don't want to have to play with a handful of cities as that gets boring. In all the Civilization, Alpha Centauri, GalCiv2 and Master of Magic I always have tons of cities to play with. I get settlers out as fast as I can. Heck I even have a settler city once I get started good just churning out settlers/pioneers to gain even more cities and resources. So, keep up the good work here Brad this is what most players will want.

I don't mind city spam as a valid strategy technique that's used to some extent or other in all 4x games, but:

1) It doesn't match well the theme of a post "cataclysm" environment in this game in particular (however, I also don't think it's possible to match the game to this theme in a practical & realistic way that provides a challlenging AI for a number of reaasons).

2) city spam should not be the only means of victory as some other poster mentioned previously. The amount of time it takes to win with spam & conquest should be about the same time it takes to win on magic, quest, and diplomacy. If this is not the case, it's going to turn the game into a one-strategy wonder, and a weak AI (especially militarily wise) insures that it remains mostly boring.

These things need to be adressed. Nerfing the city spam strategy just for the sake of doing it because a few vocal players don't like is exactly the wrong thing to do. If you nerf it or minimize spam for other reasons (i.e. to fit with the "cataclysmic" theme, then I can understand .. but in this case the "cataclysmic" theme needs to be underscored dramatically in a practical game-wise way that players can directly see while playing, it just doesn't exist in the game-as-is in anything other than a story-line). I don't have a problem with "weakening" the city spam in some way if the ultimate goal is to make alternate game-play strategies equally viable, but frankly I don't see that happening. I mean this whole post is about nerfing city spam to some extent or other, but how is this going to make victory by other means more viable, which hasen't been addressed at all? At this point based on everything that I've read, it seems that the spam-conquest strategy is still going to be the #1 approach. How is going to be any easier (or at least equally easy/hard) to win on spell-making, quest (still have to access those enemy lands which will only happen with war), and/or diplomacy? Especially on small maps.

And btw, how is one level four building with a food, gold, ant material resource going to be better than 4 "outposts" collectively collecting 2 gold, 2food, 2 materials, one metal, and one crystal? ... I just don't see that happening in this game. I'll take the spam cities every time with extra resources & build that horse archer III squad with 96 attack that all the good trinkets that crystal can provide me (but level 4 cities don't).

I really like this idea. Maybe with the move towards fewer cities, this will become viable again?

Now, having thrown my 2 cents in, I have to say that this thread gives me hope, but not for the reasons you may think. When I first heard that Stardock was going to "listen to our input", I wanted to toss my DVD into the waste bin. But, from Frogboy's posts here, I'm reassured that this game won't be designed by committee, as I had thought. Trawling for good ideas is good. Trying to please everyone is bad.

Easy when the lvl 4 city can build multiple irrigation buildings, banks, money changers, great mills...

"Very special" resources like crystal will always require a minig camp of sorts but that's not the same as building 30 generic outposts just because they produce something (like a food caravan) for nothing.

i guess this is my last post then.

I don't disagree. I've certainly played enough GalCiv, all the various CIV versions, MoM, Master of Orion, etc, to appreciate rapid expansion as a viable strategy. Not to mention all the RTS games that also allow/need this. However, please note the bolded section: this is precisely my quibble. One of the things that strongly attracted me to the game was the pre-release conceptual discussion published by Stardock's developers - the game wasn't going to be just another "CIV-lite". The way it sounded, Stardock was making a bold effort to redefine the fantasy TBS genre: sort of "Sid Meier meets Gary Gygax". And to a great extent, they succeeded (which, btw, keeps me playing it in spite of its current flaws). Unfortunately, the alternate strategies are NOT currently viable - certainly not as a starting strategy in the early game - at least at higher play levels. Now, admittedly, once you get some breathing room, it's usually possible to switch to one of the other game-winners in mid-game. Of course, by that point you probably have 20-30+ towns (and your economy is in the toilet) because you've been forced to conquer at least one AI opponent to get any breathing room (and you're stuck with the AI's gold or food deficit). Which IMO sort of defeats the RPG aspect of the game that was such a central theme of the concept. After all, by the time you have the "luxury" of, say researching Adventure tech to start questing, the Royal Family is already a crowd of powerful casters with a massive army at their beck and call and the first four quest levels are ludicrously easy. Even the Master Quest is absurd at that point (I ran it once with 3 family member casters including the sov, Sarog, four young dragons, and the rest were summoned giants in a single 12-unit army; it didn't even last a full combat turn).

To make my point explicit: I'm not whinging for Stardock to nerf the city-spam/conquest strategy. That can be fun in it's own right. What I would like to see is some way to structure the AI's approach so that I'm not forced to race up the Warfare tree and spam outposts at the beginning of the game simply because I know that I'm going to be in a war-to-the-knife with the AI within the first 50-60 turns (on a large map - I've had as little as 15 turns before that happened!) or get squished into a corner. IOW, I'd like to be able to explore for awhile, maybe beat up some wandering monsters, run a few quests, and choose my own tech path/strategy right from the start. That is, after all, what the game was designed for (as I understand it).

Dawn of Discovery had an awesome trade system where you automate ships with goods to deliver to any city.  It seems micromanaging resources to that extreme might be too much for elemental, but what about some type of "Trade Caravan" screen / spreadsheet?

What if prestige was global and there was no per city bonus so by building many small outposts you would actually dilute your prestige and eventually cause your cities to not grow?

Also with this system you could award prestige with quests and for defeating certain monsters or completing other objectives.

Well said.

In my mind, there's only two real solution to the problem:

1) Incremental maintenance (city cost x-1 of a certain resource -usually gold- to maintain). So as you build more cities, you get increasingly harsh maintenance. This forces you to develop less cities to keep maintenance at a manageable level, and you'll only take on new cities if you know you can offset the cost. Basically, the CIV way.

2) Development maintenance/bonus, aka the GC2 Model, where colonies cost you until they grow and produce gold. Basically, smaller cities cost maintenance (negative income), bigger cities produce gold. IE: An outpost could cost 10 gold to maintain, a Village could cost 5, a town would be neutral, a city produce 5, a metropolis produce 10. Think of it as tax income overcoming cost of maintenance. In this model, players are rewarded for building real "cities", and not just dropping outposts everywhere and reaping the benefits. In fact, if you do that too early too fast, you'll cripple yourself.

To be honest, I don't know why the 2nd isn't in place, given how well it works in GC2.

Maintance costs for low level cities the start would require you to already have an establish presence at the beginning of the game. I have preposed the first suggestion many times, though in my model it would be non-linear in how the cost grows.

No it doesn't, all you have to do is give players 1000 G to start instead of 100. Have them manage that as they start in the red on their economy, it's exactly how GC2 does it.

The problem, Kalin, is that you don't always get your first gold mine for some time.

Edit:  Oh, a larger amount of money to start with.  That would take care of the problem.

As to adding 1 food cost to starting cities:

Right now a Kingdom city requires (assuming you've researched Housing):

Level 1 (10): 0 food

Level 2 (25): 1 food (+1)

Level 3 (100): 2 food (+1)

Level 4 (400): 4 food (+2)

Level 5 (1250: 11 food (+7)

Adding a 1 food requirement to the level 1 city and not changing anything else would make the total food requirement for that city 12.

My starting city will, at present, always have a fertile land providing 4 food. Irrigation is a quickly available tech that will give me +25% once built, but that pales in comparison to what I will get from caravans. Assuming I build subsequent cities at least say 10 or so squares away (don't know the exact distance formula yet) each caravan is going to give another +25% at minimum, and I've seen caravan bonuses of over 98%. In other words the caravan boost from any level 1 city founded sufficiently far away will, once connected back to my capital, pay for a proposed 1 food requirement.

Add in an eventual granary, farmer's guild, a few farmer heroes, caravans from other factions and so on and I'll probably have 500% or more on my capital. So even if I didn't find any more food anywhere I'm at 24 total food, enough to make my capital level 5 and support at least 4 level 3 cities. Granted that's assuming I don't build any of the gilder-related buildings that also require food, but you get the idea. In all reality I will have gotten more food tiles from Adventure discovery or just plain good luck, so really food limiting growth beyond the very early game is not much of a challenge, at present.

The numbers are slightly different for the Empire but they get their upgraded housing tech way earlier than Kingdom.