Good to see another option suggested. 

Frogboy are we to infer from the OP that teleportation per se is not to be addressed?  If so perhaps 0-tile cities should be on the table.

(With a 9 tile city we will still get 3 tile teleportation...  Leads me to suggest that perhaps a 0-tile city would be the best, strictly on this account.  Have an icon marking a city in a tile but require units once they are already in that tile to 'enter city' as a separate move - like entering a cave.  This is the only way we will get rid of teleportation if it is not addressed separately.  Gives the added advantage of making sieges take place easily when there are enemy units in the tile which is the countryside surrounding the city.  I think this is preferable to a 1-tile +additions city.  Not my favourite option but also deals with whatever problems the AI might have with chokepoints...)

I have great reservations about the removal of spatiality (as Cruxador puts it) from the game.  With regard to city building:

-It should matter whether a resource is included within my city, on the outskirts of my city, or halfway across the map.  It should be 'better' somehow if it is closer, whether through reduced maintenance, additional resource production, or other abilities like opening the possiblity to construct buildings.  I think you are forgoing an important source of city specialisation via the latter if you no longer allow resources to be within city walls.  No more Temples of Essence, for example.  (There is quite a lot of added challenge/value in looking for a city site which will allow Special Building X but requires a Lumbermill and Iron Ore mine within the city walls.  Or perhaps I could do that but only by not being able to use a nearby, overlapping location for Special Building Y which requires a shard and a scenic view within the city walls.)  Geography should matter for city specialisation.  Of course the optimal degree which you can extend your cities to do so is a separate matter for debate.

-It should be a strategic possibility to create a chokepoint.  We are able to do this with terraforming spells, so why not with cities?  Build the AI to deal with/use chokepoints (which they are going to have to anyways) and there is no problem with this.  Chokepoints can be useful but it is hardly, create a chokepoint = win the game.

-I want my more powerful cities to be bigger on the map.  Not merely by level but by actual infrastructure development.  An 'empty' level 4 city should look smaller than my (building) maxed out level 3 troop production city.

-Cities just look cool on the main map! (Okay this is my opinion and others differ.)  Have a look at the recent FE promos we have seen and take out the lovely cities... the promos are much more lacklustre.

-I don't want my Pariden level-6 megametropolis being limited to 32 buildings.  (By the way, as Froggie knows, he didn't make a 9 tile city, it has already gone out over the edges.  There is already a 4 tile teleportation zone there...)

I'm conflicted.

On one hand, the proposed mechanic is neat and surely superior to what we have right now.

On the other hand, I don't like a pre-set limit on the number of improvements. That's NOT how you push towards specialization. Look at Alpha Centauri or any other 4x game: players are NOT FORCED to go the specialization way. You could try and make generalist cities all over the map, building everything everywhere (barring mutually exclusive improvements or other special cases): it's just that efficient use of resources (and time) discourages it, or it's just plain hard to do - and increasingly so as you raise the game's difficulty. I would prefer a system that works somewhat like this.

Hope this helps Love the map thingie anyway!

How about some kind of compromise

Stay with the 1 tile building concept, but on every level up of the city take another tile on the map to show that the city is larger...

You could even take than buildings already build for this tile to give most cities an individual look.

Benefits:

- No limitation in the number of buildings due to artificial size restrictions

- easy to see the size of a city on the map (this can probably also be realized in the pure 1 tile concept, but anyhow)

- a more organic look to the world and cities if they grow a little bit

Other potential options here:

- a potential option for players to decide on their own how their cities should look like (e.g.  by a city view configuration screen, where you mark which buildings shall be shown on the card)

- with some work you could probably even make the specialization of a city visible, but selecting one building of the most build kind, e.g. barracks if there are a lot of military buildings or lumber yard, if there are lot of resource buildings.

Just my five cent.

I would actually prefer one tile cities, resources on the map and connected to the nearby city if in its influence zone, and a separate city building screen where you can build as much as your heart desires.  This allows great sprawling metropolises.

This game, like all turn based 4x games, is abstract.  But having a city only take one square on the strategic map is that much more "realistic", which helps my immersion.  I think of units with x figures in them as representing hundreds of soldiers, cities as having thousands of people flocking back to civilisation with nearby minor settlements not shown on the map.

Just my preferences and opinion, of course.

Cheers,

Sword

From the video and screenshot, the limit isn't actually 1 tile, it is 1.5. There is a 4-subtile building that looks like a dark tower that is built on the outer edge of the limit.

April the first joke?

I'm for 1-tile cities. In my opinion, cities look worse when you have to put improvements adjacent to each other without options to arrange them and build roads from one another. It's just a mish mash of random building crammet together. At least with city hubs that possibly grow larger as you level up, you can design the hubs to look interesting.

I don't like snakes - too many exploits.

That said, I do think resources need to be protected from weak monsters, provided they're under a city or outpost ZOC.

I also dislike the idea of 1-tile cities. The cities become plain vanilla in their appearance...no variation, no difference. One of the cool things I like is the ability to build cities into different shapes. As a previous poster indicated, I also like building my capitol into a huge metropolis with all the special buildings. It adds (IMHO) character to the game.

Seems to me like 1-tile cities dumbs down the game.

Hope so..1 tile cities would be a HUGE disappointment for me. The current method is fun and creative..civ style queue management is not very fun. ooo managing a list! whoop-de-doo

If the idea is to appeal to a wider audience I can't see how scaling down the beautiful cities will improve the game. Building my awesome cities was half the game for me! A seperate map for them would be fine, but I am in favor of just keeping them the way they are.  

So you see 1 tile cities wouldn't be actually be just 1 tile. They would just be much smaller. Personally I think this would be a good system because we have too many buildings on the main map which makes cities cheesy and look like blobs. This system would actually make every city look unique as it specializes. There is no reason to place every bakery and workshop, especially if it's a building you would build in every city.

I really hope you'll stick with the 1-tile cities. The proposed expansion tile that would indicate the cities specialization would be nice, or even gaining one tile every time the city levels. Both options allow you to make a clear visual distinction between different cities and city levels, and allow you to influence the shape somewhat. Which I'll grant can be pleasing aesthetically, and offers some strategy options. But only in moderation, expanding a level 2 town into hadrian's wall is neither imo.

The key considerations for going with 1-tile cities to me would be:

Scale:
First and foremost, because to me it is the most noticeable. Where 1-tile cities make the world look huge, snaking makes it look small. Suddenly I'm no longer the immortal sovereign leading my nation to become the dominant empire in the world, but I'm the city zoning councillor, having to decide where each and every building is placed, for each and every city that I build or conquer. It turns forests into parks, mountains into hills, lakes into ponds, and continents into islands. It just changes the whole atmosphere of the game for me.

Strategy:
Snaking just kills strategy. With 1-tile cities you'll have carefully consider where to place your city. You would have to balance tile yield against location (next to the coast, near a river, in an exposed area or sheltered between two mountains, etc) and proximity of resource tiles (I'm not adverse to including these in the cities defence if placed next to the city hub). Where as with snaking, you just build the city on the best yield you can find, and then incorporate all resources into the city. A complete no-brainer. No need to keep an eye on vulnerable resources, there are none. You can defend them with the same stationary force as the city, and also have all the defence bonuses it has. There is no strategy involved in this process, only annoying busywork.
Those saying to use this method is a choice are wrong. A choice means that both options (snaking and auto-placement) have merritt. But one is clearly better than the other. If snaked cities were harder to defend (which they would be in real life), it would become a choice. But in fact snaking makes it easier to defend more stuff with the same force.

Map options:
Right now there are only three types of player controlled structures on the map: 1) cities, 2) outposts, whose main purpose is giving access to 3) resource tiles. With on-map building, adding anything to this would just add more micromanagement and contribute to the cluttered look of the map. But 1-tile cities change the area around them into an actual province (rather than just room for expansion). Not only is this more interesting lore/immersion wise, but it also opens up space for a whole new type of player structures: improvements. I'm not proposing civ's covering of the map with structures. But what if you got to add 1 'satellite community' to the city for every city level? Some of the options could be:
Farming village: Adds the tile's grain yield (-1?) to it's parent city.
Logging camp: Adds the tile's production to the parent city.
Fishing village: build on river or coast, adds a fixed amount of food to the parent city, but at the cost of some production. This would be interesting for cities that are in rather infertile area's.
Town: Only gives 1 grain and 1 production to the parent, but produces ((grain yield-2)+(production-2)) in gold.
Breeders colony: Produces (grain yield/2) of the factions preferred type of mount.
Trade post: Can only be build on a tile where 2 roads cross, but adds 10% to the value of all trade routes on those roads.

I'm sure others can come up with more and more creative options.
To me, this would make the world and the game much more interesting.

I personally like the to see the cities on the map, although I can't bring myself to make them snake due to aesthetics.  

This system seems like a good compromise to me, although I wonder if it would be cooler to start a city with a 1-square building radius around the hub and expand the area when the city levels up?    For example: 

• A Lv 1-2 city would have 1 tile around the hub.
• A lv 3-4 city would have 2 tiles.
• A lv 5 city would have 3 tiles.

This should make larger cities sprawl more and have more possible buildings than smaller cities while keeping them from snaking.  

So, what would happen to all that awesome art work? A separate build screen to show it off? Or does it get scrapped?

1 tile cities would sure make resources on the main map less intensive and things less cluttered. Maybe we could get walls now?

If there is very limited space to ensure city specialization, you could really get into trouble. What if a player isnt quite planning perfectly and when the final science building is available, then there is no room`?

People will destroy buildings to make late game ones. Don't want that to be part of the game.

I think Satrhan's idea is worth thinking about. These improvements could also have a minor effect on ZOC to try and mitigate the loss of the effect huge cities had on ZOC.

Perhaps a silly suggestion, but why have city teleporting at all? Why not treat all city buildings like improvements, where units can occupy the space at the same time and enemies can raze them?

Sorry, don't feel like taking the time to be politic. This just strikes as one of the gamey compromises that started happening with WoM that just made it not fun. I like the fact that cities grow organically and that I can make a city to be as Snaky as Seattle. I like that not just what buildings to place, but where to place them becomes a strategic choice.

If "snaking" really bothers you there are lots of other things I've seen suggested in the past that are far less gimmicky and can be implemented. I.E. remove the unit teleport through cities. In fact you could even make city movement slower and force people to garrison for a turn to get through it quickly. You could bring housing back but have the game auto-place it to make the cities appear less snaky and perhaps cause a "use it or lose it" penalty to tiles. You could make building arrangement matter more (Building A gets a bonus when next to buildings B & C).

The limitations of the immersion breaking "cure" are far worse than the original problem. It begs the question of why you're spending so much coding time on something like it? What is so bad about non-box shaped cities. Is there something else you're trying to fix?

Personally, I'd rather have 1 tile cities with a separate screen for placement. I'd like the city hubs on the strategic map to look awesome, representing size and specialization, and let the artsy details be on the separate city screen (and allow players who want to place, place manually). 1 tile cities will free up some real estate on the strategic map for quests, monsters, etc. Solves snaking, teleporting, etc. and still allows players who like the aesthetics of placing to do so on the separate city screen.

The one practical aspect of current design that would not be solved with 1 tile cities is chokepoints. Need the ability to build walls or something (you have walls in the game already, that one wildland has walls all around it prohibiting movement). Maybe pioneers or some other unit could build walls, fortifications, improve outposts, etc?

For clarification, the 1 tile city system that is the current plan will have a separate screen to display the wonderful tile art. Some people seem to be confused about this.

I'm happy with 1-tile cities as long as there is some visual representation of size and scope on the game screen.

It seems to me that the main arguments against snaking are about gameplay/strategy (i.e. teleportation, the feasibility of pathfinding, and game performance), while the main arguments for snaking are aesthetic. IIRC, games like Civilization IV and V would have the city graphic 'spill over' into surrounding tiles without actually expanding the city tile. Couldn't we try something like that with Elemental? Now, I recognize that the building graphics in Elemental are a lot larger than in the Civ's, but maybe we could scale things down so that, for instance, a building that takes up 1/4 tile now might take up 1/16, etc. But the building would only take up that tile for graphical purposes, not for gameplay ones.

Don't forget that you could always build every single building in an 1 tile city, like in the civs... its just reduces clutter. I am for either or, as long as cities become specialized.