I was thinking the same thing.

Very good point, totally agree.

As far as the concern for destroying early improvements in favor of late game improvements, why not let improvements level as well?  It could be a linear progression (lvl 1, 2, ... n) where the higher levels are tied to tech.  It could also be a branching scheme:

Whipping Post: basic unrest reducing improvement

General Store: basic gildar producing improvement

Schoolhouse: basic research producing improvement

And so on, for each of the basic effects improvements offer.

Now, certain techs will permit these basic improvements to merely level up; they'll provide more of whatever benefit they've always provided.  Certain techs will also permit improvements to "branch": a level three general store can become a level one market square or a level one traders guild.  Each branch greatly enhances whatever benefit its root improvement provided, and perhaps some secondary benefit, as well as a penalty on some other aspect of the settlement.

Coupled with a limit on the number of improvements a settlement can have (even if this limit can be increased/decreased through gameplay), this would increase the strategic importance of improvements.

Just my two cents for one tile settlements.

Just saw this - thx for the vid.

The benefits:

-More detailed tiles

-Better game performance

-Better scale

-Better gameplay

-Sieges are more feasible to implement

-People in cities

-Whole new dimension of effect possibilities for this screen: Magic can be seen affecting cities, Sieges can be viewed here from season to season, destructible buildings and walls, etc...

-Maps could load this screen and place it on the outskirts of the tactical map, or have the battle on this very screen.

There are so many new doors that open up with this idea. The time spent is well justified. 

I'm very strongly against a hard cap on number of buildings in a city. If I want to build a super city which is much bigger than my others and I have the time/money/production/tech to do it then let me - limiting the player doesn't add to fun in this case.

Only being able to initially build in the tiles immediately around the city could still work so long as if they ever get filled up you can then choose to build in the next ring (either just in one direction at a time or anywhere in the second ring).

Having a hard cap on number of buildings would just promote ICS even more (than it, once the maintenance cost/income ratio has been addressed). I'd rather not have a limit. However, I really dislike having all city walls compare to the great wall of China in Length, and city layouts whose sole purpose is to create choke-points. I'd rather have 1 tile cities (Or 9 tiles without a building limit) and a city screen (or at least the catual city in the background during sieges). 

Excellent list of possibilities.

NaytchSG: Great Wall could even be a one per civ or one per world achievement or an Earth spell obtainable via quest or levelling up.

Cruxador: Making it a spell would be redundant. You can already raise impassable mountains. We need a way to close chokepoints with building.


Might be redundant, but I was thinking of ways each of the tech trees or different factions might approach city defenses. 

Tarth would not get a bonus during city defense. They would get a lesser bonus in all their own territory. That would make them use a totally different defensive strategy. They want to lure the enemy in to their ZoC forest to ambush them. 

Gilden could get ridiculous unique walls that make their late game cities impenetrable. 

Magnar could get Firewalls early.

Yithril could get no defensive bonuses, but excellent bonuses to fighting in other people's territory and neutral areas.

How about this: 1-Tile Cities with individual building screen, but on the map, an (up to) nine tile city is shown. How hard would it be to periodically render the city build view into a texture to lay over the area on the overland map where the city is, which would be a current depiction of what the city looks like?

I'm against a hard cap on number of buildings in a city as well, as that just encourages unit spam, which is a traditional problem with Stardock games.

A hard cap on # of improvements could work. The prestige mechanic is already in place to limit the number of settlements that can effectively grow.  By forcing players to additionally decide what specialization their core settlements will have seems to promote strategic differentiation.

This would be great .  I don't know about the technical details.  But it seems to me that if you're not asking the user to interact with the buildings on the map, you can make everything smaller (half or a third of the size) as well.  This would cut down on the sprawling cities, but not lose the feeling that your cities are really a part of the game world.

I can't see how anyone can look at the video up there and long for a generic 1-tile city icon.

I am very glad to see that SD is considering completely revamping the city building mechanic to a one tile system.  As it currently stands, city building is bland and uninteresting because every city is the same as every other city.  Plus, the ability to make sprawling cities reduces the viability of a siege mechanic, something I consider vital to any medieval-themed game.  So color me very excited by the possibility of reducing cities to a single tile.  I think this will go a long way in making the city building mechanic much more interesting in the long run.

I really like this idea and think it should be considered. Doing this would also allow for easy transport through a city of armies without needless micromanagement. This would be similar to the HoMM system, perhaps though, not allowing any extra armies currently on city tiles to defend, only armies 'stationed' in city are able to defend. Losing a city would boot any other armies of the former owner of city outisde city limits.

Using this system would leave the option of allowing snaking to envelop resources, or, if that doesn't balance well, perhaps, just designate the original city tile as the only defensible (or enter-able) tile. You could then either consider all other tiles as roads, or just ignore them as graphic fluff. Seems like it might get a bit confusing that way though I'll admit.

Just some thoughts.

edit: I'd like to add, even if we go to a 1-tile system (which right now I lean towards agreement) I'd like to see a change made to allow passing an army through the city HoMM style and having "stationing", especially seeing as we can't place our own roads to go around the city.

Ignore, had posted on wrong thread.

Have a nice day!

Thanks for fleshing it out, Seanw3.  You are wise in the lore, good sir!  I just know tropes from 1st Ed. AD&D, MOM and HOMM

Very excited after reading the Faction Diff Journal! 

It comes down to this… as a player I snake my cities because there are gameplay advantages to do so and I play to win. Eliminate the snaking advantages and building/improvement placement won’t matter anymore to me. I’ll hit the Build-Auto Place button every time unless you give me a new or different reason, other than aesthetics, to further care about building placement.

Under these circumstances cities could be represented any way you like on the main map: 1 tile static icons, nondescript circles with the city name, proud faction banners hoisted on ornate poles, or small gaggles of fornicating ewoks. It doesn’t matter because city representation has been reduced to a single point on the main map.

I grant there are players who very much care about aesthetics when they architect their cities. They need some love so the city building mechanic has to provide them the tools to craft their own Babylon.

No Babylon for me though. Build-Auto Place could churn out Lego blocks and I’ll merrily accept it.

As I posted in the other thread, simply adding a cost to buildings that are farther away from the city hub would do wonders for the situation, say 5 Gildar for every tile away from the hub. Thus, you can still build massive cities or snake or creatively wall your empire, but it comes at a cost to your treasury. If you can afford it, go crazy. Which is how it should be.

As for specializing cities, I've always been a fan of upgrade paths for buildings. For example, let's say you start out building a shop in your village, which can either be upgraded into an armory or a weaponsmith once it grows... suddenly you have specialization. If you take that a couple of tier higher (along with city levels), then you suddenly have specialized cities. There's no need to force cap anything, just need the player to make some choices.

We spent the last few weeks of beta 2 getting rid of unnecessary costs...

Judging from everyone's supposed hatred of snaking, perhaps this isn't all that unnecessary...

Agree.

@kalin:  I don't hate snaking.  I exploit it ruthlessly.  But I think the game would be just as good without it.

And I like the idea of upgradeable buildings.  MoM had a good examples in its 1-tile cities:  shine - temple - parthenon - cathedral, etc.  Those would help reduce snaking in multi-tile cities too, because the new improved building would not take a new tile, and the advanced city would not take so many more tiles than a low-level one.

I like big cities, the bigger the better.  I get most of my enjoyment from having the greatest cities in all the land. Has nothing to do with snaking for movement. I would be fine with cities that can expand infinitely but require movement points beyond the hub or how about a one per city barracks or garrison which is where the units would have to move out from.  One thing that bothers me about city building is rivers.  Would be nice if we could connect a city over a river so that we can have a river through the center of it.

I'd just like that we were able to build a city on top of a river for some special bonuses and a different look to the city with a river going through it.

I like building a sprawling metropolis, mainly to grab resources to protect them.  I've never been a fan of the Civ games city building concepts, so am a little concerned how this will work with Fallen Enchantress. 

But I am interested to see how this will be implemented.  My main concerns are how do I protect resources? and will I be able to find a good spot to build my first city before the AI spams all around me?  Not being able to protect resources from the AI is going to be a real bind if I have to keep clicking on rebuilding every turn.  It looks like CTRL + N are going to be abused until I start next to a river with shards, crystal, metal and all the other necessary resources to have a decent start.

Maybe ZOC resources will automatically be built if destroyed, maybe start positions will be better.  At the moment it's all speculation, so I'll wait and see.  If these things have been addressed then great I'll be a happy bunny!

I still love the game and have faith that it will be amazing, but I'm lacking the vision to see it at the moment.  Roll on BETA 3!

Andy.