It's not really a question of too big or too small a scale, although I do think the scale is not as it should be, one tile per 100 square miles is lame for any purpose besides explaining why maps are so small which is really a hardware limitation. This is a question of consistent scale.

What is your point exactly? One tile is a large area, but it also is merely representational. Within that tile, the town is the only thing worthy of being represented. Map making is all about balancing scale with representation. You may not like the scale, that's fine. It is a logical scale though, it fits well with hardware limitations. You are free to imagine the scale is different to fit your own proclivities, but don't let that illusion seep into your discussion of scale. 

I also like the cities as they are now. The more organic growth makes them look interesting and unique, and a lot more like real pre-industrial cities. As a couple others have said, this both a distinctive feature of the game and a fun part of it; going back to boring rubberstamp icon cities would feel like a real loss.

More from a game-mechanics viewpoint and perhaps in the direction of the "gamey" comments, with powerful NPC armies wandering around in the early to mid game, the ability to grow a city toward a vital resource so it can be merged into the fortifications is an important balance point. Maybe this random wandering is a bug or other artifact of my limited playtime, but given that even my one killer army is unlikely to be able to repel that wandering death demon or giant drake, the idea that I can somehow protect the 2 or 3 key structures that it might wander into by stationing some units on every structure it might hit seems a bit, errm, easily falsifiable.

In my mind, the set tile cities (like you are suggesting you might be headed to with beta 4) removes too much of the city construction (essentially taking it out completely), which is a shame. I happen to like the current city construction mechanic (playing with tiles and shaping cities) because I think it allows you to build forts and adapts to the openness of the game and making chokepoints. Having said that, I do think it could use a few changes to address the key issues:

1) To curb snaking/gameyness, add a small Gildar cost to constructing buildings as it gets further away from the hub, say 5 Gildar every tile after the first. Call it a cost to build roads/transport materials, or whatever. This will still allow the player to snake and game city construction if they want to, but at a cost. Which is to make the system fairer ... to the AIs who don't design their cities as well.

2 & 3 & 4) I don't particularly have a problem with "urban" cities, but the performance reduction is acknowledged (although I often play in cloth map, so it barely matters all that much). The way to address this in my mind would be to limit the tiles the city can spread to (say, 3-4 tiles away from the hub max), and put a focus on upgrading existing buildings over adding more and more of them to build. This would allow you to add more buildings/improvements, without having the world turn into one giant cityscape. In other words, you build your cities up instead of spreading it around. That way, a high level city can be seen at a glance just because of the bigger, more impressive upgraded buildings. Not to mention it adds a lot to the fantastical feel of the game while giving you the satisfaction of having grown that city yourself.

Should that be done, I think the current system is salvageable. You can still build and design your cities, although to a more limited degree, while still addressing the fundamental problems of the system. After that, if you want to make the system actually interesting, just add some flavor on where you put buildings:

1) Some buildings might only work in forests... say a Hunter's guild, that improves your archers and produces a set amount of food.

2) Some might only work on plains... a simple flower garden... that grows man eating plant units every couple of seasons (4 sounds right).

3) Some are awesome in deserts... a Fire Temple that generates a bit of fire magic, and can be upgraded as your city grows until it becomes that Elemental Temple of the Sun that is the envy of the world. Take that, silly Egyptians.

... etc. Just some random things off the top of my head. I'm sure you guys can make something out of it if you tried. Scrapping it all seems like so much wasted potential. Although, if you aren't going to use it, then I suppose it would seem like it's not a bonus. I'd really rather you didn't though. Because at least then, modders could still use it to make the really awesome stuff.

Actually, Kalin's thing might work, or at least contains the seed of an idea.  One of the neatest factions in FFH was the one that allowed your cities to be 3 tiles out, instead of 2, so you could have HUGE cities, but at a cost of how many you could have.  Since we're also watching the faction differentiation discussion starting to form, this could be a good mechanic to implement.

However, one of the things that would have to be figured out is what constitutes a tile.  Right now, city centers are 2x2, most improvements are 1 tile, with some notable 4 tile things.  If we bump out the city one tilewidth per level, that might work with some balancing, but goes back to the issue we had in WOM when we had tile limits, of it feeling artificially gamey.  8 tiles L1 (no corners) around a 2x2, 16 tiles L2 (no corners again, you have a cross of 2x2 tiles), 28 tiles L3 (8 more around periphery+4 corner tiles), 44 tiles L4.... What you would need is to break the 2x2 limit, and have some of the high level improvements be 3x3 or even 4x4 improvements, so you'd need to plan to leave space for those in the future.  You could fit no 2x2 tiles until level 2.  To fit any 4x4 tiles (university?  Crystal forge?  Metal Foundary, Dare I say it, Artifact Forge?) you'd need a L5 city, highly specialized.

Map layout like this, with red being the city center, orange being L1, yellow L2, green L3, blue L4, and purple L5 city tile additions.  You'd need some kick ass 4x4 tiles to make it worthwhile, but it does solve the snaking problem.  I like Kalin's idea of having stuff you can only build on certain types of land (desert, swamp, river, hills, plains, and those annoying fissure things).

I like sprawling, large cities. I like cities the way they are now, but I wouldn't mind if they were more civ-like, although IMHO the cities the way they are now have their charm and their mark on the series. I would say to make it optional, everybody choose the type o city they want, but I suspect this would not be possible to implement in-game. I like the way cities are now, but if it were to add more buildings and you had to change cities to 1 tile city to do this, I would vote for 1 tile cities.

I like this idea much better.

I'm in favor of making the change to a single tile city as well.

One of my occasional frustrations is capturing enemy cities and finding a sacrificial altar, which I don't want for a city that won't be producing military.  Often as not the altar is placed in a location that is A) hard to find and located in a place where I can't actually destroy the building without breaking up the city.

Vote for 1 tile - with appropriate city detail art and ZOC changes.

I don't believe this has been mentioned, but one of the reasons I like the current city building mechanic in fe is that there is no other way to improve tiles. 

In civ, you had your workers building farms, mines and whatnot, but here there are just special resources and cities.  We can't even build roads.  Thus, the sprawl of a large city matched the civ type 1 tile city+improvements.  Taking away the sprawl without adding anything else in its place will be a mistake, I think; it'll turn attention to how barren maps are and how little you can do on them. 

Units using cities to teleport large distances is due to cities not being multi-tile *enough* in their implementation.  Have soldiers only occupy a single tile, rather than the entire city.  Have city defenses only occur on a given tile under attack.  Snaking will be a suboptimal build plan on any city that has a chance to be attacked, then. 

This is actually, imho, the first strong argument against the "new" mechanic.

Yet, the problem lies more in the excessive streamlining of the resources management (which in truth I lamented once or twice already) than in the way cities are displayed on screen. I say the advantages are too many anyway not to go for it.

Wait, there are advantages to 1 tile cities, I cant wait to hear about them! >_<

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

You trolling Kondej? The advantages are multifoliate.

There absolutely are many advantages to one tile cities. 

We know this to be true because countless other games have illuminated this fact.

Lets just say I dont like the 1 tile city thing, and keep it at that...

(I cannot, how ever I like see any benefit beyond some Ram savings, any that cannot be fixed in another way anyways)

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

When I first saw the reviews for this game; being able to expand your cities on the main map was one of the primary attractive features for this game. The way it's done in WOM is FANTASTIC, if not for the unfortunate side effect of being able to warp your city and abuse it.

I recommend keeping the squares there, such the units moving through the city would still have to travel the distance of the squares...also, an attack on the city would place different troops closer or farther from the battle line depending on where they were positioned in the city, relative to the opposing force.

I also recommend placing a limiter on how the city is able to expand, ie have a certain number of square around the initial city square filled before being able to proceed to a further ring. This would limit the abuse a 'snaking city' would have in obtaining far to reach resources, yet give the player important building choicing in how to develop a city so that it can reach nearer resources.

At least for me, by not being able to develop your cities across multiple squares, would greatly decrease my desire in purchasing the game.

Also, as I understand outposts....they should be able to expand aswell...though not to the same extent as cities. Say, 4 squares max in a limited variety of options....turning the outpost into a fort or into a fortress as it levels up and gains bonuses. Would be TOTALLY awesome.

Keep up the good work!

Hope this helps.

I like the idea of the new system for its customisation potential, but I think one tile cities are a little limited. I would like to see an option to expand a town/city to an adjacent tile when it levels up.

This could be done by introducing specific districts which could be placed strategically instead of buildings.

The type of districts available could be influenced by the city lvl, faction, technology and what resources it has access to.  

Each district could build its own specific buildings. For example a farming district (access to a food resource required), increases the cities growth and allows it to build a garden, granary, etc.

I really like the way you can design your cities anyway you like, and expand towards important resources or choke points. However, I think the reasons given for changing to a 1 tile system with secondary tiles for certain improvements have merit.

Personally I feel I have to try this new system before I can have an opinion. Bring on the next Beta with the new system implemented. THEN we can talk.

I like either city design in the game, but the sprawling city could be redesigned a bit so that things in the game make more sense:

Eliminate the city radius for putting units 'inside' it. Each tile that a city takes up must be separately defended. Razing happens with each city tile, not the whole city at once, unless the city is only 1 tile anyway. Snaking cities thus become easy pickings for invaders. And this gets rid of the 'teleport' ability of defending units. To compensate, perhaps a certain number of militia or other defensive bonuses apply for each of the buildings that are present only in the defending tile, and city tiles otherwise behave as if they include a road.

Apply cost increases for building buildings that are father away from the city hub, as already suggested.

Make the city hub 1/4 tile wide instead of a full tile, so that if wanted, the city could be built as a metropolis or a fort or something right from the starting tile, with 3 other buildings being put on the first tile before having to expand to another tile. This could also make something useful out of those 1-tile cities that are otherwise completely surrounded by swamps.

I do think the idea of adding a square per level would work in the concepts of the game, but it is plain boring.  The large cities look nice and make the game more personal than a small abstraction (or smaller abstraction) which just looking at the picture you posted looks really … well, boring.  The initial picture of the current form large city looks much better.

What I would love is for you to only be able to build work enhancing buildings on squares with Material so if you built a +10 work for each material building on a 2 material square, you would get 20 work instead of just multiplying it by the city base number.  This way the land you choose to build the improvement makes a difference, and you don't just build every improvement on a random square since it doesn't matter. I would like the same rules for food, only with grain instead of material. 

You would maintain the 4 buildings per square (perhaps more if you want to compress the cities more), which would in itself make the player want to consolidate their buildings to use the resources they have the most efficiently.  They could still snake out to try to gain access to a new resource, but that would be tempered by their want for having effective building placement.

This difference would also mean that you could build multiple workshops and the like, instead of the old 1 per city.  I hated that 1 per city rule anyway for things like bakeries and workshops, since it doesn’t allow you to make any decisions on what you want to do with your city.  Since you can build everything in every city, city building is rather boring.    Also, this change would require the ability to destroy buidings to replace them with more effective buildings, which I know I did often in the original game.

Non-resource needing buildings would still be one building per city, and could be built in non-resource squares.  These could be snaked out, however you are greatly limited in the number of these buildings that are available.

city hubs for each faction would be wonderful, placing buildings is somewhat of a chore, getting rid of huts/houses/villas was already a big step ahead, if a city could show only the most important buildings, so as to have an identity, this would be perfect, players will be able to tell that a town is specialised because of the kind of buildings visible

today city buildings are barely visible, the effort to draw each building is lost as we need a global point of view to move armies, I cannot tell if I built a City Hall or whatever other building if I don't read it from a menu because buildings look all the same from a distance, so city hubs easily identifiable from a distance, with World Wonders standing out, covering a number of tiles proportional to their level would be really fine IMHO

now actively waiting for beta 4

True, lhetre.  But the beauty of it comes into play when you zoom in on the city and see your citizens hard at work, all without having to open another window.  The more I play FE the more I want see the current system stay.  One tile cities have been done so much it makes me want to

As far as memory problems go, I say push the limits and offer options to reduce quality for those that need them.

wrong thread

I vote for multi-tile cities for one reason- it's easier to spot when I'm conquering somebody.

1) Meh. Nothing major to exploit here.

Here is a shot taken from Google earth. This shows us that our lovely power-gamers that make snake cities for some reasons.... Actually design them IRL too.

2) Urban world? Yes I expect that to happen. When we got a world that is in the mithril age and cast the spell of mastery, exterminated every monster and dragon, and only a few races are left, I do expect it to become something like this in a couple of years:

3) Didn't you make the cloth map for the reason of "oh shit, it's too much for my computer to handle properly... lets go cloth." and if you want to see how it looks like, zoom in, lag a little, go back to cloth. I do agree on the subject, though, it is a problem.

4) first, why wouldn't buildings be 1/9 of a tile, or some such? That will help you control your cities. Will also look nice when you make a level 5 with tons of world wonders, since it's a huge city with tower scrapers all around.

In terms of pure gameplay, I do agree that single tile cities are better, but the multitile cities add a lot of fluff to the game.

Quoting Raledon, reply 74

1) Meh. Nothing major to exploit here.

Here is a shot taken from Google earth. This shows us that our lovely power-gamers that make snake cities for some reasons.... Actually design them IRL too.



2) Urban world? Yes I expect that to happen. When we got a world that is in the mithril age and cast the spell of mastery, exterminated every monster and dragon, and only a few races are left, I do expect it to become something like this in a couple of years:

God damn power players over there, We should out-rule that!

Sincerely
~ Kongdej