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Multi-Tile City discussion

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Multi-Tile City discussion

from JoeUser Forums

We have touched on the discussion of multi-tile cities recently:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/420896

https://forums.elementalgame.com/420585

For those of you not up on the discussion, a brief recap:

The current city construction system

In Elemental: War of Magic, players built their improvements directly on the map. This was a pretty fun and cool feature and exists in the same way in Elemental: Fallen Enchantress Beta 2 (0.86).

There are, however, some problems with the system:

(1) It encourages players to create snaking cities that look ridiculous, are gamey, and easily exploitable.

(2) It results in the maps, especially late game, feeling very urban as you have many cities that are often using 20+ tiles of space on the map. 

(3) They affect performance considerably late game (those beautiful, intricate buildings have to be drawn).

(4) They limit our game design possibilities since we are constantly reminded that we need to keep the # of city improvements to a minimum lest the map get filled with buildings even though often times, the design calls for a city improvement to be available.

A high level city might appear like this:

image

(this assumes the player didn’t “snake” the city out in some weird shape so this is somewhat close to an ideal).

 

As a result, the plan was in Beta 4 (Summer 2012) to migrate to a different system.

The new city construction system design

In this system, each faction would get their own city hub tile that would change based on city level. In addition, cities would specialize (that will be a separate dev journal) and based on that specialization, a different sub-tile would be be added to the city that would indicate, at a glance, what level it was (higher level cities would have more subtiles).

External improvements, like shards, crystals, etc. would be unaffected and if adjacent would become absorbed in the city.

So a level 5 city might look something like this:

image

(a level 1 city would just have the city hub)

When players clicked on the details button for their city, a new screen would come up and show all their built improvements in all their glory. Players could zoom around, rotate, and see the fully fleshed out city along with all the stats and other information.  But this would be a separate screen ala Civilization rather than on the main map.

Now, since this has begun being discussed, we’ve heard a lot of different views on this.  Since this is still months from being made available in a public beta, we very much want to hear from you since most of you, like us, have been on the Elemental journey for a long time now and have a vested interest in the game’s ultimate success.

The question before you is, what are your thoughts on this?

122,601 views 82 replies
Reply #76 from Elemental Forums Top

I like the idea of one city tiles. BUT I would like to see two things happen to keep city building fun.

  1. Dramatically increase the size of ZoC. As it stands now, cities cannot be built within 9 tiles of each other. A cities zone of control should be able to extend to all of those tiles. Not every city, certainly, but one of a high enough level. This could also start ZoC wars with two cities fighting over that area. Perhaps the "better" ZoC could be the bigger population, or the lower Unrest score.
  2. Make each city look unique. As it is now, I can craft my cities as I please. They look kind of silly due to snaking issues, but the decisions I make effect how my city looks. This needs to be carried over into the new system. For example, perhaps at every city level I can place a new tile down. So a level 3 city has three tiles. Each of these tiles should look different, and if possible be directly related to the level up choice I made. For example, let's say my city reaches level 2. For the improvement, I can choose "Merchant District", which increases gold, or "Slums", which increases population. I choose Slums, and the tile I can place next to my hub looks like a rundown section of city.

All in all, I think the decision to limit city sprawl is a good one.

Reply #77 from Elemental Forums Top

I'm for the new system.

I always placed buildings arbitrarily anyways.

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Reply #78 from Elemental Forums Top

Hmm. Yea, I guess just having buildings be smaller (and losing certain details when appropriate for the shrinking of scale) might be enough.

A single building, unless some great wonder, should not be a whole tile in size imho. (other than the city hub I guess)

Reply #79 from Elemental Forums Top

 

Kalin's idea is much better IMO. I really love city building but I acknowledge the performance/size problems. His idea is very good compromise.

Reply #80 from Elemental Forums Top


Great idea !!   No need to show a miniature view of a city on the main map view, your doing double the work, just have a city icon on the main view of the map,  this could be race specific so at a glance you could tell with city belong to which race, as you zoom in to the city icon, have a 2nd view with all the improvments. It would be the same way we zoom in from the cloth view to the main map view.

Reply #81 from Elemental Forums Top

I think this idea is very nice also!!! Keep the cities as they are now and place the improvements in squares but as you zoom out to the normal map you see one tile city. I just pre-order the game and the city placement I saw on the pictures was one thing that I liked a lot.

Reply #82 from Elemental Forums Top

I personally like the multi-tile cities, but at the same time I understand they create issues in terms of design and drag performance down considerably, even on top-of-the-line machines.  I wouldn't mind a switch to a one-tile system if the single cities were still extremely detailed and/or had a separate city-view screen similar to the Heroes of Might and Magic series.

In addition, I think that cities should be treated like your sovereign and champions, as your capital city is your sovereign and your other cities are your champions; they should be customizable in appearance and specialization at the whim of the player.  As it is, the multi-cities look nice, but do not present a lot of options for unique appearances and limited choices in specialization, not to mention dragging down performance in the mid to late game.