I think this is a great idea!

Oh man I wish this is how it worked, I hate how there is no real strategy to city placement/terrain atm.

This works amazing with the lore as well as you have this world 100 years after a cataclysm just now recovering. You are able to take advantage of surviving resources such as lost libraries and clay pits but in the long term you will want to establish your own mines and lumberyards and such as your civilization grows and needs increase, this is only natural. This works real well with the scarcity of resources we currently have. You should only be able to construct things in your ZoC like current improvements. Seeing as your channeler is reviving the land as your ZoC spreads.

Some examples of what might be availible:

Forest tiles: Lumbermill

Plains tiles: Farm, Pasture, War Horse  (kingdom: horses)

Hills: Mine, Warg Den or Warg Training Pit (Empire: wargs)

Marshlands: Plantation of some sort, maybe some kind of alchemy thing for +arcane

Mountain tiles: eh probably hard to build anything on them as they are impassible

Water tiles: (yes elemental has water) Fishing boat style improvement

Desert tiles: no clue, maybe some sort of trade outpost

I can think of a lot more as would be easy to think of more abstract things that could get you more tech/arcane/diplomatic capital/gold. I think you should really have the ability to make something mid-late game that produces things you need but are rare such as Horses. All of the above could use up population from cities they are linked too so we have a decent pop sink between that and city improvements. I'm sure some people find it frustrating that you can build units like caravans that use horses but have no way of getting them unless you are really lucky or have snagged an enemy city that has them, I know they get rare enough use in all the games I've played unfortunately. Honestly if playing as kingdom I seem to have seen more umberdroth and warg pits in my ZoC than horses lmao.

My ideas above started me thinking about Civ and come to think of it Elemental completely lacks rivers...thats a little odd.

It might also be nice if when you settle a town if instead of setting up buildings you could choose to upgrade it to a Fort or Castle using materials/gold. With a different set of upgrades increasing its ZoC and ability to defend an area where an invading army would have to besiege it to pass perhaps.

Love it. This would add a lot to Elemental. It could still include some resources, but they wouldn't be as important to finding a city, just an added bonus if you found em. 

Great post!

I believe its because they had difficulty implementing them. Rivers were in the first beta's, but they had a lot of issues with making them look good, and getting them to end at the coast.

unless there is some strategy to city design, then what purpose does it serve? couldn't it just as easily be represented by an image that simply grew tith city size? if nothing else then we'd stop running into the city tile limit all the time.

which raises another questions: is the city tile limit supposed to be a tactical gameplay restriction, or is it just a performance thing to save memory? i mean, if it's the former, than it's a pretty lame mechanic, and if it's the latter then why are there so many buildings seemingly designed to push us closer to the limit? (2x2 slums i'm looking at you) why do walls even have to have a footprint at all?

Nice I like the idea.  Actually your suggestion reminded me of the city building in an old game I used to play, Conquest of the New World.  I think it was made by Sierra.  Anyway, in it, you placed resource accumulating buildings, and they received bonus multipliers based off of what tiles were nearby (i.e. a lumber mill with lots of forests and a river nearby would give you more wood then one in the middle of a grassland).  It worked quite well, and it stressed importance in placing cities in spots that could take advantage of it.  So I think it could effectively combat city spamming by only making cities worthwhile when they are placed in "good" spots that have appropriate terrain, and it also makes cities highly specialized based off of what's available.

Add me to the 'Great idea!' list.

In early beta we could place lumberyards in woods, kinda along the lines of your suggestion.  This was removed.  We could also place numerous gardens to grow food (but not limited to certain terrains like you suggest), again, removed (but now 1 garden per city).

Having city layout be more attuned to the landscape would greatly increase immersion and the feeling that we're recreating a real, living world.

I am with Heavenfall. Whilst this idea is a good idea on its own merit, i am not sure this is the direction I'd want E:WoM to take. It would take some of the originality out of the game and push it towards being more like Civ etc. I do wish the City Tile Limit was relaxed, or at least easily mod-able. (maybe it is I suck at Modding). But I really don't want any more encouragement to city spam than there already is.

Also I am not sure it is in keeping with the setting and fluff. This is meant to be a destroyed world with few resources that everyone fights over, the moment you make every square a 'mini' resource is the moment that this is lost.

While we don't want to copy Civ wholehandedly, we also should recognize that Civ does, in fact, do some things well (and possibly, right). We shouldn't be afraid to take cues from Civ and twist them to fit Elemental. After all, if you want to be picky about it, Food in Elemental is exactly the same thing as Happiness in Civ 5, save for the fact that Food is a hard cap and has no secondary benefits.

That said, terrain does need to be a little more 'alive' in the sense that it at least partially influences city placement and development. As is it, there's no real choice or decision making in city placement. It's merely 'find resource, drop city'. There's just no incentive to expand vertically or horizontally; bigger cities don't get you anything special and more cities are -always- useless unless you're spamming them (which is essentially the same as spamming buildings in fewer cities). While the game has limited the ability to city-spam, it's still also not rewarding city building either. Anything you'd really want is available at city level 3. It's not that 4 and 5 level cities are hard to get... it's that there's no reason to get them. Right now, I can build 4 cities with 2 workshops a piece and be pretty much set for materials for the majority of the game; there's no pressure that I need to expand. I have no reason to expand (and even things right now like maintance are easily overcome - I have one game where I'm spamming buildings and have 0 gold mines, merely a swam of merchant champs.

I'd say that one place to start off would be to give terrain some trickle flow of production, resources, as well as population/housing modifiers and prestige. Building a city near mountains or woods might give some modifiers to unit and building production while plains would allow for 'bigger' houses (modifiers to how much each hut provides). Resources might not be a profit persay (you gain X) but rather, a sort of discount to existing buildings (so you have to actually build something to get something). So mountains might provide a bonus 0.2 material so workshops (or what have you) produce 1.2 base instead of 1; not much, but a heavily mountainous region combined with a high level city and a handful of workshops will probably get you a heck of a lot more material with a far smaller cost than simply spamming workshops. No one really likes living in a swamp (even if the houses are nice) so prestige might drop by 0.1

Then also decrease the amount of stuff resources give (maybe even a dramatic decrease in how much each resource node provides but a slight increase in how many of them there are) and increase costs and upkeep. Make production times higher. Also add in high (4 and 5) city buildings that really help out with an associated very high costs. Perhaps even some nice unique (faction or world) buildings that depend on both high city level and terrain. Make existing high city level buildings provide better percentile bonuses. Move more buildings to rank 4 and 5.

Heck, one could even have effects related to combat. For instance, swamps might decrease the effectiveness of soldiers trained there... but provide access to unique units. This is another thing that Civ5 does well; there's cool resources that let you do neat things. More of these types of 'special' resources would help as well - if there's a neat special resource out in the middle of no where, should I drop a city there even though that city really won't be good at anything (and take a while to get to a point where it's making some sort of profit). By special, I don't just mean crystal and metal - I mean fancy cool things like the currently rare horses and wargs. "You found an shrine to an fire elemental. If you build X, Y, Z here, he'll power the forges and people let you produce soldiers that have a flame aura!". "You found a hidden glade in pre-Catalysm forests. The magic here is strong and you find that soldiers who train here become almost bear like. You now have access to Bear-zerkers!"

This would be a start to making cities feel different and also, in part, make terrain influence city development. That city in the middle of the plains (ie every capital city in every fantasy movie ever)? Yeah, it's gonna be huge with a big population. Those highly productive but slummy mountain towns (again, in every fantasy movie ever), likewise. Do I place a city here and get a little more production and defense... or do I place it over there and get more prestige.

There's no need to neglect this interesting feature for something that can be easily controlled (and should be implemented -- the lack of increasing costs for increasing large empires is a surprising omission).

I loved how 2k games promised they would eliminate the "cottages" to only have them replaced by trading posts....lol

Anyway... Combining the two forms of resources would be great. If the "revived" land could possibly trigger the mines/fertile land, it would be even more spectacular. Right now there is just a small combat advantage for fighting on your turf (I guess Tarth likes flowers and Yithril likes mud?)

I hear what your're saying, but isn't EWOM like that now?  Spam cities all over the map?  ...what I'd like to see though, is a system where I have to think about where to build the cities.  As it is now, barring there being a resource (of which there are far too few IMO), it doesn't matter where you build at all.  The terrain is meaningless.

I also understand what you're saying about the cataclysm, and the world is supposed to be empty and barren.  But my idea is that after your influence has spread, and you've healed the land, then you can use it's resources.

I just think this game needs some serious work as far as the empire building aspect goes.  Where you build your cities, and how the cities use the land has to matter.

Great post and love the idea because I also have felt that the land has no value which I have expressed in other posts.  Also this is not about the Civ games because like someone else said MoM had this also to a degree.