so you may or may not know that level 5 cities will eventually reach a limit beyond which it can construct no more due to a hardcoded tile limit. most games have limits of this kind, but the question that needs to be asked is whether this limit is there for performance/visual reasons, or as a gameplay mechanic. neither answer is particularly satisfying.
if it's genuinely a gameplay feature, it seems like a pretty lame one. it's one thing to say that a city can only support a certain number of buildings, but we have much better, less obtuse mechanics for that. for example the citizen limit. however, i've never found citizens a limit, whilst i often run into the tile limit. the city tile limit at the moment would seem to be running counter to the principle that we're supposed to be developing a small number of cities to a high level, because you can get more total buildings in three cities than you can in two.
so i really don't suspect that it's the former.
but if it's actually just intended to be a worst case scenario safety valve, then why are we be given so many buildings that eat up tiles so quickly? it's like stardock wants us to reach the limit. why exactly do walls need their own footprint? i can fully see that there is a wall in the city without the benefit of a special building. similarly, why do we need 2x2 slums etc?
more importantly, it seems ridiculous that the tile limit is currently doing a better job of limiting buildings than citizens are. i would recommend that citizen requirements need to be pumped up, but that doesn't really work when you're dealing with lower level settlements.
this goes back to one of the problems that we first noticed with the specialist/citizen system. when you're dealing with settlements that can range from 10 people to 1000, how on earth do you make the number of buildings proportional to population without either A making buildings prohibitively citizen expensive at lower levels, or B allowing building numbers to explode to map-eating extents in the later game?
i really can't see a solution with the current numbers. over the course of the 1.1 beta, master archivists and the like were introduced to curb the need to spam archivists and hit the tile limit. however, since these buildings have identical citizen costs, they have made a complete mockery of the citizen requirements. you can pose a hybrid system where you go from an archivist with 1 research for 10 people to a master with 2 for 15 (efficiency improvement), but then you'd have to scrap the auto-upgrading (since you'd be risking giing players a citizen deficit). it really wouldn't be pretty. and but for avoiding building spam, you might as well be replacing your entire research tech tree with "refined research" that incrementally increased your research by 10% for the same citizens and gold maintenance. and that idea would have some merit if it wasn't for that tile limit issue and the resulting redundancy of citizens.
so i really can't see a solution with the existing numbers. if you want both population and level to influence production, the only ways to deal with it would seem to be
- remove an order of magnitude from settlement sizes. eg, give a basic outpost 50 people and boost citizen requirements so that limits are both relevant for level 5 cities and achievable for low levels. this requires a massive re-assessment of population growth and opens up a whole new can of worms
- move to a system such as the one i kept suggesting during my skepticism of the citizen system, where instead of determining the number of buildings by population (citizens) and their production by level (upgrading to master archivists etc), you swap the two around and limit the number of buildings by settlement level, and have their production determined by settlement population. so a level 3 city might have 5 of the following: archivist/lore shop/merchant, and those buildings themselves produce 1 research (or gold or materials)/25 citizens in the settlement. this solution has the advantage of production increasing at an increasing rate, so a city with 500 people produces more research than 2 cities with 250. 10 guys in a city are worth more than 10 in an outpost because you have better infrastructure there. it also allows you to tightly control the number of tiles being used by a city of any given size. while it might lead to huge production as production scales up to to that magic 1000 citizens, this would in all honesty being happening now anyway if people were actually building up to their populations in the end game
- just do everything by level. level has the advantage that you can set the goal posts wherever you like. this way you can say "up to 5 buildings at level 3," each of which does a set amount of production. you can set the production of those buildings, the requirements for levels, and even the number of levels possible to whatever is required for balance & fun, from the start of the game to the end. also, you can effectively prevent the player ever hitting the tile limit. however population would become simply a means to an end however, instead of having innate value.
so what's it going to be? as it stands, the citizen/tile limit mechanics are clearly flawed.
