I don't see how this would improve the game.  I also don't think the abstracting particularly makes sense, but I'm unsure- this is something that needs to be tested.

One idea: limit cities on tiles, but level 5's get no limit, and housing and bonus tiles/buildings (shards, resources) don't count against the limit.

Second idea: limit city building to a radius around the town center, based on level, and maybe prohibit city building within your own influence.

The housing thing was for FE.

This seems like a good system to me. A improvement over what we have now.

this is what i was getting at in the above rant. if you limit the number of buildings by city level and determine their production by the city's population (instead of the other way around, as now), you can exactly limit how big a city of any level will be. that way you can keep cities sane looking, whilst still getting all the benefit of population as it increases. and you will never need to worry about hitting the tile limit.

i know i've said this all before, but it's the only sane, simple and practical solution i've heard.

Another idea perhaps to deal with the sprawl:

Instead or in addition to increased population costs for buildings, maybe increased time to build, though build times get reduced in higher lvl cities.

One way to slow urban sprawl is to slow the pace of built buildings, or have fewer, more meaningful buildings.

While we're working on make city levels matter again... could we also do something about the city level-up bonuses?  Here are the things we've requested a number of times:

1.  Don't make us choose our bonus immediately--let us come back to it after we've reviewed our city and the rest of our kingdom so that we can be sure to pick the right thing.

2.  Give us more choices-- spell research, tech research, gildar, and random monster spawn is not enough.  Let us choose materials bonus, crystals bonus, horse bonus, prestige bonus, mana bonus, greater number of tiles bonus, troop creation bonus, diplomacy capital, etc.  Those are all kind of basic.  Be creative.

Apologies, my shift key broke a long time ago and i got out of the habit.

Well, the point is that right now population determines the number of buildings, not the production of those buildings. This is supposed to be the main thing that determines how many buildings you get. However, it is usually the tile limit that ends up more significant in all but a few situations. So if we now add a building limit at specific levels, isn’t that now three total ways of saying the same thing ? (ie, that a city of a given size can only perform so many functions). And if only one of those limits is relevant most of the time, what is the point in the others?

So wouldn’t it be easier to just throw out the citizen system (ie, population cost) altogether, and simply determine the number of buildings by settlement level alone? (and set this in a way so that you never reach the tile limit). You can add more finely grained settlement levels if that helps. The value of population is in determining levels, and levels limit the number of buildings. Simple no?

If you want to give population a value in itself, then you can determine the production of those buildings / head of the population (ie, each study, of which you may build up to 15 in a level 5 city, produces 0.1 research per head). I’d prefer this because that way you can continue to get a benefit as your population increases indefinitely, without having to keep building more studies and run into the tile limit. And this way when you recruit troops, production goes down because the population goes down, without the need for a citizen system. And you don’t get ridiculous situation like when you can’t increase your population by upgrading to houses because you can’t increase your population to level 3. Or doubling of research rates when you get to level 4 and all your studies are upgraded.

If you have 2 studies in a level 3 city, and have the super studies tech, then the second one becomes a super study producing 1.5 research per head.

If the idea of production / head scares people (and i don’t see why, since tax already works like that anyway, and everything else would if you could actually build up to your citizen limit), then you can just have a fixed production value per building (and the game becomes even easier to balance).

But surely it’s easy to see how simply limiting the number of buildings by level and ONLY by level removes a huge amount of redundancy, confusion and is much easier to design for?

I'm not sure what you mean by town growth. If you mean population, well we had that before we had the citizen system. The two are very different things. I've got no problem with population. Citizens are the number displayed in the building info as one of the costs of buildings.

The point is that citizens are almost NEVER a cap on buildings. in the early game gold maint is almost always more significant, and in the end game the tile limit is always more important. And now we're adding limits on buildings by city level AS WELL? Citizen costs were redundant before and they'll be even more redundant soon. Get rid of them.

You can only mae them relevant if you increase the citizen cost per building. You can't do that without making them unbuildable in the early game. The only other situation is something bizarre like increasing the citizen cost of each sunsequent building. At which point you just have to throw your hands up and say "what is this adding?" (unless you like going back every 4 turns to see if you have enough people to build yet another goddamn study).

what is the point in saying population > levels > buildings AND saying population > buildings? Why don't we just say "level 4 towns can have 8 buildings, level 5 can have 9" or whatever? It's effectively the same thing, and it means less micro (because i can just queue up all my buildings after level up, instead of building a new study every 5 turns), less clutter and better balance (because you can design the game knowing exactly what a settlement of a given level can have, because you're dealing with between 4 and 10 significant buildings, instead of between 0 and thirty goddamn studies.

On that I can agree.

I´m curious to test all the new and old (but new ) feature frogboy.

Thank you for don´t giving up on E:WoM.

The problems that need solving are:

1. How do you make city spam a non-issue by making the game viable for players with just a few cities?

2. How do you stop micromanagement (deleting etc to make space)?

3. How do you make city specialisation a strategic element of the game?

4. How do you stop city sprawl on the world map?

I like the idea of 'free' housing that can be built but I can see that city spam (point 1 above) will become a big problem with this model. It does help with points 2 and 3 above, but fails again on point 4. So it is not an ideal solution.

Here is a possible solution:

Make city populations 'abstracted' rather than 'constructed'.

Civilisations have an overall Population Growth Factor based on global parameters such as number of cities, sovereign traits, at war, army size, merchant income, etc.

The fewer the cities the player controls the higher the Population Growth Factor. This way players who spam cities have slower population growth within those cities than players who concentrate on a handful of cities. Would also mean that players who lose cities would get a population growth boost to their remaining cities (refugees).

Cities also have their own Population Growth modifiers that are applied along with the global factor. Combined these give each city a unique prestige score which in turn gives an indication of population growth.

Pops are attracted to cities that have a high prestige and are not drawn to cities with low prestige.

All buildings add or subtract to the prestige of a city. Inns etc boost the prestige (and pop growth) but workshops for example may detract from the pop growth. Subsequent buildings of the same type would not affect the pop growth modifier to the same degree. Eg: Using a simple halving rule, 1 Inn boosts prestige by 10, 2 Inns boosts the prestige by 15, 3 Inns boost the prestige by 17.5 etc.

Cities that have been attacked and especially changed hands receive a massive hit to their prestige that slowly creeps back over time. Buildings that are not of your alignment could also negatively impact your prestige if they are left in cities.

Housing is built automatically by the pops as they require it and they build into any vacant tile.

Housing tiles are scaled to look small and can be built over the top - the game will then build new housing to replace any that needs replacing. Doesn't cost anything.

As cities rise in level there could be other levels of housing and a certain number of the housing tiles would show a visual upgrade. These can be used to show higher population factors so city sprawl is reduced.

Visually then each city would clearly show the special buildings while the smaller housing tiles would automatically grow around the edges or in gaps.

City walls ignore housing and are built around the special buildings.

Housing is no longer a selectable part of a city. If you enter or leave a city it is where the wall finishes (like the current game).

Housing ends up becoming a visual queue on the map to represent the population of the city but isn't controlled by the player.

Looking at the points above:

1. Does it solve city spam?
Yes. If you build more cities your population growth factor drops. If you conquer cities the new cities take even longer to recover.

2. Does it stop micromanagement (deleting etc to make space)?
Yes. Population for each city becomes a factor. The player can still strategically build the city to have high growth but it also works largely automatically.

3. Does it make city specialisation a strategic element of the game?
Yes. And by having housing like other terrain tiles, it highlights the other important buildings inside the city making it easier to see what is what.

4. Does it stop city sprawl on the world map?
Yes. Housing is now a growth of tiles around the edges of cities so players can only sprawl in a certain direction by using the specialisation buildings.

Has anyone picked the spawn random guardian option and not been really disappointed in what showed up?  I remember in one build I got a darkling shaman that could cast some spells and that was neat, but I think that was a bug...

Or do battle with any sort of hostile wildlife on your commute?

I'd prefer local population obviously, but I can live with global. I just wish people would stop talking about it like it actually makes sense.