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Major changes to city building? Noooo

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Major changes to city building? Noooo

from Elemental Forums

Mr. Frog said in a recent journal that city building would be getting some big changes, and basically there will be a lot less stuff to build. I am hoping I misunderstood, but I really don't like that idea.

 

There are different segments that will buy this game who enjoy different aspects - some just want to get units and do combat, some want the magic, some want... well you get the idea. I hate the idea of only having a handful of city improvements to choose from.

 

You should do what most other games of this nature do, and include an 'automate city build' feature. As old as MoM is, it even had one. A little customization of that feature would be good also, like "Set city build to automated with a focus on: A) Gold production B) Reasearch production C) Spell point production D) Unit production E) Food production F) No focus/balanced

 

I have been really enjoying customizing my cities so far - maybe you could do a poll to check who is for, who is against, and who is neutral on the idea.

elemental
24,251 views 46 replies
Reply #26 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Stmorpheus, reply 20
i have to agree with most everybody else, i like a huge city as much as anybody.  however, it is just simply useless to build 4 farms that could do the same thing as 1 farm.  what i want to see is building that force you to make a decision at some point around 3rd city level.  because you can't build everything, you have to decide on specialization or a balanced but weak city.  at 5th level  i would like to see some uber buildings that might use more than 4 city slots. example:

Colossal statue - takes up 4 spaces, but requires 6 city level points or whatever.  this would have a huge increase in prestige(hopefully we will still need prestige for something after 5th level), also it gives sight of 10 squares(like a watchtower).

 

i totally agree, i kinda liked the actual feeling of "anno" in the cities but i can appreciate more specialized cities with more focused building... IF there is an actual strategy behind, choices that makes towns different and so on

Reply #27 from Elemental Forums Top

There isn't less stuff to build. We are greatly reducing repetitive building (unlimited gardens, multiple workshops, multiple studies, etc.).

In XML, we can, literally, define how many of a given improvement you get per city level, per faction, etc. So we're playing around with balancing this because we were finding that building up a city was more chore than fun.

Interesting. Can you research technology that allows you to build more of a certain building?

Curtains - Customize Windows with additional styles
Reply #28 from Elemental Forums Top

I was doing some thinking about this new version.

It's a more concentrated city, with a specific style, now. 

But bear with me on this, I was thinking that wouldn't it be neat if we could add Flavor buildings, per city level. So that way we could expand the city a little bit in a direction we want, but not have it take time, just some city planning.

For example a level 1 city could be given 3 new pieces, they could place down that have No mechanical benefit beyond city expansion. And could appear there in city beautification or darkening.

This way it's less micro management but also let's us put together some neat ideas, for town development, and so on.

That number of new pieces, is purely abstract, it could be any number, of free city tiles for appearance purposes. And each level could be some variable, 2 or 3 per level or similar.

What does the community think about this as a way for a compromise? 

Maybe there could even be different achievements associated with the Free pieces, different quality/styles buildings based upon research, or magic, or adventure or something tied to the various levels.

 

Reply #29 from Elemental Forums Top

I like the idea that buildings can modify adjacent buildings, but I would like it even better if buildings could modify a variety of adjacent buildings.

 

Examples

  • Like adding a tax office next to an adventurers guild would create a licensing system for adventurers who visit your town, creating a way to earn an income from the things they do Mitigate the costs of hiring them to do adventures with licenses to adventure as well as weed out the less skilled adventuring parties, by denying them license to adventure
  • placing it next to a market will allow you to collect more income from the market's activities
Reply #30 from Stardock Forums Top

needs to be between simple and complex so its just right.

Reply #31 from Elemental Forums Top

Just played a game of Beta2A/v0.803 and my word; the city building truly is so much improved now. Even without adjacency bonuses or merging tiles in yet, I <3 it to bits.

I do however seem to be getting the issue where if I go to cloth map and back to 3D view the buildings disapear bug more often though. :(

Anywho, I do have a suggestion to add to this that might make things a little bit more fun. Hehe.

 

Anyone else play the SimCity games? (No, I'm not suggesting we start simming every part of city building :P ) If you did, do you remember the 'reward' structures you could get at certain milestones? Like your own mansion/house, statue, things like that.

Perhaps we could get some reward/milestone type structures here, too?

You have eleventybillion children, you have earned a Boudoir!!
Your people love you to pieces and want to erect a statue of you, which of your cities shall be graced with your eternal marble presence?

etc, etc. Each of them should be buildable but once per empire, and should imbue certain bonuses. Perhaps +prestige, or +even moar babies made, etc.

Reply #32 from Elemental Forums Top

Perhaps we could get some reward/milestone type structures here, too?

You have eleventybillion children, you have earned a Boudoir!!

Your people love you to pieces and want to erect a statue of you, which of your cities shall be graced with your eternal marble presence?

I think we had this planned, but I REALLY like this.  THe other week I was watching an 'Actraiser' playthrough, and remembered how cool it was (in the ciy building portion) when the 'Your People bring Gifts' screen came up, and they give you some bonus item just for helping them out. "You've been such a great ruler...we'd like to build a statue in your honor. Just tell us where to place it and we'll start construciton immediatly!"

OK, back to the campaign :)

Reply #33 from Elemental Forums Top

i noticed with last build that cities are way more stuck with food/ppl

 

dunno if this is intended but imo its a bit too much, i found HARD in 2 3 towns to get them growing

Reply #34 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Xtropy, reply 22

Quoting klaxton499, reply 21@Xtropy    To me the choice is enhance an existing building or build something new.  The adjacent addon should occupy a tile.

Right, but the choice to enhance an existing structure or build something new has nothing to do with adjacency.  This "choice" exists whether or not an "officer's quarters" is built on the other side of the city or directly adjacent.

I'm asking about the point of adjacency, not the choice as how to spend available tiles/resources.

If someone who builds a hypothetical officer's quarters is _always_ going to put it next to a barracks to gain whatever advantage the officer's quarters would get by being built next to the barracks, what is the point of requiring the adjacency, because when would someone build an officers quarters and not put it next to the barracks?

Off the top of my head I can think two ways the adjacency could add a real choice or decision,

1) A barracks can gain advantage from multiple kinds of "add-ons" but can only have a subset of those connected to it at any given time.  For example, a barracks could have an "Officer's Quarters" next to it and armies built from the city will gain some sort of leadership/morale bonus, or alternatively the barracks could have a "Arcane Warfare Academy" built next to it and armies built from that structure could gain some sort of of resistance to magic.  However the player would have to make a choice, as they couldn't build both next to the barracks. 

Of course even this doesn't really require adjacency to be implemented, because upon building the "Officer's Quarters" the developers could design it so the "Arcane War Academy" is no longer able to be constructed.  In doing so the adjacent requirement becomes moot.

2) The add-on structure could alternatively enhance several kinds of buildings, but you have to choose which by building it adjacent to the structure you wish to grant the advantage.  For example, an "Arcane War Academy" could still be built next to the Barracks in order to give your armies a magic resistance boost, however it could alternatively be placed next to your schools in order to boost research, or spell points or whatever.

So I'm not saying there aren't ways of creating choice and strategy around the idea of adjacency, but in all the discussion surrounding the topic I rarely seem to hear the strategies and choices afforded by implementing adjacent structures enhancing existing structures.

Adjacency really only becomes interesting if you can build a particular add-on once in a city, but it could enhance multiple buildings thus what you place it next to is important. Though that has its own problems like, how does the game determine which building it is adjacent to (think a plus-sign, with the 'add-on' in the middle - ok, which building does it enhance?).

I'm for enhancements, but I'd rather "add-ons" be modifiers that you build by clicking on the building in question and selecting from a list of available add-ons there (a la Starcraft). Whether that requires tiles or just further specializes the building/visuals without requiring more space is a question left to others :)

Reply #35 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting ddd888, reply 34

i noticed with last build that cities are way more stuck with food/ppl

 

dunno if this is intended but imo its a bit too much, i found HARD in 2 3 towns to get them growing

I didn't have any trouble growing cities, but they do grow more slowly which I believe Frogboy specifically mentioned tweaking. I'm fine with that and if they have a "pacing" preference option, then faster pace would speed city growth (maybe enhance food production).

Finding a food resource (fertile land/bees/orchards) and building a granary (hell, the granary anyway) made food a non-issue for me.

Reply #36 from Elemental Forums Top

yeah but not every city has a granary

 

in fact thats the problem, early is too much important, maybe some other building to research b4 granary and not needing resources...

 

anyway the point is i agree with multiple gardens was too much complicated and dispersive but right now its just linear and not fun imo

 

you build garden hut and wait wait wait

 

while b4 you had the option to work hard on a town and make it grow faster or just let it be

 

i like choices most of all, even if they make the pace a bit faster im not sure its enough to make the city growing fun

 

 

Reply #37 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Naithin, reply 32
I do however seem to be getting the issue where if I go to cloth map and back to 3D view the buildings disapear bug more often though.

Scroll in slowly, instead of superfast. =p

Reply #38 from Elemental Forums Top

One of the issues, there are to many building you don't know what they even do (Villas, Estates, etc)?

Need more buildings that do something vs food +1, housing + 1.

Buildings to train/upgrade army units (peasant to archer, footman to knigs ward, etc.)

Buildings/guilds to add/train npc's (healers, miners, potion makers, etc.).

 

 

 

 

Reply #39 from Stardock Forums Top

OK, back to the campaign

gameplay isn't done yet so what would be the point of working on the campaign yet?

Reply #40 from Elemental Forums Top

The one thing I think I mentioned in a blog post is that I wish the types of building were color coded on the cloth map. For example, food producing cities show up as green, administration buildings show up as grey, war buildings (barracks, siege foundries) show up as red, and so on. It would make it easier (on the cloth map at least) to show how you're zoning the city and easier to find buildings for building adjacent buildings which give a bonus--ie a granary (if it has to be placed next to a farm to give a bonus) next to a farm and so on. Otherwise, I like the new system as it is. The old one had too much repetition.

Reply #41 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Madmelodie, reply 41
The one thing I think I mentioned in a blog post is that I wish the types of building were color coded on the cloth map. For example, food producing cities show up as green, administration buildings show up as grey, war buildings (barracks, siege foundries) show up as red, and so on. It would make it easier (on the cloth map at least) to show how you're zoning the city and easier to find buildings for building adjacent buildings which give a bonus--ie a granary (if it has to be placed next to a farm to give a bonus) next to a farm and so on. Otherwise, I like the new system as it is. The old one had too much repetition.

Great idea with color coding. Maybe make it an overlay while in build modus.

 

Reply #42 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting ddd888, reply 26

Quoting Stmorpheus, reply 20i have to agree with most everybody else, i like a huge city as much as anybody.  however, it is just simply useless to build 4 farms that could do the same thing as 1 farm.  what i want to see is building that force you to make a decision at some point around 3rd city level.  because you can't build everything, you have to decide on specialization or a balanced but weak city.  at 5th level  i would like to see some uber buildings that might use more than 4 city slots. example:

Colossal statue - takes up 4 spaces, but requires 6 city level points or whatever.  this would have a huge increase in prestige(hopefully we will still need prestige for something after 5th level), also it gives sight of 10 squares(like a watchtower).

 

i totally agree, i kinda liked the actual feeling of "anno" in the cities but i can appreciate more specialized cities with more focused building... IF there is an actual strategy behind, choices that makes towns different and so on

 

^This.

Reply #43 from Elemental Forums Top

Agreed...and the elimination of redundancies sounds like it also gives the ability to specialize with the variety of things available to you instead of doing the same thing over and over and over and over and over before you cna really get into the variety.
It should neatly sidestep boredom and make cities quite interesting. I personally greatly dislike the whole "build more farms" thing.

Reply #44 from Stardock Forums Top

ok having played for sometime with the city changes, I like what they have done with houses and food. Food should be the real limiting resource.

I would however suggest allowing players to specialise cities more by letting them build multiples of some financial or knowledge buildings.

 

Reply #45 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Tridus, reply 25

Quoting Xtropy, reply 19
My only concern with something like this, as I said in one of the other half-dozen threads on this same topic, is whether there is ever going to be a time when you are _not_ going to want to take advantage of this adjacency.  If you build an officers quarters, like in your example, is there any reason a player wouldn't want to put it next to their barracks? If it's always the obvious choice I'm not sure what the point of requiring the adjacency would be.

That's definitely a real concern. I also wondered at the very end of my post if it might just annoy people because you have to plan housing around where the attached upgrades will go later. Ie, you can't build the officers quarters yet because your town is tier 1 and needs to be tier 2. So you build houses, but you can't build them anywhere that they'll block attached buildings later on.

That might very well be more annoying then anything else, in which case having it not need to be connected would be better (so long as it's in the same city).

 

Agree with everything said here.

 

I have a suggestion: Why not simply build these attachment buildings on top of their relevant main building? It'd look nicer and feel like it made sense, having them as upgrades as opposed to new buildings. Maybe work it like the GDI Power Plants and Upgrade Centers in Tiberian Sun and have the building occupy empty patches next to it with a placeholder courtyard graphic of some sort, and they are the spots to build attachments.