Terrain Exploitation

I agree with this to a point. I like to have the freedom to build cities where I like, but the rarity of food resources really ends up making the decisions for me most of the time. Oh, there's one of the four food resources on the continent, guess I have to put a city there. And all those other resources that you may want (iron, crystal, wood, etc.) usually aren't all that attractive because there's no food tile anywhere nearby. I like the idea of being able to build one farm or something in a city. Not enough to make a level 5 city. 

I actually prefer having to have cities next to strategic resources. It makes sense - you don't generally find people sticking down cities just because there's space there. Plus having cities few and far between keeps with the post-apoc atmosphere.

 Though the generic city issue is a problem. I think this is largely because you sometimes have to stick a city in the middle of nowhere simply to keep your borders contiguous due to resources being far apart. It would be nice to have either a specific settlement type or else some outpost / village level buildings to allow you to specialise in something other than resources - a castle style settlement which doesn't produce anything but can build defensive works and various watchtowers to extend your vision and allow a garrison to control the countryside; or a fortified coaching inn that extends your borders and perhaps boosts trade for caravans which pass through it.

At the moment, food is the limiting factor on empire growth (no food, no level 2+ cities, no certain buildings). Being able to produce food within the current game environment means that you can readily have level 2 cities at will along with the handful of food-requiring buildings. You're right, this would reduce the need to specialize cities but it would do nothing to make cities any more interesting. I'd still do exactly what I am doing only now I'd have an even greater abundance of food than I currently have.

I can appreciate the need to make cities more distinct. The Civ-style works - to an extent. While it produces specialized towns, it does nothing to make them any more interesting. They're as generic as unspecialized towns; the only difference being that you build X buildings and then forget about it. I've had empires in Civ that span 30+ cities and the majority of them don't really have any personality any more than those in Elemental.

More than that, the Elemental world is about being resource-poor and technology-poor; Elemental is a post-apocalyptic fantasy world. They can't mine and they can't farm because they don't know how and the world is scorched into lifelessness.

I think that while we should make cities more distinct and make terrain play a little more into the game (beyond choke points and such), I'm not convinced that Civ-style mechanics really do that. Fact is, unless you're building something in a city or it's the focus of combat, most - specialized or not - will be generic cities. This is unavoidable.

I think making cities more distinct means making a handful of cities more distinct so it feels like an empire. More unique buildings and perhaps more buildings that are mutually exclusive. Give different cities different items in their shops - more remote cities may have less items in their shop but they may have a different variety as well. City-specific units - you can only build X at Y city. More concrete and moment-to-moment game mechanics; I think things like these will make city and terrain interesting not just for the first 5 minutes you spend plopping it down and making a building queue.

I agree with your first statement, although (as you specify in your second statement) the way 4X games are played, if you don't put a city in every possible square inch, it's just a spot waiting to see an AI city sprout . Also, from what I gather, when influence covers terrain it prevents monsters from "spawning" there. So it also serves that purpose. So given these facts, I really find that something needs to be done about this.

Thing is, if they really want to diverge from common 4X games and make terrain irrelevant, I don't see how you could make cities vary when away from SRs. Since SRs are the only determining factor in a cities purpose.

@AnjinSan1966

Thanks for the feedback

@Supronar

Just like you can only build 1 Labor Pit, why not impose restrictions to how many farms can be built? Quite simple, and even more awesome, make it so you can't build farms on swamps or hills. I think with these restrictions it would ensure that you won't have uber auto-sufficient cities.

Man, I really wish I had joined the Beta. All my years of QA experience... unexploited!... A bit like the terrain...

Thanks for all the feedback gentlemen!

Something like watchtowers and town halls? Though yes, more utility buildings would be nice.

Though borders being contiguous is 'meh'. I personally don't build things unless I'm trying to grab stuff - in the end, due to influence growth, my cities borders naturally connect to each other any way. I've noticed that I can take control of one large canvas map square with 3-4 cities whereas the AI will use more than twice that. 

I've felt the food mechanic being a problem kind of from the start. I like the strategic location model, but I don't like, as has been said, how food dictates so much of your early game city placement options.

I think this is going to change in future. For example, when a City is max level, people have discovered you can destroy housing with zero consequence. Since housing is the entire point of the food mechanic currently, I expect that to change.

But I know they want food to be a rare commodity because of the game's backstory, so it can't change that much.

What I think food should be good for is getting you started, but since we in theory "revive the land" when it comes under our sphere of influence, we should be able to build farms as part of the city. Make them fairly expensive in gold, materials or time, but let us add to our food resource count without having to build another city. The refinement tech research is nice, but it's global and instantaneous, and still provide less benefit when you control fewer food strategic points. It would scale back the power of that research, and de-emphasize food resource points a little, if we could build farms as part of the town. Then you're not just getting a straight +100 to all food production in every city as a way to get more food, you can get 3 extra food units for another farm in one city instead.

Food strategic resources should provide a lot of BONUS food, and provide food to help cities start growing quickly early game, but they shouldn't be the only way you get food...and they would provide stable, relevant +Food values for your research to interact with. As it is, you have to do a lot of research and build a lot of structures to get a 1 Resource food to 2.

This way you can also make a trade off between available city space, total housing and farms. How much extra food do you want a city to provide? How fast do you want a city's pop to grow? How many other buildings are you willing to sacrifice to have a big city center?

I think putting food control totally in our hands as players would give us one more layer of depth to city building. It's an element that's totally missing atm because food is almost totally in the hands of the random map generator, and strategic points.

Population does consume the food, that's why it doesn't stack. What you see on the top of the screen is the turns surplus, if you don't use the surplus it gets wasted since food is perishible. Makes sense to me... Also you can use Nature's Bounty to give +1 food to a city. There's no need to build extra farms if you cast that on everything. On four cities that's like a free fertileland+farm. And as far as I understand one city with a fetileland+farm can support a city without it, especially with trade through caravans.

i have yet to play a game where my initial spawn point was near an iron resource... in fact, the only times i've ever had one have been when ive conquered other cities that had already established production...

Depends on if you did the research, and what your pop requirements are for your cities to grow and what you're building in them. If you get three fertile land and max your research and food enhancing improvements, you can get 20+ food, more than you'll ever need. But on the flip side, without, it's hard to get anywhere.

As for nature's bounty, I don't think anyone wants to stack 4 of those when there are a lot other enchants available. It wouldn't be more useful if there were better versions of it available.

You cant cast Nature's Bounty on everything as you say because if I am not mistaken you are limited by you enchantment slots.

I have to agree with Brad here, but I feel you may be missing his point.  I'm all about--as I suspect Brad is--making fewer specialized cities and growing them, rather than just covering every square inch of the map as fast as you can with pretty much worthless cities..."infinite city sprawl" is something that makers of 4X games strive to prevent.  The way Elemental seems to have done this is by making generic land tiles pretty worthless, with a few special tiles aroung which you should build your cities.  I think Brad's saying that in GC2, he didn't need to worry so much about that, because you can't create a city just sitting in space wherever you wanted, you had to colonize a planet, so they can control where you place your 'cities'...

The EWoM system needs tweaking but I think it's a good.  There should definitely be more fertile land tiles in the early game.

@sagittary

Hi Sagittary,

I think the whole concept of "food/city size/access to better buildings" concept is going to be a headache to work around. It's also very weird that your food upkeep is claimed immediately when the building is being built. Shouldn't the population size reflect the food consumption? I find it's a bit of a weird way of handling things. And even without being able to produce food on the get go. If you are even a little bit of an expansionist. You just build cities after cities, and converge all the caravans to your capital. Soon enough you'll have something like +500% bonus to your food production. And then you are back to the same position of having too much food.

As far as making cities more "interesting" I didn't mean to make them into this unique entity that you care about as much as one of your champions. If the potential of a city was determined by it's location, it would make it so that all cities had a little something different. More hills, more grasslands, no grasslands all swamps, etc... this could affect max population, production and research potential.

I'm just really floored that a city in the arctic will be the SAME as a city in the middle of grasslands. I'm starting to sound like a broken record on that, but I really feel it's weird in a 4X game. I mean food permitting, i could build this huge city in the arctic. I mean... think about it.

Yes, I agree with that point. Although the part where you say "They don't know how", that's a little false. You can on the first turn, build a farm on your food node next to you. So I guess they do "know how to farm". And to reflect the apocalyptic world, obviously you can't make a super efficiant farm (like the SRs) but with tech and research, you could turn 1 square of grassland into somewhat farmable land. Not 8 or 6 food per turn, but 1, 1.5, 2?

I just want to get rid of the feeling that I could make a map ALL desert or Artic, and it wouldn't have an impact on the game much.

Cheers,

V.

@Vhorx

"As far as making cities more "interesting" I didn't mean to make them into this unique entity that you care about as much as one of your champions. If the potential of a city was determined by it's location, it would make it so that all cities had a little something different. More hills, more grasslands, no grasslands all swamps, etc... this could affect max population, production and research potential."

It depends. From a city building perspective, yes, cities are different. From a gaming stand point, it results in even more counting tiles and picking the spot that (as an example), has 1 mountain tile for basic production, 2 forests to for mats, and the rest plains for food and gildar.  And you look for spots with only some variant on that. It also tends to discourage unique cities similar to that in real life - there's not really any way in Civ to mimic Las Vegas or what have you. As a player, one tends to just ignore certain areas (or rush tech to grab those areas first - you rush Axe in Civ so you can chop forests and jungle).

And yes, the counter would be 'well you don't have to play like that' and that is also true. But we can't ignore the effects of game mechanics on the dynamics of the game and thus the relationship the player has with them. If the game encourages something, players will do that unless they're actively trying to self limit.

Again, it's not that the Civ system is bad. It isn't. I just think we can come up with a system that works for the intended game play and aesthetics that Elemental is trying to achieve. And at the same time, we also don't want to use a system to fix a small issue where a small adjustment will do. Making food plentiful and terrain resource-rich just to get rid of a 'feeling' doesn't help; we need a fix or a system that works to enhance the aesthetics, not spite them.

 "Yes, I agree with that point. Although the part where you say "They don't know how", that's a little false. You can on the first turn, build a farm on your food node next to you. So I guess they do "know how to farm". And to reflect the apocalyptic world, obviously you can't make a super efficiant farm (like the SRs) but with tech and research, you could turn 1 square of grassland into somewhat farmable land. Not 8 or 6 food per turn, but 1, 1.5, 2?"

They know how to farm fertile land. They do -not- know how to farm land that requires work. You can easily buy potting soil from the Home Depot and grow a garden. It's not nearly going to be that easy to take a 6 acre piece of land and grow enough food over the course of several years to feed yourself, your family, make profit, and pay a tithe. The technology you research is about the scaling of food production to feed people; about making farms more efficient and allowing better storage of food. The same piece of farmland at the start of the 20th century now, in the 21th century, can feed exponentially more people.

But also, remember, that progress and technological advance do not happen in a vacuum. You need infrastructure and resources. You need to be able to re-route rivers and mass-produce farming goods (and be able to repair them) along with the animals or machines to use them. You need technologies that allow people to spend the same amount of time doing -more- work. You need to factor in waste disposal. These things and more are part of farming not just 'land'. Land gets you a start but it's only the beginning.

These technologies are not what Elemental has. They're just starting to re-domesticate animals and develop basic farming technology. They do not have the ability to turn any piece of ground into a farm. They may eventually develop that technology but it's a slow process. If anything, I would see such a thing being a high level spell combined with high level resource and costly; it'd be an investment of time, essence, technology, and education.

I understand that you want to make terrain matter; but I don't think this necessarily makes it any more interesting in the long run nor does it really support the fiction and feel of the game. I think part of it is just an overall lack of strategic level things you can do. You move units and... that's pretty much it. There's no interconnected world beyond that. Even with terrain resources, it's not really adding much other than more resources. Without strategic level mechanics, you can have all the cities and all the resources you want, and it's still fairly meaningless.

For instance, I can build a city in Civ in a mountain pass. But between movement mechanics, city mechanics, and what have you, that city is about as meaningless as can be. It'll drain money, be worthless strategically, and have no real significance unless there's a strategic resource near by. The only real benefit is hammer production but you can produce more hammers in non-mountain terrain. I certainly can't turn it into a fantasy style city like Helmsdeep.

That's I think a route Elemental needs to take. Not try to mimic Civ but try to mimic and allow for the 'quirky' cities we see in fantasy worlds. What if there was a type of faction that could -only- build in forests (treetop villages like stereotypical fantasy elves) or only mountains (dwarves). What if we could actually build great walls and such (again, Helmsdeep or the actual Great Wall). Fantastical things in a fantasy world and the game mechanics to back it up rather than just trying to Frankenstein a solution from other games that are trying achieve a different game design goal.

This would be so awesome.

I second this as an awesome idea...

Precisely, but specialised in those aspects to an extent. Rather than building an outpost and sticking down a town hall and watchtower, a specialised castle which has perhaps three levels of watchtower so it's "specialised" in watching the borders for example.

Kind of like the Gal Civ II system in fact - Cities with resources become your colonies, while those without become the space stations.

It's largely a problem with caravans. I get sick of having one destroyed because there's a two square gap between city borders. Eventually they'll probably grow together, but until then it's just an irritation. Besides which the trading is pretty dull as it is, create a caravan, send it to a city and that's it. Having the ability to build improvements which increased the value of trade would not only make it a more worthwhile system, but a perfect excuse to pad out the diplomacy tech tree too.

I generally don't create caravans (or grow cities) until I need the food and such; since I can't stockpile food, havine a 100% bonus on 12 food when I already make 45 is mostly pointless. Though admittedly, this is purely my style of play and I'm more comfortable with playing a slightly longer game.

Perhaps one idea would be that roads generate their own sort of 'influence'. That is, the assumption is that the more a road is used, the more people other than your civilization use it for things. It becomes more armed and armored on its own and you can go out and specifically build specialized structures on a road for whatever reason (tax, defense, or both). As a road increases in influence, it looks 'nicer' (from dirt roads all the way up to Roman-style roads) and 'repels' monsters up to 1 tile away. It would -not- add to your own influence if it lay outside your sphere.  At the very least, I suppose, combined with other things, it could make trade a little more interesting (and a little more fantasy esque) - highway and bandits would only be a problem if they're particularly notable.

To me, making cities dependent on randomized map squares is ok only as long as it affects the AI as much as it affects players.  As AI players can currently build without resources and may in fact even build after they are far negative on things like gold or food, the current system damages players while aiding AIs.  Since the AI is currently rather weak this isn't much of an issue, but when they improve the AI their unlimited effective resources will be a bit of an issue if players are still shackled by random generation of things like research and food.

I think I may agree with the food part, but I don't have a problem with Iron because even in Civ4 you need Bronze or Iron for Axemen or Swordsman (if I remember correctly...), and these are really basic units.  Heck, in both Civ and Elemental you can't do ANYTHING with mounted units unless you have horses.

 Thing is, given the fact that you CAN build cities in the middle of "nowhere", and that the AI CAN also. This doesn't' fit in very well into the Galciv2 concept where, you can only build colonies on planets. If you use that analogy and reverse it, it would mean that following elemental rules you could build a "colony" in the middle of nowhere in space. And like I said, the AI will do this practice. Anyways, I don't want to debate this too much as it digresses from the initial point I am trying to make.

Taking into account that this is post-apocalyptic world, where resources are scarce and that normal terrain is as good as bucket of rocks. Can you explain to me why a city in the north arctic, will grow and output the same levels of resources that a coastal city in a temperate environment? If someone can explain this to me, I'll be more than happy to let this go. But my brain is just wrapping itself around this problematic and it's driving me crazy. Someone help give me a mental slap.

Because the map generator doesn't factor in a graphical texture set to determine resource availability. There's just as much of a chance for there to be a farm on the snow cap as there is for one to be in the swamps (at least as far as I've noticed.)

If you want that kind of simulation, you need to be playing Dwarf Fortress or something, because that level of thought has not gone into map design in Elemental.

Well in the current version everyone starts near a farm (I always had and assumed it was by design) and you can choose the special leader trait if you are afraid you're not going to be near metal, so I don't really see the issue. 

After you have expanded as much as you can with your starting farm, if for some strange reason you don't get any more farms, then just research the appropriate adventure tech and you will have more farms!  And if that doesn't work, then add some caravans, food storage, and Natures Bounty to your starting (farm) city to tide you over until you can conquer an enemy and take their farms! 

Seriously I've never had the problem with Farms or metal being rare.  In fact it makes the game more interesting.  I find I want more farms if I start with royalty trait but I've never had to end my game because of lack of food.

Also I have often built cities in the "middle of nowhere" in elemental for (1) Shopping and healing for my champions (2) to create a choke point (3) to turn rediculous amounts of extra food into Tech, Gold, Alchemy, etc... (Each city produces one of each) and (4) so I can build a seaport EXACTLY where I wan to (5) Teleport destination for my hero for quick travel and (6) to add a road to a hard to reach place by creating a new caravan and (7) if you found the city in the early game, and then you research the adventure\resource technologies you CAN ACTUALLY GET REAL RESOURCES THERE and make the city productive later on!

I say leave things as is.  And there are plenty of uses for a "city in the middle of nowhere".

I know you can, but should you?

EWoM should have a system in place where you benefit more if you don't build cities in the middle of nowhere.  And the AI should follow that as well and not just place cities willy-nilly all over the map.  Better placement of resources and more resources would help.

@sagittary

I guess I'm not expressing myself properly. I don't want to make the world food & resource plentiful, I just want to see terrain/climate having somewhat of an impact on the cities/progress/gameplay. Like I say in the above post, there should be something different depending on where you build your city. Am I wrong for believing so?

Here is perhaps a better example of what I would be looking for.

Let's take Empire.

* You can make a Labor pit, gives you +1 Material. I'm guessing this labor pit is a bunch of slaves making bricks, cutting wood, etc... Would it make sense that making a Labor Pit on a Hill/Forest would yield more materials than one built, let's say in the middle of a desert?

* Along the same thought, should you build a Money Changer. It gives you +1 GP. Wouldn't building a Money Changer in a very large city yield more Gildar than when built in a small city?

* Even houses. If you build a houses in the arctic, for the same cost, it will house as many people than some built in temperate climate. I'd think that there would be mandatory reinforcements needed to make a house to survive in the arctic when compared to a temperate zone. People can live in huts in temperate regions, try living in the exact same hut in the arctic. Not sure it'll be as enjoyable. Not to mention people eat more in cold climates, will probably need to burn wood all the time to keep warm. It's a massive difference in energy costs.

I can't fight the feeling that there should be scaling happening here. No?

As it is buildings are what dictate resources, when I feel that it's location should matter and affect it's output. I guess as I'm explaining it, I realize that perhaps it's not just, or specifically "terrain exploitation" that bothers me. It's as if buildings exist in a vacuum, or are in a magical bubble where whatever they need to produce their output is provided in a equal amount regardless of where it is established or the city's size. There is the city level up bonus, but I feel that the pieces still don't fit.

Regardless of the mythical and magical essence of the world, there is some basic logic that needs to carry through I think. If anything Brad's fear is present in the current situation. He stated that he didn't want resources to be created out of thin air, taking the Labor pit example, I feel that if anything it's a perfect example that you can create resources out of nowhere.

And taking your Mountain City example in Civilization. You said it would cost you money and not be worth anything, well in elemental your desert/swamp/arctic city can produce money and resources as much as any other city as well as grow to the same size. Wouldn't you agree that building a huge city in the arctic would cost more to sustain then a city built along a temperate coastline?

I think I maybe just explained myself a little bit more clearly. I apologize for the long posts, I'm just trying to grip the game's logic.

I'd like to thank you all who posted for the great feedback. Let me know if i'm making more sense now.

Kind regards,

V.