Small Towns, Big Adventure

Umm, can't you limit Pioneers by... lets see... not making anymore ? 

Just odd you would need a mod for this.

indeed.  A lot of complaints people seem to have would be best served by them not using it.  No one is forcing you to city spam, no one is forcing you to use organized, etc. etc.

The problem is the I don't want the A.I. to build tons of cities either. I want it to be a two-way street. Forcing both sides to do their best with just a few towns. 

I believe this would lead to there being killing fields, which are always awesome.

I agree 100%.  I would rather have a small kingdom in a wild world (with other small kingdoms/empires out there as well) and build up adventuring groups to explore the wilds.  Instead we get urban sprawl in the late game with hardly any room left for monsters to spawn.

So if you figure out a way to mod this, please share it in the modding forum. 

the problem, as i say in every thread, is the way population grows and income is generated.

if population growth for your faction as a whole was determined predominantly by the food available per person, and merchants generated 0.05 gildar per person or whatever, then the best way to play the game would be to build small villages to control resources (such as food) but only build the capacity for population to grow (houses) in big cities. that way you keep most of your population in the places where you have the infrastructure to exploit them.

the result of this is that you can use pioneers to grab resources without getting settlement spam. just one or two biggish cities per faction for making the things that people make (gildar from trade adn taxes, troops, materials in workshops), and small villages to control the things that are produced by the world (metal, food, gildar from mining).

this keeps the map unclutterred, micro-management minimal and the whole thing intuitive and believable. best of all it helps the flow of play, because the settlements on people's borders are less important than the cities at their heart, so losing factions remain competetive for longer.

Sethai, to alter your idea.

How about if cities made by Pioneers can't grow beyond level 1 (still limited in number). Then you would get 1 UBER pioneer that can build a city that can grow just as much as your core settlement.

would also suffice, but i think if you get the game mechanics right (like i suggested) you won't need to limit people's settlements like this. they will want to do it themselves.

this way it's organic and the player is empowered instead of restricted. and if you lose your capital early on for some reason, you can redevelop a smaller place to work as a new big city.

This is an excellent idea. The general issue with MoM, Civ and Elemental and games like this or that cities tend to grow like a fungus across the world until every inhabitable expanse of land is conquered and owned by some empire or city. It's not realistic in this day and age and it most definitely wouldn't be realistic in a high-fantasy/medieval setting due to the extreme cost of sustaining it and the fact that resources aren't available all over the world and different climates are hard to live in.

Anyway, I love this idea because it would be great for there to be a few major cities and some lesser cities with vast expanses of land and unmanaged rough dirt roads between them. This removes the city spam and the insanity of micromanaging every little city and promote the idea that the world is dangerous and the safety is in cities around the world. I'm thinking Lord of the Rings or virtually any D&D campaign. In this game magic is really rare, civilization is really common and it just feels odd.

In all honesty the biggest reason with the Civ games was also city spamming, even in this day and age there are huge swaths of land not dominated by any cities etc, countries might claim ownership over them but there isn't a city for hundreds of miles in any direction and we're 'modern'

Also this would have been easily managed both from the player and AI points of view if the game was designed like Brad originally suggested where creating cities would be progressively more expensive, so you might cap out at 4-6 cities overall or some might not be able to get that large, etc. Again, rubberband effects are needed here. Most of us don't want to manage 50 cities I don't think Beyond 3-5 it gets pretty difficult to manage anyway.

Awesome idea, I love it.

Another way to slow down expansion would be to make the wandering enemies aggressively attack your cities, and make them much more abundant and powerful. Then you would have to balance expansion with making sure that everything you take is secure. To balance this, the player would probably have to start off with a couple defensive units to station in their city. A side effect of this is that there would be much more experience gain.

How about you start with one city.

Pioneer can only build an outpost (a size 1 city with no growing influence beyond the one square). The outpost can build one caravan that connects to your city.

A second city can be built only by gaining research in civics, and this could be a repeatable tech so if you really want lots of cities you can, but they would not happen until much later in game.

This world is VASTLY under populated and more expansive than most people realize. And yes, for the record where I live I can drive 10 miles and be in the middle of nowhere, no buildings, no restaurants, nothing, but swamp, forest and wetlands for hundreds of miles.

In Civ and this game, cities end up taking everything over and it's unrealistic and it's annoying. It should be an adventure from one city to the next with dangerous creatures about (not everywhere, just enough to be dangerous).

I would like to see city size affect how much you harvest from various resource nodes.  That way spamming lev 1 crap cities is less helpful than taking the time/food needed to max cities out around several nodes.

Reading Brad's new Dev Journal post Thursday Musings, population is about to be a resource, that I think will help some.

Indeed, Ssternbe I like the idea of Outpost buildings that would act as mini-settlements (which i imagine would be used to "cap" gold mines and what have you, but they would be really restricted in terms of sprawl.

Right now I'm going the easy route and making a map I feel will cater to keeping a low number of towns. It includes a ridiculous number of quest nodes, few but dense resource areas, lots of mountain passes to discourage settlements, things like that.

Edit: Delmoroth, that is an amazing idea!

It just makes sense to me.  Have a town with 100 people in it? Well then you have 6 guys and a donkey working at the mine.  Have thousands of people in your city?  Well you can spare a lot more to work at and expand that mine of yours.  It also allows for city spam for those who want to play that way, while not punishing those of us who prefer to play with fewer cities.  Though they need to fix the caravans of never ending food for this to matter at all as currently there is more or less no limit on how much food you can have.

I don't see anything wrong with players having a fair number of settlements, but as Sethai suggests there should be few big cities and larger numbers of small towns and outposts.

Maybe you could have a system where every level of an existing city allows you another city at the level below that? So if you have two level two cities, you can also have two level one cities. This doesn't really stop city spam, but it does encourage you to build up cities more and it means you can only have so many high level cities.