War of Magic: v1.3– City levels matter again

I'm curious to see how many non-housing buildings we can make in a level 1 or level 2 town, as a major issue (in my opinion) is the validity of creating many small cities just to increase your production of materials/tech as you gain additional building and training queues. By the way you describe it, it actually sounds like you want to tear up the big high-level cities in favor of smaller ones, but we are already doing that in a min-max game.

On the other hand, high-level cities DO look like rubbish visually, sometimes covering a whole screen and leaving almost no room until the next city. That leads to a "map of cities" rather than a "map of the world" in long games (inherited from the general uselessness of the world, of course).

Regardless, what about prestige buildings? They are only concerned with city growth as well, and most are what I would consider "organic" (an inn is organic, a theater is organic, a monument isn't). Similar to lacking housing in a "capped" city, the user will possibly feel the need to destroy production buildings in favor of prestige buildings. It's sort of the same problem as housing, only not as bad.

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.

i too have read this a few times and still don't really understand it. as far as i was aware you could build as many buildings as you liked (other than uniques) in any settlement so long as you had enough citizens (and you almost always did). wasn't that the point? that citizens > buildings > production? i often had settlements with more citizens than population, which i thought was weird, but i assumed that those buildings were being "deactivated" (and if not, why not, if there aren't enough people to run them?)

what i found more annoying was stuff like hitting the housing limit and not being able to get to level 3 and upgrade my hovels to houses. ridiculously, i couldn't continue to increase my population BECAUSE i couldn't continue to grow my population. yes, you read that correctly. the free housing (from WHERE?) when levelling up a city makes this jump even more jarring. and then stuff like doubling my research across my empire overnight because i researched a new type of study (that i don't even have to pay for). so basically the best way to win the game was to make a beeline for the housing and food techs at the beginning of the game (esp the refined housing tech).

fundamentally, i never really understood the idea of having both population costs AND city level requirements. surely they're both a measue of the same thing?

wouldn't it be easier to simply add more levels, and give settlements up to 6 buildings at level 2, up to 8 at level 3, or whatever. that way you can easily predefine exactly how powerful and large a town can be by it's level, instead of dealing with huge numbers of citizens and buildings. instead of determining buildings by population and production by level, determine production by population and buildings by level. you could then insure economies of scale by having those buildings produce a certain amount per citizen (this is what gives value to population between levels, and results in a dip in production when you recruit soldiers). this way the tile limit would never be a gameplay issue, because the maximum city level would have a lower building limit, and even after than, production would could continue to increase with population.

at the moment, because end level pop is so huge compared to early levels, you either make studies cost 5 pop and have hundreds by the end game, or make them cost 10 and have them unbuildable at the start. all the fixes seem to be awkward workarounds to attempt to escape this fact, such as the recent decision to make your second library cost twice as many people as your first. they are attempting to stop building numbers from growing exonentially (as your population does) by making the costs of buildings grow exponentially. and so the two cancel out and the number of buildings grows at a steady rate. if you limited numbers of buildings by settlement level instead of people, this would happen anyway, without crazy mathematics, because the settlement level requirements increase at an increasing rate already.

and because you can't make the second level studies cost more pop than the old ones (ie you have to go from 1/5 people to 2/5 people instead of 2/7 people) the bonuses from getting the tier 2 studies are obscene once you manage to cheese-ball your way to them first.

i also thought i read in another recent blog that housing no longer needed to be actively built in order to save tiles, size and performance. this seemed eminently sensible to me. or was that for fallen enchantress?

EDITed several times.

The housing thing was for FE.

Well, the only thing will be again city spam... the more city you have, the more building you'll be able to produce, the more terrain you'll be able to gain, etc. All will then point to the war tech because Civ and other wont be that effective since they will grow exponentially in requirement and army wont. In the end, you will always need to build a lot of city and a strong army to win, no matter what.

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

i agree with this 100%. this is one of the things that turns the game into fugly as it progresses. cities grow so much it eats the so called fantasy world around it making it look like one giant urban sprawl of a map. i really think the accual zone a city can grow in needs to be shrinked as to not eat the map. oviously all the buildings need to be shrinked into the box. like a lvl1 city can be 1by1 tile. lvl2-3 can be 2by2 tiles and lvl 4-5 can be the max 3by3 tiles.

buildings should be placed and arranged automatically by the computer as you build your city. ( elimating micromanagement of zomg i want this building facing a particular direction BS).

in summary placing a max on how the city can expand visually will remove THE FUGLYNESS that large cities turn into later on in the game AND GOBBLE UP THE MAP.

end qoute:   if i wanted to look at a map of an urban sprawl i would load up simcity2000. when i want to play a fantasy game i really want the fantasy uniqueness flavor not eaten by urban development.

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.

Cities do get rather large but since the world is so empty there is no real need to make them smaller. Plus placing all those buildings allow you to claim resources and expand your borders, if random improvement placement is your thing you just have to double click.....

One thing that bugs me about cities is that all the buildings are so small and there are no tall towers. It would be cool if libraries and sanctums could stack on each other to form towers. This would look much cooler, make spam cities use less tiles, and make cities look more organic because libraries aren't over 50% of the city. To bad but I don't think it would be possible to mod in.

He is adding a building/tile limit determined by city level, and city level does effect and thus determine production. So what are you trying to get at? Plus the new scaling population costs will decrease building spam.

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.

You know, there's a good point here.  City placement of buildings on the map has little value (there's no economic strategy to improvement placement, and only limited strategic value, such a choking off an access point...in a game with raise and lower land, not particularly valuable).  Maybe we should go ahead and let the computer place buildings for us, since there's needless micromanagement to the process.  By the time I'm L3 or above, I'm pretty much randomly placing tiles anyway, most of my special tiles have been connected up to gain the defensive benefit.

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.

I like these ideas, I've been thinking similarly.  

One other thought quasi-related thought:

•  With each increase in map size add 1-2 squares to the minimum distance between newly founded cities

One of my favorite reasons to make sprawling snake cities is to provide visibility in my controlled area.  I would be very happy to shrink cities down, but it would be nice if there were some sort of lookout tower we could construct (it could be captured or destroyed) to enhance sight.  

I still find it too bad that we can see what our enemies cities are doing when they are in the fog of war.  You should have to have the settlement in your units field of vision for that.  

What if each time we built a duplicate building the originally placed building just grew in size.  That should help hider the sprawl, at a glance you would still get the jist of what that city is up to.  Could also add an interesting look to things.

Cheers 

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?

The citizen system is needed for town growth, and as a cap for infinite building.

I think part of the problem is that the citizen system isn't forcing hard choices that much right now (though Brad's changes might work for this)

I do think getting rid of human city-placement is a good thing, it adds very little and is micromanagey.  Unneeded feature.

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.

the map looks atrocious with those things and really kills the fantasy factor with unrealistic aesthetics. though i do think that there should be an innate Line of sight from the city outward.

i agree on this as well

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

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

I for one like placing my buildings, but I wouldn't mind the buildings being automatically rotated.

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.

I don't like the idea of having a cap on the number of buildings a city can have. If I want to make a research capital (lots of libraries) or a metropolis (with a little bit of everything), I should be able to do so. I don't want to run into a cap of buildings.

That said, I wouldn't mind having the population of a city be tied to only that city, and not usable by any other. I can handle the need to build more houses in my research capital so I can build more libraries. In fact, it might solve a few problems. In one of my previous games, I had conquered many enemy cities and had found myself short on population. In turn, I was unable to train any new units because I didn't have any population to spare. That really slowed down my advance as I couldn't advance without leaving some cities exposed to attack.

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.

Why do we even bother with using city levels anymore?