A mod/expansion I'd like to see

from Elemental Forums

I'd like to see it possible for a 'one city challenge'.  From the beginning of WoM many thought that there should be an alternative to city spamming.  Early on in WoM (my memory may be somewhat faulty here, my apologies for any mistakes) our sovs started with a set amount of essence, it cost essence to found a city (cities not in our existing territory anyways), essence was needed to give champions the ability to cast spells, and unspent essence would power spells.  This gave us the choice of 'many cities/champs + low powered spells vs few cities/champs + powerful spells.

I'd love to see something of the above.  I'd love to be able to have only 1 city and a couple of champions, and still be competitive.  Currently that's not possible.  Even with outposts to claim resources and shards, and outposts being upgradable (a very nice feature!), because the city is the 'developer' of the resource/shard/outpost upgrade, 1 city would have to build buildings, recruit troops, develop resources, and upgrade outposts -- not possible in any reasonable time frame.

Possibilities (numbers are made up for purpose of discussion only):

-Sovs start with ~20 essence (magic 'heavy' sovs more, magic 'light' sovs less)

-1 essence per city (no matter if founded in or outside of territory)

-1 essence per champ (all champs now are casters, if we went back to having to grant spellcasting to champs then make the essence cost for granting spellcasting and not for recruiting)

-rare locations that grant +1 essence, and possibly sacrificing champs for essence

-unspent essence would power spells (extra 10% damage/range/etc. per point?), increase build rate (ie -- increase production/research by 10% per unspent point?), etc.

-outposts would be the 'developer' of any resources/shards in said outposts' zone, and also be the 'developer' of any upgrades to that outpost (taking this away from the city).  Outposts would otherwise not substitute for existing city functions.

Remove restrictions of city building so 1 city could build all possible buildings

Goal is to add choice -- empires with few cities would be able to compete with many-citied empires.

Can the above be modded in, or would it require an official expansion?

5,101 views 2 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Actually from what I've seen, the only real advantage to having multiple cities in the current version is more research. With just a single Fortress being fed by lots of resources/outposts you could easily hit level 5 (a few farms) and build everything in one turn (a few clay pits). Building more cities to basically get empire wide +prod per material and +food per grain to feed a main fortress city ends up splitting map resources between them and in the end accomplishing the same thing with much more work. The problem is that they appear to have removed the research resources, or more accurately they turned them into chests you open for a few points, so you'd fall behind in tech. It might just be easier to mod those back in and make Conclave research slightly weaker to compensate, making a supercity strategy more viable.

However I'd imagine that old essence system code is still present in the game somewhere so it might not be that hard to just turn it back on. I did not like it though personally.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

There are several ways of cutting 101th city required to win this game.
- Currently each city gives cummuliative bonus to your empire. So more = better no matter what.
How to solve this:
(i) add handicap on city resources based. Each faction can have city rankings based on population, level and types. Only first three cities gives full amount of resources. Beyond that resources are cutted to 2\3 from 4th-6th and to 1\3 from 7-10th.
(ii) add handicap to city progression and make it manual upgrade - capped by maximum level of your specific capital type (max level - 1). Each city have 5 levels and starting from second level they receive types thee types (civic capital, warfare capital and research capital). Each faction should be able to build 3 types of capitals but its irrational when i have two civic capitals of same level in one domain. So idea "only one city can reach max level in its specific". Manual upgrade city levels give players to choose which city he wants to be his civic, warfare or magic capital.

And main thing what FORCE factions to city spam:
(iii) Outpost borders means nothing if city can be build near it. Outposts borders should be equal in strength to its parent city borders. Currently if you build city near lonly outpost it will lose its borders and territory as resources.
+
(iv) Players should be able to manually link resources not only to closest city but to any city (as in GalCiv).
(iii) + (iv) opens viable option to play without city spamming and with resource gathering
(v) And MAIN thing to make playable few city strategies its territory bonus multiplier to resources. More territory city controls = more resources are actually gathered. There is average number of tiles each city can control in given time if all of this tyles belongs to its city = 100% production. And if city dosent control its "must have" tyles its production cuted by percent of tyles it dosent control. Maybe enemy neighbor took it or your own other bigger city (yes i know we dont see our own borders for each city but we have them after they merged). 

 

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