Kingdom improvements visible on map

from Elemental Forums

I have to say that I love the cloth map.  However, the zoomed in screenshots look really bare and empty to me.  I know that these are really early, and the world will become more vibrant as development progresses, but here's my suggestion:

I want to see my kingdom grow and develop on the zoomed-in map.  I don't want to just have a large city surrounded by empty countryside and maybe only a few points of interest, as is currently the case.  I want to see villages and towns spring up, connected by roads.  It would be great to have the initially wild countryside become progressively more cultivated and civilized, with farms and pastures replacing empty plains as the game goes on.  I think that some developments should appear automatically (villages popping up as the population increases, trading centers forming at the meeting places of important roads), while others would be built by the player (it looks like it's already possible to build roads, so add to that forts, mines, etc.).

These locations on the map should have strategic importance to the player.  For example, I might want to cripple my enemy's food production by sending raiding parties to burn his fields, without ever approaching his larger cities.  Before I do that though, I may want to capture and garrison the fort that my opponent has built to protect his farmland.

While on the subject of maps, it looks like the appearance of the land that we hold will be transformed based on our kingdom's element/alignment/whatever, however right now this effect looks a little bit extreme.  Particularly in the screenshot that shows the border between what I take to be the "good" and "evil" kingdoms - I think that it's a bit much to have the river suddenly change from regular water to lava.  It would be cool if the effect could be a bit more subtle instead of a complete palette swap.

Anyway... I'm really excited about this game! :)

 

4,888 views 4 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

The building of a town is entirely in the hands of a player. Early on in the development we realized that while the one tile city that simply visually expands as players build on to it in a game like Civilization really doesn't communicate the epic scale of a large kingdom that we really want to promote throughout Elemental. So, for a gameplay feature, we're going to have players choose how their town expands when it reaches certain population levels and such so that if you, say, want to make a really long city that is one tile deep but seven tiles wide then that's your choice (not a strategically smart one, most likely, but we don't want to inhibit a player's creativity on the matter).

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Cool.  :) 

 


One question I have, though:  Will we actually be able to build *new* towns, or can we only improve existing ones? 

 

 

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

One question I have, though: Will we actually be able to build *new* towns, or can we only improve existing ones?

I'm pretty sure I read somwhere that founding is a player option. But I'm not sure whether it is free placement or if there are a limited number of possible city sites.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

I hope it will be similar to mom in that respect.

 

Apart from not being allowed to build another town 3 tiles from another you could build as many towns as you wanted. Made the game really inrteresting at times.