Unique city/region traits (was "Predetermined city locations")

I have mixed feelings about predetermined locations.  It works pretty well in HoMM and other games.  However I liked creating settlers to go and create new cities.  It made the world feel more dynamic, which is something that MoM was all about.

I doubt, with the world destroyed and all, that there will be many population centers.

Well, I guess what I liked about it was that cities weren't generic things you could plop down anywhere. They each had a personality in terms of the race and types of units you could build there. Cities in one area tended to be of the same race which gave regions of the board some flavor, some concept of absorbing another culture into your empire.

Creating Civ cities was like stamping out cookie cutter cities where you frequently do the first X builds always the same. MoM did have some distinction in races and special units per race which is nice.

The game will offer more flexibility.

The principe is that to build a city anywhere you have to pay with your personal essence meaning a weaker mage.

Then there will be spot where you can build city for free. You must probably clean the spot from some monster nests first.

So you can either start with weak mage + many cities or strong mage + few cities. Free spot being a drive for exploration & conquest.

I wouldn't like the idea of predetermined cities (especially given the context of the world we're playing in). Even the idea of predetermined locations feels a bit limiting, but i suppose you could put in some locations that are 'prime' city locations and it's up to the player to locate them (or not). Although that might unbalance the game.

I'm opposed to predetermined population centers for this one simple reason: imagine playing a game of Civ IV where you couldn't settle your own cities. I could imagine it being a fun way to mix things up once in a while, but I would get really bored/frustrated really fast if that were the normal game.

It's not nearly as limiting as you might think. Have any of you played Warlords?

Or, perhaps, neutral cities that start the game (pockets of surviving civilization) in particularly good spots. I love Civ, but one thing I don't like is it gives the perception that you've got, in say a 3 player game, 3 spots of people in the entire world and they spread. It's not like that. You've got people everywhere in pockets and they coalesce into an region/country/state. You conquer them, absorb them via strong trade relations, immigrants, etc. You can argue that settlers are an abstraction of that I suppose.

I find the idea of taking over a living world (albeit devastated in Elemental) which has some cities and uniqeness of it's own much more interesting than a world that essentially starts dead except for your city.

Well, that's what has happened according to Elemental lore...

But it has been mentioned that there will be preexisting cities on maps (probably like minor civilizations in GalCiv)  which you can conquer, so the map shouldn't be that barren.

I oppose this entirely, as this ruined Kohan II, and was the reason it tanked, and Timegate really hasn't been heard from since.

Kohan I allowed for you to build cities anywhere you wanted, outside of a min distance between cities.  That's a better model.

Neutral independents/lairs  running around waiting to be conquered would make scouting real important.  This is a good thing.

Heh, I don't think it was the lack of settlers that killed Kohan 2 . They changed a lot of things.

As for Elemental lore, well, not much is exactly set in stone yet. Ignoring an idea because "that's what Elemental lore says" is pretty silly at this point. Having pockets of people eeking out a living hardly goes against the theme of a devestated planet.

The neutral cities sound good. My real point is a drive to make cities unique or locations unique. GalCivII went this way a little bit with their specialized squares. It gave you a reason to specialize a planet. I'm thinking a little more than that though. In Warlords, you had several towns that could produce light infantry. One town though produced kick ass light infantry because they were warrior monks as I recall. They weren't any cheaper, but had better combat abilities. Another town might product the same unit cheaper. Some towns couldn't produce some units at all.

I'd love to see some sort of regional variance. If you found a coastal town, or take one over, yea, you can build boats, but are these guys from a long viking warrior tradition or a fishing village tradition? Do they excel in building war boats or in producing food (via fishing) or transports? Do those mountain people excel at tracking in a way that the plains people never could?

Read most any fantasy novel with battles and you have semi-classic "this country is renowned for X". That's what I'm looking for. Do I need calvary? I don't want an abstract Civ IV "I have a horse so I can build cavalry anywhere" type system. I want one that gives some strategic value to an area of land. Hardy mountain folk, fast horse men/archers, etc. I want to take that area so I can have some of those types of units produced in that region.

How that gets accomplished is much less of a concern, whether by neutral civs, or a city "unique attribute" assigned at game creation to anything built in a certain area, or maybe a hero arrives and is willing to train a certain city on how to build warships. I want to conquer a moderately believable world . One where the human city on one edge of the world isn't just a generic "Human" city like every other single human city on the map.

Does that make sense?

Well, I think we defaulted to Civ 4 systems because Master of magic was so very similar to the the original Civ games.  Like the order of spiritual sequels might go  "civ, MoM, Civ 2, Civ 3, Civ 4"  so in theory this game might come after Civ 4...  i.e.  advance on its systems the way civilization games advanced upon master of magic.   AoW may be the closest thing to MoM we have recieved since the game came out.   But Civilization is the 2nd closest.

I don't like predetermined city locations at all, but nothing prevents Civ players from making scenarios with prebuilt cities and modding settlers out. It's nice sometimes, but settling is a lot of fun and shouldn't be out.

You're not going to get it I'm afraid. The system described by Frogboy is not abstract, it's based on commerce. If you have horses and a city with some of them, you can send them to another city to get troops mounted built there. The only thing that might fit would be race if races are in, so you wouldn't build dwarves in a human city. But even then, cities could be cosmopolitan cities with different races in.

I must say that would be cool. It could be implemented in a lot of different ways besides having predetermined city locations, though. You could choose certain traits at the start, giving your civ a to certain things. And if you take over another civ's cities it could retain its special traits.

Actually a cool way to do it might be to have cities gain bonuses or traits for certain things based on what they build. If you have one city that does nothing but churn out cavalry every turn, it could get the "Horse Master" trait, resulting in better cavalry. Another city that does nothing but make swords could get the "Master Weaponsmiths" trait. In addition to providing more of a fantasy feel to the world, it would also encourage specialized cities.

Yea, that's exactly the kind of thinking I'm talking about. There's lots of ways to achieve a regional trait. I defaulted to predetermined cities because that's how I saw it done in Warlords, but my goal isn't predetermined cities, so I sort of sent people off on a red herring there.

I think this actually would fit in reasonably well with Frogboy's trade/resource shipping aspect if you extend the thought of a resource to include certain types of skilled labor. You need horse archers? Well, you've got horses in city X, but the guys that have the skill to be horse archers, they're over in in City Y. Whether you get the horses to them or bring them to the horses, either way you're moving a resource around. You want that Paladin armored cavalry unit? Yea, well, only the king's master forgesmith can build the armor necessary (uber-smith trait on a town).

Maybe each city has a trait. Or maybe each hero can "train" one city to give it a trait. Or maybe your wizard has to give up a little power to imbue a city with a trait. Maybe traits come with certain discovered artifacts ("Forge of the Gods").  

You woudn't want most units like this of course. Cranking out average militia and crossbowmen is pretty generic.

This leads to the logical questions- how did those horse archer guys get good if they never had access to mounts?

Supply? Those nomads just didn't have the herds to support full on armies. Now that they've got someone to supply them with enough horses, their long tradition of training and culture means they can crank out new warriors if they can get enough horses.

Those sea side folk were just wasting those horses having them draw carts to and from things...

(for the anal retentive, yea, plow horses are very different from the types horse archers would use, which are different from battle chargers knights would use, but I don't think we'd want a game that got that into gory detail).

That is kinda how I would like it.   but I imagined other similar ideas focusing more on magic.  Thinks like 'summon master' that ensures that summon creatures are ensured into spellbooks and very prominant.   Or 'cavalry master' which lets cavalry units (summoned or otherwise) be stronger and easier to create.   Some traits I would imagine encourage things like direct damage spells, where others might boost influence and buff spells.

Yes there were a few things which stopped me from playing Kohan 2 moving on from Kohan 1. Kohan was a brilliant game and I played many hours playing online multiplayer with that game. Adel's a nice guy too.

I too played many 100's of hours playing Warlords 2 in particular. Predetermined cities are great for strategic warfare which was what Warlords was all about. There was obviously some prescripted story in the game and maps that also generated a realistic touch to the game. Steve's a great guy too.

Someone came up with a script in Civ4 that enabled people to have generated benefits/techs based on stating location. Dynamic starting locations could give a touch of realism to the game by doing so.

Seven Kingdoms also had an interesting system of pregenerated cities etc. There is no definte in my opinion. I'm in favour of pregenerated 'realism' to some degree but also high level randomness. In-game options are the key to the player deciding which style of play they agree with. Like my post in the City growth thread, it doesn't 'have' to be one or the other.

Random pregenerated realism?

In some interview or post Frogboy mentioned they really wanted to have a good map generator. If you look at the screenshots, it has named mountain ranges and forests for instance. Take that and extend it beyond simple names for flavor into actual game affecting traits. Are the archers of Dreadwood descended in part from Fairy/Elf stock and shoot better than most?

I think something like you were saying with that Civ4 script combined with the map generator where certain areas of the board would get special traits when inhabited.

Mom had things like mithril and Adamantine (sp?) that made a city special.  It sounds like the are going to be other kinds of resources that will make the cities in Elemental special.  The presence of a certain resource that allows a city to produce a certain type of unit would make cities special.  For example, the presence of horses allowing the production of cavalry.  A city without the horse resource near it would not be able to produce cavalry.  This is a simplification, but it would make certain cities special.  I think that they have been talking about trade allowing these type of resources to be passed around from city to city, but this might be a trade off.  If the horses were limited to the city that they were near, it would make that city feel special.  If trade allowed them to be used in other cities, this is a benefit for the whole kingdom, but it makes each city less individual.  In Mom I used to work my empire up to the point where I could produce units only in the cities that had the Adamantine resource, and obviously I felt like those cities were different then the others.  It would be great if there were multiple resources that made the cities feel like special places that were unique.  Trade might be a hinderance to this feeling, if it's not implemented carefully.

Well, don't forget things like the nightshade, that couldn't be traded.   I agree with you 100% that there should be things that make a place special.   I feel that some resources should be tradable, and some shouldn't.  I mean logically, I don't know how adamantine would only help at most 1 or 2 cities...   its a metal, you pull it out of the ground and then it can go whereever.  We do that stuff.  We pull oil out of the ground, then move it a great great distance to be refined.  Logically, a place with adamantine but mediocre smelters wouldn't waste time trying to fashion that into something.  They would send it somewhere that could better use it (for a price of course).

I think there should be other features like nightshades, swamps, minor-shards, or sometihng similar that are part of nature and only really work as part of nature (the moment you pull it out of the ground it stops being what it is).   THOSE shouldn't be tradable for obvious reasons.

exactly... thats computer games for you..

Very true, which is part of what made me think of "skilled labor" as a potential type of non-portable resource. You can pull metal out of the ground and send it anywhere, but those dwarven smiths and their forges carved out of the mountain that use lava from the volcano nearby for heat...those guys and their forges aren't portable. You find admantine and bring it to them though and they'll build you weapons and armor for a unit of knights to strike fear into the hearts of your enemies!

I really like the idea of portable and non-portable resources. If you're on a large map, it'd create a lot of regional flavor if certain special units can only be made in certain areas. You'd tend not to shift them to other battle lines because it would just take too long to bring that force to bear or you spend significant magic to teleport them around.

Me too. But first I want to mutter a moment about the portable kind.

I haven't caught any details yet on how the 'resource routing' might work, but what I'm hoping to see is a class of resources that work somewhat like the Asteroid Mines in GC2, which can be assigned to any world in your empire, even if it's on the other side of the map. But also want it to work like the trade routes, where a 'supply' line means a vulnerable unit moving on the map. So for something like a mithril mine, you'd normally want to assign it to the closest city, but on some maps that might not be the best choice because of a military problem or the overall layout of your logistics network

So, I want high flexiblity for things like wood, metal, and food. But I also very much support making 'city individuality' a strong aspect of the game. MoM is one of the few 4/5X games I've played that gave me some of that, in part for exactly the Adamantine(sp?)-based reasons you mention. But I like your example of a unique labor pool and/or 'natural' production infrastructure much better, not least because it could satisy player control needs.

And just to pick on my own aspirations for the game, I have no idea whether any new tricks in Elemental will overcome the 'why build it' problem some of us have had with unique production facilities on extremely large maps. If your game has only a few colonies, making a colony able to build units with +1 speed can stand out. But that subset of +1 speed units can get quickly buried if the world that builds them is just one of many tens of unit-building sites. Maybe the ludicrous-size maps will have a limit on cities, so the increased scale is more about movement speed and deployment decisions than it is about building the biggest network of cities?

Another solution could be to make the bonuses truly significant. Or geographical (so multiple cities could benefit from the same trait). Or some traits could be teachable to other cities, and it would be easier to teach nearby cities than faraway ones. And cities that are taught a trait wouldn't be able to teach it (to prevent you from being able to spread a trait across your empire easily). This wouldn't work for all traits, of course (like a bonus due to volcano forges for example). I really hope there isn't a limit on cities on any maps, though. Making one feature important by limiting a more important feature is a bad idea imo

It also might not be so bad to have only a small percentage of your military benefiting from any one trait. I imagine on large maps we'll be fielding many armies, each one populated by troops trained at nearby cities. So maybe this would just result in your different armies being composed of different units based on geographic location.