Harvesting Resources WITHOUT a City.

I think this is a good idea especially if the resources pop up when you have researched the tech to use them as the city placement might be less than optimal.

Guard Towers and Watch Towers might be useful without this as the fog of war can hide an attack.

I totally agree with you. Being forced to build a town for harvesting crops or building a mine will lead to strange behaviors.

The only thing i'd like to be added is the possibility to create roads to those special locations.

i think it is better to require a city, since there are always settelments around resources (where do the workers + families live? ect. ).

I think you have a wrong impression what a city should be. I think it would be good to have a city development tree:

-mining settelments

-population / administration centers (trade /sea trade)

-military garrisons / castels

-outposts

-minor communities (farming)

each city type should have a purpose and should exclude other options, with a system akin to this you would get a unique and realistic kingdom.

Completely agree. Reduces city sprawl, makes the world feel more alive (especially if accompanied by lively graphics on the 3D map), and forces you to protect your borders and not just your cities. In many games, if someone is invading your land the optimal strategy is to hole up in your city; either they attack your cities despite your defensive advantages, or roam around/leave. If there isn't much damage that can be done outside of attacking a city, then there is little reason to really strive to secure your borders. Having valuable and vulnerable targets scattered about within your territory, though, would go a long way.

Originally I thought so too, but now after playing for a while I think it should stay as it is.

It is going to be a big part of making city placement very tactical. You want to be able to expand to as many resources as possible.

I agree with tesb, it takes a whole lot of people to work a mine.  It doesn't take quite as many to work a farm, but it's still a sizable number.  Those people need a place to live, eat and spend their money.  It's quite realistic to require a city be present to make use of a resource, although it admittedly depends somewhat on the resource.

I just realized that I can build town in range without using essence -___-

In fact I just changed my mind : building "mining towns" will be really fun ^____^ But we still need waypoint for roads in order to create the road you need to avoid that nasty forest ...

Build a road get a resource slowly, build a community get the resource quickly ?

I like this idea, maybe little colonies of people would start flocking there but not enough to be deemed a city. maybe storehouses and perfect pillage points would develop in the area. You know, for those of us who want to go raidin' . Good idea, Raven!

Not at all. A City is a home to Lots of people. Even in medieval time periods people often "commuted" to where they worked. Many jobs were purposely put outside of castle walls and city limits because people didn't want to live near them.

Think about this. Quarries weren't built in cities in ancient times. Neither were Mines. Mines and Quarries would spring up and then people would build settlements "Near" them, but not right next to them. Backwash from mines would pollute the drinking water of towns if they were downstream from mines. This was a particular problem during the "Old West" time period of mining expansion in the US. Also once man kind learned to boil animal fats to make oils and such people didn't want to live near those industries either because of the stench.

The Egyptians and the Romans both had Stone Quarries that were sometimes Miles away from the nearest settlement.

I still think having these buildings be separate from a city proper is a good idea. I'm not saying it should happen all the time, I just think it should be "possible" to build one if you have a city near by and the land has already been reclaimed by your Sovereign's magic.

I would agree that we need to be able to develop resources outside of the cities. Making the city boundaries meander around to get resources will look very strange. A snake city sized 15x1 seems very unrealistic.

I would apply some type of factor to reduce the production of resource facilites that are far away from the cities they are conected to though. Similar to the way asteroids are in galciv 2.

I agree with Raven completely, although either method would produce a different strategic landscape.  I think the implications of requiring cities to gain resources will have very strange and aggrivating implications in war time.  It basically means that you must capture and manage or raise an entire city every time you want to eliminate a specific resource from a player's repetoire, which means that raiding a player's resources as a viable warfare strategy is greatly neutered, and you'll see many more sieges than battles on the field beyond a pivotal mine or lumbermill.  Imagine the aggrivation that will ensue as your opponent prevents you from raiding their resource base by juggling around troop garrisons of walled in cities.  Ugh.

And this is all beside the point that being unable to exploit a resource without building a city atop it is a-historical and difficult to believe.  Yes, it makes perfect sense that a city might spring up around a collection of important resources (and even gain bonuses, pehaps), but to you can't instruct a handful of miners to build a mine 10 miles from the city walls is downright facile and hard to swallow.  

In fact, if you have reclaimed the land near a min eyou can just build a town near it without using essence, then construct some hovels and the mine and leave it as is ... it's exactly what you meant : a mine, some folks around and that's it.

Try the following : build a city far away from the mine, wait to get the reclaimed land, then go build a city ... you build the mine and voilà !!

That's cool and all but I want just the Mine. (No pun intended)

In fact, I would like to have the ability to build structures from a city without being connected to the rest of the city.

You would just have to open the nearest town's UI, then select the mine, put it, and a road would automatically being built.

Instead of having cities like (T for Town, --- for roads, X for buildings)

having cities like

Sure that can work, but will it interefere with a host of other mechanics that involve tabulation of city numbers and calculation of unrest, maintenance, etc?  Personally, it seems about a million times simpler to just have a mine with a road connecting it to a city.  It's simpler to work with from a game design perspective and easier to explain from a fantasy setting standpoint.  The 99 percent of people who will play Elemental and not read the forums during development will notice that you can't build a mine for some bizarre reason, call the feature something to the effect of "retarded," and chalk it up to poor game design.  

A lot of those calculations that are derived based on city numbers can be influenced by the size of city though.  A small cattle farming comunity of 1200 will have a far smaller impact on your overal city count (which shouldn't merely be a base number but an average of sizes, territory covered and buildings created) than a massive metropolis of 100,000... which would enable players to have good reasons to have small farming and mining villages (which also make typical adventuring locations).

Yes, this is a possibility, but it generates an entirely new negative effect on the game, as we see in older civ games.  If cities generate maintenance proportional to their size, you have given the AI and player a green light to spam cities like crazy across the landscape.  That's why Civ 4 made city maintenance contingent on number of cities, rather than size of cities to prevent tedious sprawl. 

And besides, everytime you want to exploit a resource, you may not want to have to build the fort/palace that seems to always come along with city construction.  And really, why should you always need to have your sovereign around every time you want to build a mine?  The sovereign should be able to go off on grand adventures without having to baby sit his growing empire every minute. 

Like I said before, just allowing players to build mines without building a city doesn't create any real problems.  If you decide it does require a city, you have all kinds of issues cropping up that you have to spend extra time coding around.

Seems to me that there should be a difference between "city" and "settlement". Have settlements be built by settlers, created at cities (much like traditional TBS games), and cap their development at 2 large squares. That gives you enough room for one resource and some stuff or two resources.

Settlements do not reclaim land the way cities no, nor are they are versatile or productive. If a sovereign feels so inclined, they may go, follow up with a settlement, and infuse it to turn it into a city at a later date.

I approve of the strategic benefits of not requiring full cities to develop resources, especially for those who wish to play the one-city overlord sort of sovereign. why waste your essence on those weak little mortals? Let them go scrape out a living in the hills for your glory.

Well said.

indeed, cities require essence, and settlements are small villages built by settlers, anywhere on the map. Only cities have prestige and produce things, as well as spread "reclaimed land" from their city centers.

Yep, I'll stand behind this

Indeed, Large cities, require essence, small cities for resource aquisition or farming, don't officially produce anything other than raw-resource, mana node, or food, (dont build buildings or units), don't require essence, and are instead built by population consuming settlers inside a "real" city.

A strategy could even be to ICS tiny settlements in order to ship 2 squares of food apiece to a large super-city ... which I don't mind since the main factor will probably be relative prestige value anyways ... and that extra population could end up emmigrating to someone else's cities if you aren't careful. Perhaps settlements could also be tax payers ... although they would not be centers for education. Now, if a settlement was a center for a secret experimental laboratory, that would be acceptable (improvements to allow scientists to directly grow the raw technology score), but anything inside the settlement would be unheard of.

This strategy tends to lead the question about road development, walls development, and fort development. I think that a military unit (or special military unit with shovel) should be able to build roads, walls, guard towers, and Fortresses.

Walls and Fortresses, especially Fortresses, are Incredibly expensive to build (gold-wise?) ... and maintanence is pretty regular on well-built roads, forts, and guard towers. Anyways, while maintanence keeps from infinite road spam ... expensive walls and forts encourage the player to only build them when/where it is needed.

I can agree with this... Having to build a city for every resource I want to use, would lead to too much cities I'm afraid.