Cities or provinces?

from Elemental Forums

Another area in which I think games like civilization have boxed in game concepts far too much is in the idea of cities. In civilization all strategy and tactics and development is 'city-centric' most everything is built in cities and cities are the determiner of who owns land and who can work it. They tried to fudge the concepts of non-urban development and infrastructure with improvements and by having the cities 'work' the surrounding land. In case anyone didn't realize cities don't really work that way, most especially not on the scale that civilization implies they do. In ancient/medieval times cities served as fortified points and also as centers for trade, craft, industry, and government. Large cities were NOT farming communities  a person had to be able to easily walk from where they lived to where they worked. Also the very existence of real cities was only allowed by a surplus of food production in the surrounding lands so that people did not have to work in food production to survive and so could develop other trades.

From what I see of elemental the game is going to be city-centric but it's also completely ignoring the rural components of any successful empire. There is no sense of land management. All production is focuse on cities and tiny resource nodes, even food. I would really like to see a more balanced focus between city development and province development and I see many other people on the forums expressing similar sentiments. Cities are not everything of an empire.

So here's my proposal:

1. Seperate creatable map objects into: cities, settlements, and structures

2. Make cities smaller on the map and rarer, make it difficult to have many of them

3. Cities should be considered as the hub for a province, to create this feeling make most management centered around cities and have the player associate smaller settlements with their capital city

4. Make resource production the primary realm of settlements and unit, wealth, research production sentered around cities.

5. Have cities be very customizable with many options and much character while settlements only have a few upgrade options

6. Settlements and structures can be captured, controlled, razed etc. independently from cities.

 

To be continued with more details and examples

10,822 views 7 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I totally agree with you here Sarudak, I think games like these need to move away from only focusing on city building. You are completely right about "Cities are not everything in an empire." In fact, one of the things that infuriated me about civilization was the fact that you ended up having almost every building in every one of your cities. I would rather have "specialty provinces" where I'm gonna decide to have my iron swords made in the Abdulla provine because they specialize in that. It makes your choices more important i think. I've liked this idea ever since I first heard something like it from Raven X, and then Vandenburg added on it. And I will keep agreeing with whoever talks about doing this because I think it's extremely important for more immersion into the game. Looking forward to seeing the examples!

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

With respect to 2, essence limits cities a lot currently anyway.  ICS isn't a viable strategy.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Under the current system essence does not truly limit cities because it only costs essence to bring life back to the ground and the patch of life spread continually eventuall allowing you to cover the entire map in cities.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

In defense of the excellent Civilization games, having cities work the land around them was an appropriate abstraction in my opinion. But I agree that TBS games should move beyond this.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

I kinda liked ICS, and would've probably loved to see enormous super-cities that build into eachother in Elemental, but alas, all things such and such. C'est la vie.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Make cities smaller on the map and rarer, make it difficult to have many of them

Absolutely agree...civ feels like too many paints mixed altogether sometimes with the amount of cities...also I think it creates a sameness from game to game. In gc2 on the other hand, the spectrum for how many planets you wanted on the maps created IMO previously unheard-of diversity. From huge, fifty turns till you find anything to utterly claustrophobic, it made for fantastic diversity and replayability.

Also, I think since we are going to have a hero unit wandering around, too many cities will encroach on the feeling of exploration/journey.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting astrath, reply 2
With respect to 2, essence limits cities a lot currently anyway.  ICS isn't a viable strategy.

I think it's early to say this with such confidence. I hope essence ends up being a fun way to limit city spam, but the magic system isn't in yet so we have no idea how the tradeoffs between essence hording and aggressive site-founding will work. A build or two ago, I had a game where lots of luck with items & fights got my sovereign to Level 5 pretty quickly and also had a couple of Dragon Fountains nearby, so it was pretty easy to carve out a large chunk of the map for my faction.