Quoting TheProgress, reply 78Are turns and tiles being used to represent real-world units of measurement? Does 1 tile represent a X meter * Y meter area? Or are they simply "tiles". Same thing for turns: does one turn represent X days, or is it simply a "turn" ?
Establishing some real-world units of measurement will help refine the pacing.
As it stands right now unit movement is about 2 or 3 times too slow (coming from 1G). Huts should take no more than 4 turns, probably even 3.
Yes, the scaling is off and needs to somewhat reflect real-world measurements. Based on the amount of space that cities take up, the tiles can be no more than half a mile (a quarter mile would probably be more accurate). In the case where the tiles are half a mile, a unit should be able to move 40 tiles in one turn when not exploring or maybe 5 tiles in one turn when exploring on open land or 3 tiles in one turn when exploring in forests or 2 tiles when exploring in mountains/hills. This would be assuming that a turn is a day. In that case, children will never grow up in the course of a game.
If your turn is 1 month, then children can grow up eventually. However, in that case, a city needs to fit entirely on a single tile and each tile needs to cover probably 100 square miles (10 miles x 10 miles). Units exploring would be able to explore that area quite well in a one-month turn. Remember, they would have a 1-tile sight around them, so they are really exploring an area 30-miles x 30-miles in that one month, which is probably reasonable. Units not exploring should be able to move 60 tiles per turn to be realistic. They would have something like a 0.1% chance of actually discovering anything that might be in their tile when they are not exploring. In this case, cities could be literally one tile apart and never worry about running into each other.
Now, if you make the assumption that the units hunt for food as they travel, then they should take no upkeep in terms of food and the movement should be reduced because they will spend some time searching for food. If they take food with them, then they must have a limit of no more than maybe 5 days travel from friendly territory before they will be out of food and be required to hunt for food, reducing their rate of travel. So maybe you could give units in friendly territory a bonus to movement due to the fact that they can get food readily and don't have to waste time hunting for it. In neutral or enemy territory, their movement would be slowed because they need to spend time hunting for food.
So, if we assume that hunting is required when traveling, then in neutral or enemy territory, travel is done at 30 tiles per turn using 10-mile square tiles. This would assume about 6 hours of travel time each day devoted to moving. When in friendly territory, you could assume a full 12 hours of travel each day and 60 tiles per turn movement.
Now, you could compromise and do 1-week turns. At 1-week turns, it takes 936 turns for your child to come of age. But, then your number of miles traveled per turn is 140 in friendly territory or 70 in enemy/neutral territory. Each tile could then be a 5-mile square. Movement points would be 28 tiles in friendly territory and 14 tiles in enemy/neutral territory. Of course, at this scale, you still don't have cities showing up on the main map or blocking movement of units. If you make the turns one week, then you need to have the tiles as half a mile and do 280 tiles of movement in friendly territory or 140 tiles of movement in enemy/neutral territory.
With tiles so small, movement would appear more analog than digital. That is, movement on the map would appear to flow smoothly and paths would appear more curved. Armies could end up taking up several tiles on the map. You could also make an army camp and it would really appear on the map. When the army goes to 'camp' mode, it would spread out to take up even more tiles because of the extra space required for all the tents and fires. It would be a pretty impressive site.
This is where I am at the moment also regarding scale as well.
The tiles in Elemental are *much* smaller than a game like Civ4. Take for example the "Huge" map for elemental from http://frogboy.impulsedriven.net/article/345012/Elemental_Civilization_4
With 224X160 tiles you have 35840 tiles in total. Putting that on an earth sized spheroid gives you a value of around 1425 square kilometers per tile. Even stretching credulity a bit and placing that tile-set on a tiny planet like Mercury would give a 209 square kilometer tile. To put that into perspective, Portland, Oregon is 376 square kilometers, with a population of 582,130. Each hut would be taking up more space than downtown Portland. The cities in the above walkthru would take up more area than London (1,706 square km). This is obviously absurd, we cannot work under the assumption that the tiles are that big, or that the map is attempting to model something of greater scope than, say, the state of Oregon (225,026 square km, or 179 "earth-tiles"). Given a more Fantasy-reasonable tile scope of, say, 4 square kilometers. Still ends up with huts that take up enormous amounts of space.
In my humble opinion, the scale has to be even smaller than that to accommodate on-map improvements. This then runs into the same unit movement problems (giving units 40 movement points to keep them from taking years to cross a bridge)... Perhaps the best thing would be to simply make the on-screen expansion of cities a different level of abstraction than the exploration map?
1425km houses... 
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