That is a largely meaningless comparison, though. City building is a completely different beast in Elemental. In Civ there is no such thing as running out of space to put another building; you can put down one of every building in every city and the entire process is abstracted away into oblivion (not to mention, there are 102 unique buildings in civ IV). To be able to build the same type of building more than once without screwing up the whole game the entire construction model would have to be completely overhauled.

Derr... The Germans had a massive industrial complex going on there. Of course they couldn't just build and manufacture on endlessly without stop, but if Hitler ordered a weapons manufacturing plant to be built in a city and one of his generals or aids told him "I'm sorry sir, but there are already 4 of those in that city! We do have all the resources and logistical capability, but it is simply not allowed! Would you like to build a university instead? We're allowed two more of those!" well, said fool would be standing in front of a firing squad rather quickly.

I really don't see the problem with extreme specialization, if the player so chooses. If I have 3 major cities, is it really such a terror that someone might decide to gear one towards military, another towards science research, and the third to magic, and divide the rest (such as special buildings, economy buildings, etc) around relatively evenly?

Quite frankly, that is how much of the world works. All around the world you'll find some cities that revolve around manufacturing, sometimes even a specific kind of manufacturing (*cough* Detroit), as well as plenty of cities with ridiculous numbers of universities and other research institutions (Cambridge, MA...) and little else. Not to mention, this is a fantasy game, which makes it all the more justifiable to me. A remote city bordering hostile territory is not likely to diversify all that much; it is going to focus on protecting itself, not enlightening itself or making heaps of cash or what-have-you (unless it's using said heaps of cash to hire a mercenary defense force!).

Now, I'm not saying that this 4-improvement limit is the end of the world or that it'll ruin the game. I just think it's a rather silly feature that doesn't serve much of a purpose. If the balancing is done right, then diversification and specialization will take care of themselves on a contextual basis, without the need for draconian hard-caps.

I had a download error but I got over that. This build is really stable. Though a few minor problems... But hey I can play in fullscreen now! Without crashing!

Does this mean we should start making balance suggestions?

I believe it will be easier if you look at this form this point:

 a city have x amount of population (let think they already considered max amount per city size), from this amount you can support up to y amount of special people and by nature not all of them can become soldiers,merchants or scientists. the number of buildings is just what represents how many you can recruit from the that x amount of population.

  you gave the example of building another factory or university in a German town, there is no physical problem in building it it will just be empty since you don't have people to work there (even if you bring people from other towns you still have to build housing and get food for them.)     

I think the idea here is supposed to be that the building limit represents the limit of your logistical capacity to support a structure of that type in that particular city.

Just installed the new beta. The buttons are all very very slow to respond, when clicking 'new game' there is some prompt response, after that every button I click takes about five seconds to get a response, and when creating a world the music hangs at one point and then I see yet again a ctd without getting even one turn of game time in.

Shurdus: Can we get a debug.err? You just keep having problems, and I think it's time to make a similar machine on our end to text the config proper

Hello Brad,

sorry to say this but stability is not yet ready for beta 2.

I have just tried 3 games and all crashed in various stages.

There are also some save games bug still there, once I loaded a game my first town showed only 20/20 People (before it were around 170) and did not update this. Even so there was housing for 360 people.

So for me it is one more beta 1Z before I would vote for beta 2.

Sincerely Sparhawk4242

P.S.: I posted two debug.err, I hope this will help you find the problems.

First of all: Congrats to the new release. First one I could play to the end without a crash.

One quick thing: My temples didn't work, they did not add an extra +1 prestige. Anyone noticed this one, too?

take a look at that thread https://forums.elementalgame.com/380985

michael: From what I understand behind the code, the firsst temple wouldn't seem to work, but the next ones would show an active effect. THis is because there was a Presitige 'min value' of 1. So even though the city was technically producing 0, it'd get bumped to 1. THe temple would simply be bumping it to a legitimate 1, instead of a freebee 1....if that makes any sense

But yeah, easy fix that will be in for the next build.

I also run mainly on Win7 64-bit, and in the last two builds (what limited time I have been testing) I haven't seen any crashes for my part.

Try casting a healing spell.  That reliably crashes for me, and I'm on Windows 7 64 bit.

I had only one CTD, but after that, I played through an entire game and messing around, kept pressing the Turn button past turn 300. I think it's ready to proceed, y'all did much in this current build. Besides, implementing Multiplayer next would be useful in revealing more errors between several players...

Any chance of a new map though?

Ok, fine. That's a slightly better reason than I had thought of, but it's still pretty laughable IMO. I'll point to the real world again - there are plenty of cities, even plenty of regions/states/provinces/nations, that are extremely specialized. I am quite sure that Detroit didn't become the home of the big 3 because there happened to be an unusual number of people there who knew how to, or were capable of building cars. It happened over time. As Detroit's economy was shifting towards the automotive industry, the population shifted with it (through training, or maybe even 'migration').

Oh, I never meant to suggest that we should have cities without farms or housing or anything; I always assumed that it was to be implied that housing, at the least, would have to be built in every city. You can't quite have a city if there is nowhere for people to live. And yes, not all your population of an entire city will be well-suited for the military, or for research, or whatever. Hence diminishing returns, reduced efficiency, etc. And population isn't fixed; people can move from one city to another, and so those with no suitable work to be found in one city would, over time, move somewhere where their skills can be used.

Saying that every city can have at most X people who can perform a particular task kinda stinks. Also, what if I spammed houses to reach an absurd population? Would that allow me to build more of a certain type of building? Presumably if a given % of my population is suitable for some task, then the higher my population, the higher the cap should be!

I still don't like it.

We are talking here about a medieval/fantasy setting, so no fast trucks bringing in the food, no people gointg to work over 100 miles each day, no big infrastructure bringing all the needed stuff to the town...

The number of "specialized towns" in medieval times you can count on one hand I would say and most of those lay in quite tight settle areas with a large farming backbone, like north Italy, South England.

But in general the medieval rule was a city had to be self containing. Everything which was on day travel away on foot is no longer really counting for the supply of the city.

I should probably submit several bug reports for this, but the new update appears to be missing a large deal of things that were in the previous updates, as well as in the change notes: including new sovereign parts, new sovereigns, and equipment.

In general, the sovereign creation is now extremely buggy with things like beards listed under equipment and clothing, some earlier options which were available before completely missing, and otherwise just a mess.

Devs,

I noticed several bugs.

1) Library is showing 0/4 spaces and when built crashes.

2) After a save recovery mana refilled but a "not enough mana to cast that spell" error appeared and would not go away even if exiting and reloading the game.

3) There is still an issue with fog of war and mountains. Mountains on my 64 bit Win 7 machine still aren't displaying on occasion.

4) Veteran or tougher troops still don't seem to advance beyond the base 10 health.

Big and noticable improvement otherwise.

Darvroth

With .302 I currently have a re-loaded Game active that has run to 365 Turns. Memory leaks way less. I vote Go! 

This, God Yes Please!!!

Seriously though I haven't tested as much just because I am getting tired of the same old map (well that and just got the SC2 beta going also)

You are forgetting that I already stated they considered the max amount per city size (it doesn't matter if u have 40 ppl or 149 ppl they still allow you 2 of each right?) so same goes for metropolis. another point you brought is migration of people, for example lets take scientists, if z amount of scientists migrate from town x to town y it means that now you are missing this z amount from town x. 

  look at it as if they already took your total population (your total towns max population potential) into factor and these many buildings represents how many scientists/soldiers/workers etc your population can have. anything else will make the game mechanics a bit more complex. 

  Personally I believe there should be a, lets call it, specialized building pool that you can choose the type that you want to build from that (in time of need,like war, you should be able to retrain). for example right now lvl 1 town can build 1 requiting post 1 science and 1 merchant so my pool is 3 and i can choose any configuration of these 3 building from that pool, but 2nd building of the same type (3rd if its lvl 2 town or 4th if its lvl 3 and so on) will be double in cost and building time to represent the time and money it cost to retrain/relocate people.

I am kinda cofused to be honest. In the first 4-5 games I was crashing occasionally, after that I started a new game with the exact same settings, I had no CTDs in that game. I abandoned that game after ~400 turns, and started a new one...again with the same settings. Guess what? CTD again. Weird.

John, you had no CTDs at all in your games with .302?

Yea I know what you mean. It's a bit sparatic for me too. Though I've never managed to make it to turn 400 let alone 400 turns in a row. I'm usually lucky to make it 100 turns in a row. Especially late game. The first 100-150 I can sometimes make but after that it seems like I end up loading a lot. 0.299 was decent for me while 0.300 seem to make things a lot worst but now 0.302 seems back up to where 0.299 was for me on stability.

I think some of my early turn problems might be caused by the fact I'm a city builder. In a recent bug report I posted a save and in it i'm only on turn 240 but I have like 13 cities a couple of which are level 4 and several level 3. While I see other screen shots of people on turn 300+ with a tiny fraction of what I have. So any type of bug, memory related or otherwise, is bound to be compounded. Like I noticed housing upgrade causes it to crash which I reported so now I don't R&D housing in my games. No point repeating a bug I know causes a crash. Especially since I posted several dumps and few save files. If I upgrade housing R&D tech early it doesn't seem to crash until much later in the game, and not just when the city upgrades to housing.

He's some Screens to show what I mean.

And then like 30 turns later you can see how much some of them have grown.

I took the screens for bug reports and those were the best two i could find to show off my cities. They only show about 1/2 of them and I'm on turn 184. So ya any upgrading building bugs I'm likely to trigger and possibly crash, but that's the point of beta testing. Weed out those bugs.

EDIT: Oh the Save file from several turns later in this game is here. In case you wanna mess around with a big empire and see if it crashes for you when you upgrade to housing tech.