sooo if you havent recieved the beta this time you WILL be in beta 3?

just wondering since I havent got any...

Great, I was just about to make a post suggesting this

Well, I hope that the buildings are more Visually distinctive

(and perhaps small "streets" between and inside building tiles)

1) More visually distinctive Buildings

2) keep the ability to build gardens

3) keep city specialization Valid

On a side note, how about making something like gardens give you +.25 for each one built be another, so a pack of 4 would actualy be generating 5. I dont want to see the sprawling city look taken away, but i have found that you need much more increased food production later. Or perhaps for some essence, be able to make farmable land, perhaps with a prerequisate like only castable on a square of 4 farms.

You had talked about possibly making a grouping of the same building combind for a greater graphical effect, something like gardens would make sense if build in conjuncture, because you technicaly could build them without all the roads and have more farmable space.

WAAAGH!

Cannot you delay the Beta 2-A? I barely had the time to play (enough of) Beta 2. And I haven't been able to post in that feedback thread yet! Man, I should read less the forums and finish my tasks first.

It'll be interesting to see that new city building. Meaningful buildings are always good.

Still people not getting this.

I had no real problems with the old city system, but it was a a bit micro heavy....I must admit it. I have no probs with micro [I am a Doms3 player :D], but the old system would annoy lot of players in late game and/or if the map is huge. So, let's wait and take a look at the new system. Perhaps it will be more "casual" friendly.

Yes and this makes shopping trivial - just shop with an NPC in a town and drag the items to your NPC right next to the enemy's capital to upgrade them. Poof! Items teleported.

On the other hand, it is hassle to bring your scouts back just to give them some gear, but more realistic.

if you can teleport units by magic, why not items too...

It doesn't make shopping trivial ... it just makes "who buys it" trivial ... and honestly I'm okay with that.

The problem with being allowed to garden spam is that it lets you build cities anywhere, which leads to city spam - we want to avoid this.

The change makes rare resources more exiciiting, and should allow cities on rare resources to specialise - your bee hive city produces the food for your empire, whilst your iron ore city produces metal etc.

This way 3-5 cities is the norm for a game, which seems about right to me.

You can transfer items, i did not notice that there was an item tab on the gui/hud. There is so much that is probibly possible, but is hidden and i have not tried all the ways to find them. So much possability, so difficult without proper tutorial or searching.

In which case why limit where you can buy items?

If items can be transported instantly anywhere there is no point limiting shops to cities - just creates interface 'clunkiness'.

Better to make a firm decision about the gameplay - either:

• you only buy items in cities and only transfer them between adjacent tiles; or
• you can buy items anywhere and drag them anywhere.

Why should this change affect city spam? I fail to understand it. This is an "anti-micro" change imo, nothing else.

Looks great

Small question. Are we going to see random maps anytime soon? The same map over and over is getting a bit stale. Tho I do see how having everyone play the same map would help for testing. Maybe have like 3 - 4 maps to cycle through?

If you only can build one or two gardens per city, you'll need a food resource for every second city or so.

The problem is, that food is the single one resource no can efford to miss. If you are not lucky enough to find food resources at least as fast as the other kingdoms, you are out of the game. You now cant compensate with Gardencities. You just cant grow your population, which means you cant grow your military and cant build high value buildings which come with higher city levels.

And resource placement will be randomized in the retail game. I forsee a lot restarting of games because you cant find food in the first 10 turns or so and a lot of multiplayer quitting because in turn 50 it becomes clear you opponent has a food advantage.

Food is the single most valuable resource of the game.

Stopping gardenspam is a change for the worse IMHO and takes flexibility out of the game.

I like Gorstagg's idea with the adventurers having different degrees of interest in joining civilizations.

As an old time pen and paper game designer I always came up with three adjectives to describe an npc, culture, world et cetera in order to build a scaffolding for creating a strong background. If the various NPC's had three descriptors like Individualistic, Curious, and Greedy and the nations had descriptors (probably based on what was purchased in the nation building stage) then those could influence how likely that hero might choose that nation or sovereign. To use the above example a polyglot, lorekeeping, and mercantile culture would probably seem exciting to the above hero while a monolithic, conservative, and warlike culture would require a hell of a lot more gold to seem appetizing.

So, you'd have a general tendency for inclusion and a specific tendency towards wanting to join specific civs that matched personality.

It would be interesting also to have merchant or loremaster types who come to the sovereign with lucrative offers from time to time. For example a sovereign who is the habit of making large purchases of rare talismongery/magic might find merchants with expensive luxuries or loremasters who make discoveries or find a rare tomb come to him first with offers with the corollary that might charge more knowing that the demand is high. Thus, you might get first pick on a rare item but if you decline the next civ could get it on the cheap. Or you could have an option to "Make a call out" for powerful items of a specific type and based on how much more than the baseline you are willing to pay it would impact how fast the market responds.

If something like this is already implemented I apologize as it hasn't happened yet to me. Just seen the merchant at your cities.

I also, like the idea of random events popping up a la sid's civ. Little disasters or boons that add flavor but not necessarily game breaking alterations.

Good news all around!  Is there any chance that when moving more than one square that we can be shown the projected path?  It's helpful when navigating around patrolling monsters and enemy units to see how close your forces will get to them.

Advanturers could be something like, if they have high magic, they have a higher chance of getting a sage, or high civ they would get merchant. Improve on something they are strong at, but only a higher chance, because its always good to be offered a warrior when you need one and not another gold pool.

I assume by Frogboy's post "food is more precious since you can’t crank out gardens anymore" means only one garden per city level or something.

Under beta 2 I could build as many gardens as I had tiles. Thus I can support more cities under beta 2 than in beta 2a if no additional food resources were available.

I think we should wait and see how the change affects gameplay before we leap to conclusions although I agree with Osiris' point - this does put a big reliance on rare food resources.

In beta 1 didn't the sov automatically start next to a food resource?

This could solve that problem.

Keep up the good work! Like the idea of more moves, I had me some wolves (5 essence) that moved 1. Tough, but sloooow. I also kept removing improvements to make room for houses, one of each will make things easier. 

Game will be great !

I absolutely LOVED my wolf honorguard, but they felt like they moved too slow compared to my "human" sov.  Would also like to see some kinda of other honorguards, but this was a great boost in gameplay to me. <3 heart for putting some cool into it.

What I would like for movement would be a 2-click system: first click select the destination (and the path is shown as long as the current unit/army is selected), and second click confirme the move/attack