Like civ4? Seems like a good idea. More intuitive IMO.

I see this change having the opposite effect. Getting a city to rank 2 or 3 is really easy, it's only when you want to get it to rank 4 or 5 that you need to think about food. If food is harder to get people are just going to build more cities and not worry about trying to get most of them ranked up. We'll have to see the patch to find out though.

Personally I'd prefer a hard cap on number of cities, possibly tied to research. A max of 3 cities at the start, then a couple techs that increase that cap by 1 each. Maybe a talent you can give to a sovereign to increase it by 1 more. Currently there is no benefit of not creating a crap ton of cities, and I was hoping this wasn't going to be one of those games.

I agree we'll have to see how it works out - this is the sort of balancing that hopefully be sorted over beta 2.

I want the same end result as you - no crap ton of cities, and just enough micro to keep things interesting but not a pain in the ass.

A hard cap is interesting - a bit like capital ships in sins - but it kinda screws you for capturing enemy cities.

It exists already with essence to a lesser extent.

EDIT: spelling!

Not really. Essence are just needed to make the land fertile again. You can build cities on fertile ground without spending essence.

I'd honestly rather not capture enemy cities, raze 'em on the spot, but that's probably just me. The cap could just be on "creating" cities though. You could get more by capturing enemy cities, and that would be a real strong motivator to defend your cities or capture them back before they can be razed and lost forever.

re: QUESTS

is there, or can we get a method for finding out which people need to go to which quest point. that's a little confusing atm.

otherwise coming along nicely it's good to see

Looking good! 

Can't wait to give the new changes a try. You nailed everything I was hoping to see in the next release so I'm very excited to experience the next build. Bored the girlfriend to death when Beta 2 first came out telling her how this is the first time I've seen the game's 3d engine and oohing and ahhing at everything hehe.

Hence to a 'lesser' extent - it's still a valid way of limiting city building whilst maintaining narrative.

To tie in to Sanati's response below...

Each to their conquering own!

A way of creating that cap is through essence - unless there is another mechanism you can think of that makes sense narratively - ie in the game world?

In sins it was around logistics - you needed better supply and such to be allowed to build more ships. What are the limiting factors in elemental?

I would have thought the essence mechanism is the best way to go. Reduce starting essence on a sovereign to 3 and then allow them to increase it again through resources and/or research.

I don't think strict capping the maximum number of cities is a good idea. I want to have a great, mighty empire after all.

However, reducing starting essences and making them available through research or questing sounds nice. This way players will be more careful with their essence in the beggining, and will have more options once they are established.

i love these Customize Sovereign enabled

finally i can enjoy the game

Good additions, especially the more quests and items. If I get another freakin' "Book of Dexterity" or health potion...

I would like to see extra resources not go directly to the pool. Food spoils, everything costs money to transport and some gets lost by accident or stolen. Perhaps 75% of extra city resources go to the pool?

Also something missing is disease. Where are the plagues? Germs are a major player in history. Also natural disasters could spice things up. Of course, these would be an option.

blaze of glory has a good point in the natural disasters idea, as they were the main limiter of civilisations in history. the larger the city the more likely that plague happens( due to poor sanitation/hygene and greater contact with other people) and plagues could spread to other cities in influence range which would encourage cities to be spread out so that if a plague hits a city it would not wipe out your civilisation.

harpo

Well it is essentially just the one person ruling over all these cities, and it could be said that beyond a certain point they simply wouldn't be able to maintain control. There aren't really any governors or nobles ruling over their share of the land, it's just the one sovereign (or you) with total control.

That actually sparked an idea. So the sovereign can only control 3 cities at first, as that's all the skill they have at city management. With training and research they can increase this slightly. Now back to capturing enemy cities, instead of taking over the city and directly controlling it, what if the sovereign installed a governor or something. The city would become an allied city controlled by an AI, and this same AI would control all cities captured from the same enemy. So if you wiped out 3 enemy kingdoms you'd have 3 governor AIs controlling their kingdoms allied to you. This would be more than a normal two nation alliance, as the sovereign would be able to order the governor around instead of simply asking them to do things. This expands your strength but doesn't add to micro management or bog you down with correcting the enemy AI's mistakes. Technically that is how kingdoms really grow, so it makes sense to me. I have a feeling that's beyond the scope of what can be changed at this point though.

As for essence, I don't think it would work without changes, I have a feeling a lot of the spell system is going to rely on essence. Most likely all the really powerful spells are going to use it, then there's events like the wolf one that can subtract a large chunk. If you required essence to make every city and not just the ones on dead land there could be that option of building a lot of cities or using some really powerful spells and I think that would work great as long as the spells didn't take up like 5 essence each. As is though you can just wait until the land grows around your current cities then expand from there.

sanati has some good ideas regards the limit of controlled cities but it might be improved by a limit of 5 but with distance from the palace determining the degree of control, ie the further from the palace  the MORE troops it would need  to remain adiquately defended due to discontent with the lack of visits from the soveregn.

harpo

Perhaps, transfer items should work like recruiting NPC: you can only transfer items between 2 units that are in your territory or on adjacent tiles. In that case, we need clear UI feedback for explaining why the transfer is impossible

this, and make transfering long distances cost. either gold, or mana (think MoM).

The difference here ... is that territory determines WHICH shop you are buying from.

In the Beta at least, you can even buy from a shop of people that are at WAR with you.

So basically ... the territory restriction is to determine whether you are shopping in your OWN shop, in an ally's shop, or in a rival's shop. Certainly there will be a difference between each shop if there is ANY variation in strategy between players ... which can make shopping abroad a "profitable" venture

Essence are to be used for a lot of stuff as far as I know. Giving other NPC magic and such. So we need mcuh more then 3. It just seem a lot now, when we dont have anything other then cities to use it on.

I guess what I'd like to see is city diversity.  Some cities big, some cities small.  When I see a hard cap, especially to a very small number of cities, I get the idea that every city will just be a level 5.  I guess I could have the wrong idea.

I thought the game had a mechanic to prevent "city spam"?  I thought there were escalating maintenance costs associated with controlling more cities?  I know at least in the earlier betas you couldn't spam cities unless they could each pay for themselves.

A hard cap on cities is hardly necessary ... they haven't even enabled maintenance yet

I like this.

If maintenance is re-introduced then this will soft cap city spam, which is fine. It's a bit boring though - maintenance is sooo civ.

So long as the mechanism to reduce city spam has a reasonable level of transparency and isn't too dull I don't mind.

I thought essence would only be used for 'big bang' magic like volcanos? In which case you wouldn't need it much til the late game, other than for building cities I thought.

Obviously we can't conclude on this til we've seen how much essence is used overall.

GJ Devs, quite impressed of the amount of changes you guys have made in less then a week.

Would anyone else like a way to disable the cloth map -- or at least change the threshold where it kicks in? I'd really like to be able to see more of the world without having to be on the cloth map. The maximum view height before the cloth map kicks in is far too low for my tastes.

There's a slider in the options menu

Ugh! You got rid of gardens? Do people not remember what it was like before the garden system?

I hate to say it but Sanati is right. I thought there was a lot of potential with the garden system, and I think most people simply didn't understand how to use the gardens. Gardens gave cities without fertile land a chance to grow up. It gave a clear reason to build satellite settlements and put natural growth limits on your empire. Without this system you are going to basically have to weigh fertile land a lot more heavily, to produce more food and make it more common. Garden spamming will be replaced by fertile land spamming.