It gives double food in the city it's built in.

lol, yeah, at the moment it's not obvious what is and isn't balanced as so many important aspects are either not in, AI, Magic, and Adventuring Techs, and others are not properly balanced or refined that there are all sorts of things you can do to achieve success of some sort.

Yes it should. I believe it was specifically stated by a dev somewhere that at the start you should have the option of recruiting NPCs and doing quests or building up your kingdom right away. It's probably even possible to never build or capture a city and still win using only the might of your sovereign and NPCs. I believe in another thread somebody mentioned they got an adventurer up to combat rating 400+, with that kind of power there's very little human armies can do. It's yet another strategy out of many that can by used to win.

This isn't Civilization: War of Magic.

Yes I agree on both statements.  There are times when people perceive a game to be bad when in fact they are simply playing the game badly.

First of all, I'd like to say that I have generally been a "careful city placer."  In the games I've played my first inclination is always to see what it is available around me and based on that I decide on whether I would be better off moving to another spot.  As such, in the most "serious" game of Elemental I've played so far I avoided the "garden spam" by seeking out food resources.  I managed to find that spot with the Oasis, the Orchard, the Farm, and the Bees, and I was set.  So, I'm not someone who is complaining about the garden spam, as I've yet to experience it.  I planned on starting a game not next to a food resource just to experience it, but each time I restart I seem to be right on top of one.

Now, from what I understand the game is not simply a strategy game but also partially a role-playing game.  As such, one of the things that makes the RPG aspect more fulfilling to me is game world which appears to resemble a fantasy setting.  In a fantasy setting I imagine a world where there exists a mix of city sizes.  There would be some outposts, some humble villages,  some prosperous cities, and some huge capital cities.  My fear is that if you allow essentially unlimited food, in the form of gardens, every city in the game will eventually be Level 5.

Now of course this might not be true, maybe there will be a diversity of city sizes regardless of unfettered access to garden building.  Even if it is true, this sense of game atmosphere might not be worth loss of strategic depth (if there in fact is a loss of strategic depth) by removing gardens.  I suppose everyone will have their own opinions on the importance of these sorts of things.

In any case, I'm still looking forward to 2A.

I may be wrong, but food seems to be the only crucial resource in the game.  You can get get by without other resources - not having iron available (build troops that don't use iron!), not having horses (many great armies had no or very poor cavalry).  Gold doesn't require a resource, materials can be made without resources (though lumbar yards help a bunch!).  Without food you're stuck with a tier 1 city.

Not having food resources available is like being stuck on a continent completely covered in desert or ice in Civ4!

Exactly.  In a completely different game, Civ 4, you could be likewise handicapped if you were to start in the middle of the desert or on the middle of an ice sheet.  It doesn't happen (by default) because the pre-packaged map generators don't allow for something so grossly unfair to occur.  Much like in your example I hope that my starting location wouldn't be so grossly unfair compared to my opponents, where I'd have to spend dozens of turns hunting down a single food resource, where they just start right on top of one.

I just don't know what, by release, a typical map will look like, and how many food resources we can expect to find on average.  I'm sure this will take some tweaking and balancing by the developers.

You don't really address the core problem here. That is how crippling it would be for civilizations without food resources. Yes, food is important. Why make food even more rare? Yes it's a magical cataclysm... but you aren't just planting on a random tile of wasteland. Gardens can only be built on land magically infused with life. This isn't the road-warrior post apocalyptic wasteland everyone is acting like it is.

I like gardens. They're modest sources of food, but aren't really a substitute for good food resources. Gardens also balance out populations. The real problem is not gardens. The real problem is the lack of a meaningful economy and/or upkeep costs.

I'm not for hard caps. I think it's possible to make things more sane in an organic way.

look, personally i think that a settlement should get along just fine without having to find special resources within the game.  now, i don't think that city should be able to become a powerful food outputting city until level 4 or 5, IF you choose to make that city specialize with special food type building/merging/adjacency.

if you can secure a special resource then fine, that city can be something really special.  and also a target for an enterprising player as well.  this is the way it should be.

however a city should be able to build farms and just get by at the earlier levels.  i would say that if you had 3 average level three cities and do not have any special farming tiles you should prob have on average around 10 extra food.  this is enough to start another town if you want to, or perhaps use the extra food to specialize a town or 2 to something like being able to output troops quickly, or mine iron.

this is where the balancing should be.  food, should be just enough to where out of 5 settlement, maybe 2 can be specialized for your plans.  that is unless you found that excellent food special tile in which you might use a single town to supply the other 4 with the necessary food to specialize.

But you shouldn't be able to steamroll over someone using that strategy.

Unless your Sov and crew can personally produce all the research and spell points you'd need the pure Gandalf mode won't work so well.  And right now you can only recruit people who are within your border, so a town is required for recruitment.

You can also recruit whilst adjacent to an NPC.

And yes, one shouldn't be able to steamroll -- unless you've (not You 'you' -- I mean the generic 'you' ) been careless and not built up ie the steamroll is preventable and you just didn't play smart to defend against it.

Food has such a major impact on all improvements right now. You can't really specialize in anything without some concentration on food because most if not all improvements require higher level cities to even build them. So little city growth = little boost in output of any one resource unless you spam cities and concentrate many on one resource or you find another food source other than gardens.

In this beta build, it seems like gardens are almost a way of encouraging specialization because being as inefficient as they are,  they take up a lot of building space. If you can't secure a large food source, you don't really have the room to keep a town balanced while gaining any significant boost in one area.

I am interested to see how the beta 2-A change impact city building.

Hello,

I just started with this Beta (2).  And the one thing that really separates this game from others like it (which is a good thing) is building multiple of the same type, really lets you strategize.   If it just becomes a build one of each, no thinking required then it may end up being like other games before it.

Tweaking food is fine, I just really like having to think about what I'm going to build, not not just a brainless build one of each.

If they don't prepare for it then I don't see why not. Much like rushing in another game. If your sovereign sits on their butt in a city all game and you don't train any adventurers up or build some really powerful defenders, then you will lose to that strategy. If you counter their strategy though with sufficient protection, then they have nothing to fall back to. So it's a gamble.

I would imagine another likely counter to that is a very magic focused sovereign just nuking and debuffing the crap out of the warrior based sovereign.

Yes I understand this, but I doubt that this will prevent me from "spamming" cities. [I don't like this word. You won't be able to "spam" cities anyway. There are some "soft caps", like territorial limits, essence/res/gold/etc.]

Side note: In fact, it would piss me off, if I would be limited in creating new cities if my Sov would have the necessary essence/resources/gold/whatever to create one more city. It would make no sense. What would be the point in limiting the player in creating 50 cities for example, if the player has the necessary resources for that? This is a strategy game, isn't it?

Either way, yeah, let's wait for the new beta version, and we will be more clever.

I agree with this as well.

Sounds good to me.

It is a very strong exploit the AI cant do nothing against. If you are somewhat lucky in recruiting some strong heroes, even 2 or 3 units in a city cant stop them.

As kingdom player right now you cant research and build enough defenders to stop that kind of rush in time. Even if i loose one or two heroes you are out of the game and i got a city.

I dont care for single player, but i see problems for MP. And they get worse the smaller the map is.

So is Ogre Battle and HoMM, you can't build any cities in those games. Not all strategy games have to be the same. Civilization and FfH are the games you play to build 50 cities, I was drawn to Elemental because they talked about how the game was based on building a much smaller number of cities.

I wasn't talking about rushing, I only mentioned it as an example of a strategy that could decimate an unprepared player in any game. I was talking about spending a few hundred turns just running around questing and killing stuff to turn your character into a monster.

If you take your sov and a few nearby champions and head straight for an enemy city on turn one, they could have built up a large number of peasants and recruited more champions than you by the time you slowly work your way over there. That's assuming you don't die and get wiped out on the way there. Or of course they could have left their city totally undefended and that's their loss. BTW, taking a sov's last city isn't a game over, they can just build another city somewhere else so at the most you'll set them back a few turns.

therefore i am wondering if you could simply put your sovereign / champion into your city and simply upgrade its defense to a point where nothing can hurt him (if attackratings in groups do not get cummulated as now) you could defend/block your city because nothing can harm you....

and we need more orcs

Becuase it's not a problem. Do you really think the map generator is going to allow for such grossly unfair starting locations?

I hate gardens, especially as they are right now. With no limits on them, you could build a city all the way up with just them if you wanted to. And if you wind up with more tiles in the end for doing so, that's the correct thing to do.

a simply limit to any production unit of any kind including gardens could simply be a decreasing marginal utility... e.g. first 3 gardens produce 2 food, next 3 1 food, next 3 0.5 food etc...