It doesn't actually give you "more strategy" though. That's the whole problem. It's the illusion of "more strategy". In truth, since you wind up with more tiles for ranking up the city then it cost you to do so in gardens, you come out ahead for garden spam. If you're coming out ahead for it, then it's the best thing to do when your access to real food resources runs out.

Much like in the research discussions, it's not a real strategic choice if of the two options, one is flat out worse then the other.

Based on Brad's OP, you'll probably have one garden in the city, but that one garden will be stronger then it is now. So that'll let you grow the outpost some, beyond which you'll need to go capture and allocate some real food (or let it stay a village).

 Source?

PS. The biggest maps is EWoM will be much bigger than the Civ4 maps. Even in the 32bit version. The 64bit maps will be gigantic compared to the Civ4 maps. Do you really think that having a couple of cities will be ok on maps like those? Having 50++ cities on the biggest maps looks absolutely ok to me.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0bdOXOkxdc

That's the latest one I can remember off hand. About 5 minutes in he says "in this game you're not really supposed to have a ton [of cities]."

I know it's been mentioned earlier though and to me that's what made the game stand out.

Just because a map is big doesn't mean you have to fill all the empty space with cities. That's again a civilization thing. Big empty areas could represent wilderness, where powerful monsters spawn and ample quests reside.

There's been numerous threads about not having a lot of big cities. Boogie's governors idea was based around the same thing. You might have lots of outposts and villages, but true huge cities are not the norm.

I agree that making finding food resources important to growth is dangerous. Any feature that gives a large advantage to starting luck is one that will turn me off.

I found that using the current system made it unwise to create more than 3-4 large cities. That's because growing them to be big enough to benefit from the more efficient building is expensive... they also are not at all easy to hold! Troops are expensive and slow to create. They also die quickly.

What is true is that grabbing resources is pretty easy by building small cities just to benefit from them. That might be a problem, but essence cost seems a good solution. Make it 2 essense to build a new city, or some such.

Worring about "city spam" just wasn't reflected in my test games... it just didn't happen, and if I did against serious competition, I'd lost many of the quickly.

I didn't find there to be much micro-management with farms and houses. It took me 3 games to master it, and then I hardly needed to think about it.

On another topic, I'm still very worried about turns where one player has 4 big tactical combats and another player has no tactical combats. If waiting for 30 minutes happens too often, that's going to be a problem. I'm wondering if a timer could be implemented... like a chess clock. If time run out, either the grid stays locked in combat, or it is an auto-defeat.

Between that and making sure these combats tend to be fairly speedy, it could be a winner. When I look at the current combat log, some fairly simple battles look like they'd could take a LONG time. This is largely because of the strange variation in damage: I've seen many cases where a 12 attack weapon did as little as 1 point of damage to a creature in a round. When creatures can have well over 100 HPs, this taken to a tactical mode, would make for very long battles.

I've already shelved several promising games due to this issues, so please forgive my harping on it in hopes that it might be dealt with somehow as early as possible in the development cycle.

Sorta OT but curious...

It seems the City upkeep values are turned back on, and as a result, so is the Desertion of troops. I didn't see that mentioned anywhere? It was off in 1Z I believe...

I was under siege from the AI. I lost a couple of undefended cities and got them back so decide to tighten up my defenses and get a tad more offensive. I added troops to my existing cities and put a group together to go harass the enemy towns.

Well after capturing 2, in quick succession, my Gold tanked, and not long after that my Towns started to report Desertions.

Anyone else seen this happening?

I notice the desertion effect also, but have been busy so I havent reexamined it.  The first unit that deserted me was a frigate, lol.  Like you I started taking some cities at the approximate time of desertions.

In regards to beta 2-a, cant wait to check it out!

Could Ale, mulled wine, mead or the like be added to the store?  After desertions or your companies getting crushed by a large geko it feels good to go throw a couple back while the thoughts are refocusing

HAHAHAHAHAHAHA Switzerland has just kicked spanish asses AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

This doesn't means that we won't be able to build as many cities as possible. [..and it should work like that. Any rules which would "limit" the player to create let's say 15 cities...well that would be a huge mistake from the dev's side.] Maybe most of those will be towns or smaller cities, but you got the picture.

I don't think they are talking about capping city numbers just that because of resources growing a lot of large cities will be hard. Also unlike CIV cities don't take up one map square a large city can be pretty big on the map.

The way I see it you are probably going to end up with 3 - 5 big cities and a couple of dozen small towns and villages over the course of a long game on a big map.

The impression I got is you could focus on city building and do more, but having the most cities won't necassarily stop someone who has focused more on magic and their leaders personal armies crushing you.

I think the point is lots of big cities is not the only ore even the best way to play this game.

In the beta, I have rarely had less than 3 or more than 4 cities by the end game all of max size, but generally I grow one at a time, finding a good site near some worthwhile resources is important so you need to explore.

Out of interest has there been any word on when 2A will be with us? Tonight? Tomorrow? Friday? Just wondering, looking forward to having a custom soverign again and seeing how the cities grow with the housing and food changes.

i think it was claimed that updates usually happen on thursday which would mean tomorrow...but i don't know it that means 8am or somewhen during the day...

Yes, because it's already been stated by the devs that it's possible to roll up a world with no fertile land at all, or it being very rare. You can watch the AI developer diaries if you want. There's no guarantee you'll spawn anywhere near food resources. Period.

I mean, hate gardens if you want to. I don't doubt that there needs to be some kind of adjustment. But barring them altogether is not fair. As they are right now, they're a fairly inefficient use of space and aren't upgradeable unlike regular ol' farms. Once a better upkeep system is in place there will be less reasons to spawn countless cities and gardens.

I really hope we can make more cities than that. I personally like a lot of cities on the map and like building new ones.  But then in games like this I usally only play on the largest maps with the potential of many cities and other goodies. 

Will currently I can make as many cities as I have essence for so you could have a lot, but because they can take up a lot of room on a map and because it sounds like after 2A iit may be harder to make big cities without a lot of land it may take longer and more effort to build a lot and there just won't be room for the same number of cities there would be in the same size CIV map. Cities being built on lots of map tiles makes a big difference.

I'd be shocked if a standard map script came up with a map where one person has fertile land at their starting location, and the other person doesn't. The game would be unplayable in multiplayer with maps like that.

If nobody has fertile land, it's still fair. Build the one garden you can, and go looking for what land there is to capture (or burn some essence and create it yourself in beta 3).

I imagine there will be sliders or options for random world generation as in GCII, so you will be able to choose how common fertile land or, other resources are.

I also epect that when placing players on the map at the start of a game there will be some checks to ensure the start positions are not too unfair.

So essence isn't a limit to city numbers, and city numbers (from what we've so far seen) can be pretty high.

Well currently a mix of adventure, killing and recruiting provide the additional Essence, via Leveling, required to make a bunch of cities. I have found that after 3-4, my ability to take other cities way out weighs my need to build, and grow, new ones.

Nick is correct on the "place on" already fertile idea. We will however have to wait and see how the new spread mechanic is set up as I am not currently seeing much change in .802 vs 1Z.

Anyone seeing different?

Played Beta 2 a lot this week and my feelings are as follows:

First and foremost cities don't feel important, at least at this point.  By the time you can build a still crappy city I can use the resources to hire a bunch of NPCs and rush you.  Even with troop production my NPC army will roll the city.  Perhaps a low level building that allows you to recruit NPCS from city would help.

Definitely need more than 1 base movement for sovereigns.  Think Should be 2 for fighter types and 3 for average and 5 for move specialists.  At present the only reasonable strategy is to kill the closest thing to you at the beginning of game to get your movement up.  At the same time there needs to be some cap on movement.  Got to over 20 one game.  At that point I could just attack whatever wherever.

Cities need some base defense based on population.  One farmer shouldn't be able to walk in and take a city of 1000.  Even if no troops the pop should be able to defend as peasants.

Allowing to build anywhere within your current city radius without the 'touching' rule would allow much prettier and easier to manage cities.  It shouldn't have to 'touch' a previously built building.

Would like to see ability in some way to build roads.  I know the Caravan makes a road appear but I don't think it gives a movement bonus between cities...this may be coming in other tech trees though.

Would like more resources.  Stone for Castles/walls.  Gold for income bonus.  Ancient ruins for tech bonus.  Maybe an improved iron replacement like mithril or something to make better weapons/armor.  Perhaps specialized tree patch for better bows.  A natural wonder for pop growth bonus.

Please make more than horse resource for movement bonus.  Riding lions, or tigers, or reindeer, or elk is important to me.  Just make the horse resource have different animal variants with appropriate skins available.  This will add TONS of customization and coolness to armies.

Starting essence should be set low enough to only allow a couple cities.  But you should be able to regain essence by sitting in town.  Sitting in town with your sovereign should also provide some production bonus.  This way it would give a choice between city building and conquest/exploration.  At present I can pretty much just spam a line of cities as I adventure.

Also I'm not sure limiting gardens gets the right result.  If I can only have 2 gardens per city then I HAVE to spam a bunch of small 'garden cities' to supplement my main cities.  My feeling is that I should be able to build one super city with the right effort and investment, but there should be advantages to having specialized cities.  I think the better solution would be an ascending cost structure for gardens.  At a certain point the cost/benefit wont be there for most.  But its still an option.  To this end I would also like to see a way to build MORE than the preset number of structure at a certain city level...perhaps at a much higher cost.  Putting hard limits on the number of city structures seems to encourage city spam.  If I have the funds and resources the game shouldnt stop me from from making a super city...it should just be inefficient.

I want to second the whole idea of "one peasant shouldn't be able to capture a city." The population of a city should be converted to X peasants, where X = (city pop) * (approval or happiness rating percentage) / 100. Then multiply X by some tweaking factor for balancing purposes. But the idea remains, your guys should fight if they can! 

I'm not against a small amount of inherent defense, but it should be small. As it is now, even a limited military is hard to build, so if I'm investing in that, I don't want a big city of farmers to cancel that advantage.

I agree.  Just dont think a level 1 adventurer of a single swordsman should be able to take it.  Also I do feel armies are very weak at present.  This will need to change for them to be a viable alternative to leveling up adventurers or specializing in magic.  I suspect it will as more items/weapons are added and weapon values are tweaked.

To some degree it would be nice to see some population die when you attack, but also have a morale system where if the odds are overwhelming an undefended town gives up.  So if you bring some sad army to attck you are gonna kill pop.  If you bring sufficient army you can just take the city.

I don't know if it will be in the game at some point but the ability to attack certain structures in a town and retreat might be add to the game.  As well as the ability to set siege to the town vs attacking it.

I am against any hard caps for cities unless it is an option.  I like a lot of cities but putting in a option of how many cicities a player can build would be ok as long as 'Unlimited' was one of the options.

Each unit in the game should have thier own movement rates like in AOW:SM and if they do these should be able to be adjusted in the editor plus there should be skills/abilities and Spells that shoould affect this.