By the way

he he he, now I'd be all out there promoting the fungii right to life if there was a "genetic alteration" research tech in the tech knowledge tree. ... wow, if I could just create a new rolling-blob-of-fungii life form with 500 HPs which is immune to fire and has 4mps on the tactical board .. Hell yeah, I could get all behind that !!! 

.... it's alive  ...... it's alive .....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xos2MnVxe-c

By the way, for everyone else, I just decided to make a list  of all the other city-spam threads in case someone else wants to read (or re-read) or re-read again, or re-read after re-reading another post on this topic after re-reading an older one which they may or may not have read or re-read already:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/399355

https://forums.elementalgame.com/399457

https://forums.elementalgame.com/398569

https://forums.elementalgame.com/398418

https://forums.elementalgame.com/398269

https://forums.elementalgame.com/397448

https://forums.elementalgame.com/396420

https://forums.elementalgame.com/397356

Darwin was asexually homosexual. He didn't have the equipment, but was also attracted to others who didn't have the equipment. I liken his theories to his number one hobby, air masturbating in the mirror.

Queue the Evolutionary Off-Topic Foam-Rabid Debate in:

3....

2....

1....

Disclaimer:

The above comments were made in jest and were not intended as serious items for debate, or for the purpose of derailing the thread and causing it to deviate substantially from the topic in the original post. Kindly leave the stage by the red door. There's a fifty foot drop on the other side, but we're still good friends.

If there is battle fungi, then I demand that there be the killer rabits need to defeat it.

None of us have played 1.1 so we can't really answer the rather subjective question however 1.1 does sound like it will encourage fewer and larger settlements rather than spaming lots of small one e.g.

1. Population is a resource used to man most building as well as build armies and most buildings are no longer 1 per city so getting a large population is key and that's much easier through a large city than lots of outposts.
2. Outposts now cost food to build as they should so they are not free any more, you have to think would you rather invest that food in leveling up another settlement which gains you a lot more population.

So yes I think this will encourage less settlement spaming since it all costs food and population goes up rapidly in larger settlements lot's of small ones will no longer be an attractive option. Indeed you will only build them to capture vital resources and strategic points until you max out your first settlement I would guess and you will need to think twice about if a resource is worth it.

I think the Dev's, probably know what changes they have checked in for 1.1, so I think we certainly can talk about the information they have posted on this. But I agree we won't actually know how it plays until the patch comes out we can only speculate using the information they have posted about what's in 1.1. On paper it looks like it will improve the game and reduce the City spamming, but you can't know for sure until you've played it.

well, the problem is that the system is so rigid and in the event of a food shortfall you get situations where "i can't do anything because my food supply is too low," potentially even aquire more food, resulting in paralysis. in other words, simply reducing food availability could be even worse than the issues currently caused by oversupply.

if you use food to limit the number of houses you can build, you have one of only two possible situations at any given time: you have more than you need because all your cities have enough houses to grow at any given time (and if you have much more than this you gain no advantage from it at all) or you don't have enough to expand (potentially devastating). it's no suprise that over the course of development supply has increased to make the former more common as it is the lesser of two evils.

if food is used to determine pop growth in the manner i described, the system becomes much softer: it is an inabler, rather than a limiter, which as a concept is much more fun to work with.

really, if we use food for pop growth instead of charging food maint/building, we're within striking distance of removing maintenance costs for all buildings (other than research buildings obviously) which would IMHO be awesome. most players have the tendency to want to build everything and get their settlements as developed as possible, and i think it's best to work WITH that instinct. when you have building maintenance you end up with horrible situations where players have to get out a calculator to work out if a market brings in more money than it cost in maintenance, which is horrible as a prospect. strategy games are more fun when players have to choose between different positives, instead of having to work out if a decision will benefit them or not. this is a conversation for another time however.

Enablers are more fun than limits, but they're even more fun when they're in a context of interesting trade-offs.

The inscrutable conversion of Essence to a yes/no flag has removed a whole host of options for design and playing strategy. The original plans for Essence were what got me thoroughly excited to see this game developed--they had potential to make a groundbreaking innovation in the genre by combining the mana-as-oil model with a feature that was both an essential stat for special units (sovs and champion casters) and a rare but crucial resource (restoring lands, casting Very Serious Magic) for play styles ranging from the most cautious turtler to the most aggressive city spammer.

sorry, double post.

as much as i was pleased by the last dev journal, i also mourn the disappearance of essense as a stat, but possibly for different reasons. more than anything it means there is no longer any personal penalty for a sovereign when he imbues champions (sure, there's a mana maint, but that's a global penalty not a personal one). while the global mana pool discourages spamming channelers for more mana, this change seems to do the opposite. i don't get that. i also think that making int the one and only magic stat is overconsolidating the system. magic focused sovs will have to focus on one stat, combat sovs on three. where's the fairness in that?

personally i would have kept essense/wisdom and used it as the "spell power" stat (int would be used as a minimum requirement for casting and for spell resistance as brad described in his journal), so that you had to choose between multiple human wizards, or one dark sauron like being of incredible power. i think that's a much better way of doing it than a mana maint, which i would associate more naturally with summons and enchantments. if nothing else, summons can be dismissed and the mana maint removed quickly, which is not possible for channelers.

yeah, if it was up to me there'd be essense as a spell power stat, that had to be sacrificed to imbue, or possibly used to "create" fertile land resources (this strikes me as making more sense than being sacrificed for settlements, because it's more magical, although of course, for this to work, food needs to actually matter again)

The more I looked into this game system, the more I see the over-simplified combat mechanism that it is: Int only used for spellcasting, no magic resistance (or rather magic resistance = to physical defensive strenth ????), shields that alway apply when worn (which should be missed in a flank/rear attack in even very simplified combat systems), a combat system that is basically an "attack range" vs a "defense range" and takes everything from hit to miss and damage simultaneously. The concept of hit/miss and damage effects should be seperated at least once. I don't know, everthing is just too simplified for me. This game needs some drastic overhauls big time.

read the last dev journal. you should be fairly pleased. it's still 1dN, but they have at least separated attack and damage, and defense has become dodge and defence (damage absorbtion). and int now determines magic resistance.

Let's see; playing in a resource challenged world where big developed cities generate little income or are income negative; yeah, why would I want to expand? Far better just to have a couple of cities, miss a bunch of key resources and go bankrupt slowly. Sounds like fun! Or not.

As of 1.09, expansion is not really optional, it is mandatory. Or at least it would be if the AI wasn't completely incompetent.

1.1 is clearly going to change some of those dynamics, especially the pathetic income generation model currently in place. At that point, other approaches might become viable, especially if the AI continues to suck (and really good AI is really difficult to do in complex games). But I suspect in resource poor worlds, then expansion (positive twist)/city spamming (negative twist) will remain the easiest path to victory. As there is little else to do in the game, not sure why you would play the game if this isn't your approach of choice.