Ending City Spam (early game)

from Elemental Forums

I have an idea to put an end to city spam, well at least for the early game.

 

CITY SPAM

Each city needs to be managed by someone, but not just anyone: someone you can trust. Champions are only loyal to your money, so your best choice is your children. Your Channeler has his hands full with managing your first city, so each newly founded city should be managed by one of your children. This way, all players will have only 1 city until their first child comes of age. Of course you don't have to be in a city to manage it. If a player has more cities than living children, then no more cities can be founded. While focusing on 1 city early game, the player can put more emphasis on exploring the world, questing, and creature-hunting with his sovereign and champions. You can implement this as either assigning a steward to each city or simply keeping track of the number of cities vs. number of living ancestors.

For simplicity, when one of your children dies or is married off (if a woman), that city remains in the Channeler's control but he cannot found a new city until he assigns a new steward  or razes it or trades it away.

To make things more complicated, there could be penalties for controlling cities without stewards: city-specific or empire-wide. This can be the result of children dying, cities gained through trade, or conquest. This could add an incentive to trade away or raze cities if you have too many.

3,559 views 5 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Hmmm ties in nicely with the whole successor discussion, not sure if'd go the complicated way but liking the first part of the idea stops the landrush as well.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

This is another thing we don't want. Because what we want is a meaningful choice where building many cities and building few can both be viable. This is just a game mechanic to force people not to build cities.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Interesting idea but it may limit people a bit too much.  I don't want to force people who want to spam cities not to.  I just want not spamming and spamming to have similar levels of power while remaining very different play styles with various strengths and weaknesses very different from the other method.  Perhaps cities which were the homes of royal family members are found should get bonuses due to increased happiness and productivity of it's people. Unless of course the royal family is crazy and cruel, in which case there should be associated bonuses and penalties, slave labor may piss people off but damn if it isn't effective for those cruel enough to inflict it on their people.  Though I doubt you would have many immigrants waiting to join your cause if you were drafting them all into 18 hour work days.

I wouldn't mind seeing production bonuses/penalties based on the successes and failures of the royal family.  What?? That kind was defeated by a guy with a pitch fork and only escaped by sacrificing his vassals and fleeing as his men where poked to death? Boo..... Wait... He destroyed that invading army with a wave of his hand? Long live the king!

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Sarudak, reply 2
This is another thing we don't want. Because what we want is a meaningful choice where building many cities and building few can both be viable. This is just a game mechanic to force people not to build cities.

 

As your family grows bigger after many generations, you will be able to have as many cities as you want, if you want. I do see what you mean: it is best not to limit the player's choice. Conversely, you would still have the choice between 3-4 large cities vs. many small cities, only that choice would take fruition once you have more than 4 ancestors. The main benefit I was going for was to avoid building towns next to every resource, or building a wall of influence around other players, essentially cutting them off from the rest of the world.

 

 

 

Quoting DrAtomic1, reply 1
Hmmm ties in nicely with the whole successor discussion, not sure if'd go the complicated way but liking the first part of the idea stops the landrush as well.

I'll have a look at that thread. I did have some dynasty ideas to add to the OP, but it got so convoluted that it became hard to explain, understand, and implement with ancestors inheriting the blood of several factions that it became hard to determine who controls what.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

There's no reason to require a succession thing or exclude champions from this generally good idea. New folks interested in the older arguments might enjoy Scott's thread Thoughts on Chancellors, Cities, Snaking and Secession.

p.s. As an old son of the New South, I kinda wish that the game had some secession mechanics, even though I still like sovereign death = game over in single-player mode. Early on, I had high hopes that the dynasty mechanics would mean that as a player I needed to pay some attention to how my offspring (scions) regarded me. Alas, they're cattle so far...

Thoughts on Chancellors, Cities, Snaking and Secession