Town Perks and Quirks and taxing system

A perk-based system for towns (as in, something a little more flexible than what we had in WoM) would be fantastic. Just think of all the things that could be done with it! I'd prefer a system in which I select the perk at level-up rather than something completely random. It, uh... doesn't 'seem' like it would be a huge amount of work to link city level-ups to the trait/perk/whatever selection that champions get.

On the other hand, I prefer the taxation system in FE (sight unseen) to anything GalCiv-related. Just my opinion, of course.

This is something that was talked about quite a bit, even before the first beta for WoM started. I still think it would be great if it was implemented though

Just a couple examples, because I have the boredom only comes with being 28 years old and having a 4-week Christmas break.

Harvest Festival:

In the years after the cataclysm, obtaining regular sources of food became a primary concern. The Harvest Festivals that have become an annual tradition in [City] provide a degree of comfort to the population as to your ability to lead them, as well as providing a forum through which the farmers of the town may exchange ideas.

City recieves 20% fewer dissidents and tiles worked by the city provide +1 food.

Rarity: Rare.

Military Culture:

In the face of daily adversity, the peoples of [what the hell is the name of the game world, anyway?] cope in many ways... despair, addiction, and violence. However, in [City name] an ardent military vigor has taken hold of the population. Youth are trained from adolescence in the art of reconnaisance and to endure hardship that will serve them well during subsequent military service.

City gets +2 to Sight radius and all units trained recieve +20% hitpoints.
The growth rate and trade rate in the city are both reduced by 20%.

Requires: Barracks. Rarity: Very rare.

My understanding is this is more or less what is involved in the city level up system in order to establish city uniqueness; city perks on level up will allow for unique buildings to be built within the city that bestow some bonuses.  To something.  Somewhere.

Oh, no kidding? Hopefully they allow modders to add city traits in after release.

Yep when a city levels in FE a random list of special buildings is provided and the player gets to build one. Each building is in effect a perk and provides the town with some sort of bonus. From release they have said that you can easily mod in more special buildings.

Word, thanks for the info guys.

The level up buildings come close, but the whole system lacks something. For one, it requires the town to grow, so you can't add any other conditions for attaining a trait. So no town can slowly devolve into a haven for criminals because there are no troops to keep order, or you haven't build a city guard yet.

Second, it requires you to actually place something on the map, which I find rather inelegant. Take LightofAbraxas' examples; why would a harvest festival or military culture require a permanent structure.

And third, when you can choose which building to get, negative or mostly negative traits (like the den of criminals) won't get picked unless they also provide something useful. Which removes a lot of potential fun, as part of the fun can come from dealing with setbacks.

Town perks sounds like a fun idea to me.

However, there's also a possibility of the game becoming hard to follow if everything can have perks and traits. Hard to say before beta whether the game would benefit from more town customization stuff over the level-up thing or not.

For example Fall From Heaven 2 felt like it almost had too many unique stuff to understand how the game played. It was enough work just keeping up with your own civilization's and units' traits, and very difficult to remember what kind of bonuses the AI had. Sometimes less indeed is more. But I like the idea of town perks, regardless.