A possible solution to city snaking

I really REALLY like your idea. I'll pass it on to Derek.

bring it on!

agreed.

Will this mean that my snaking mod will become vanilla again This is a great idea and very similar ideas I've presented. I'm glad that Frogboy agrees and is sending it up the line. (I really don't like the idea of city highways).

I really, really hate it.  No more land rejuvenation?  We will HAVE to use outposts to link remote cities? I can think of three more things that would be directly influenced by this suggestion.

Crap.  Shouldn't the consequences be considered before you people get excited?

Have you seen how inefficient AI empires are?  How disjointed their dominion, how high their unrest, how utterly out of position their armies?  So, instead of teaching the AI how to do better, lets force the players to do worse?

And anyway.  If I cannot build outside of the city ZOC, and the ZOC only spreads from the original tile, I'll use outposts to extend the ZOC and still snake.  If you want to kill snaking, you have to kill its advantages.  If you kill all its advantages, just kill the buildings-on-strategical-map feature.  If there's anything worse that form without function, it's form which reminds of the function that's gone.

I took this to mean that the buildings like monument and town hall will have a greater effect in increasing the ZOC of the city. Thus, snaking will be allowed, but restricted to what these buildings offer. One will still be allowed to snake, but it would be dependent on the civilizations buildings within the city. To build a sprawling large city you would have to build the monument and townhall to manage such a sprawled city.

I am completely against a 1 tile city and I really like multitile cities and snaking (hence the reason I spent the time to mod it back in). I do not mind in the sense that expanding the orgininal cities ZOC to build within it (A construction zone if you will), to snake out to resources that are within 3 tiles to your city. I already use outposts to connect to remote cities (I never really thought about snaking towards them).

If they are willing to put this much effort into further limiting smaking, why not just make the 9 tiles around the city a limit? It is the exact same effect as this suggestion, but it won't screw over 100 other things. Don't make me use the Derek design formula on this.

I don't like this solution.

If improvements do not expand ZoC, you might find in a bad situation: As the fog of war is just at the next tile, a monster there might attack the city via improvement on the next turn and you will not realise untill it is too late (the "there are enemies in your ZoC" message will not appear).

We all want a solution to this mechanics, but as Tuidjy said, before implementing something that might radically change gameplay, study the consequences.

An alternateve:

allow pier/LC to the second circle tiles of core city (being first circle the 9 tiles, second circle is 16 tiles, isnt it? sorry, poor at maths).  All cities expand, and eventually will reach the resources 2 tiles in any direction. Snaking then is only a way to get them a few turns sooner. Acceptable.

It would be 32 building slots from 8 tiles. I counted the cityhub since we see so many improvement that modify it. Also, you don't need to occupy a tile to build any given improvement. MA's entire city defense system is essentially invisible. So that makes the total possible improvements rather infinite. The only legitimate reason to add a tile to the strategic map is for user identification. Trying to make a metagame out of improvement placement will be disastrous for an AI that is already struggling to keep up with the current mechanics.

Right now, land in a city ZoC becomes fertile.  Usually, it does not matter, because the tiles are too close to the center of the city doing the rejuvenation, but if you snake far enough, you start rejuvenating tiles that you can actually settle.  As the minimum distance between cities is significantly more than 4, auto-built cities never rejuvenate any useful tiles except on really small maps.

Because many cities do not have nine useable tiles around them.  Hell, I am sure we have all seen the AI settle cities in which it cannot build ANYTHING but a pier, because all 4 adjacent tiles are swamps/rivers.

Okay, but the game could with some effort give out 8 extra tiles nearest to and connected to the city. Any way you go from changing what we have causes problems. That is why nothing has been done yet. One tile cities make the most logical sense, but destroy the beauty of cities. I think someone will eventually make a mod for that. I would like the devs to simply find a perfect solution that ha no drawbacks. If not that, leave it as is. It currently works just fine.

That's what I say, as well. 

Bringing back snaking to rivers and forests is the one change I would not mind, but I'm  perfectly happy without it.

This comes to mind, while I like the idea and see it as interesting, the consequences should be thought of (and there are several).

I have pushed for this for a while, this is what really bothers me with cities right now, I'm not sure why people complain about snaking.
A trillion things could be done against snaking.
But really, WHY limit some players having fun with snaking just because you think its a bit silly?
The AI isn't snaking, you don't have to snake your cities, some players like to snake they're cities across the map to gain borders just the right place (me, I snake for borders or resource grabbing).

When the overland map and border-rules isn't designed around having to put your territory on every single resource, and having your borders be 1 big blob, I really think snaking is a key tactic, placing your buildings strategically, removing this choice would not serve to make a greater game since it is ignored with no problem, but it would remove the fun for players like me seeking a more interesting game, where I have more control over my kingdom, and where my choices matter.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Interacting with a given artificial world is natural for the people. Raise/lower is nice, but apart from it, outposts and instaroads, the is no more interacting, except the cities.

Cities allow some expression on the way people want to develop the empire, and also gives some personality to each city. While some players will not pay attention to this, others will spend time in rotating each building.

Apart from stylistics, there comes the practical things, that are related to city expansion. I will not say them again. But allowing some, while denying other ones wich are even MORE LOGICAL than, lets say, fast free travel...oh no, just cannot believe.

Imagine this: Devs make a poll, and say: we will allow snaking to PIERS or to LODGING CAMP, but not to both. What would be your choice?  Grrrr

If you're going to rely more on Zone of Control, please add more visibility into that game mechanic. It's hard to know when it will expand next. The ONLY way to improve it is via buildings and population right now. Should be the ability to research, use magic and/or pay money to expand it, too.

The spell that rejuvenates land has a (significant) cost.

Perhaps snaking should also have a cost?  If you make the production cost of the improvement be proportional to the square of the perimeter divided by the area of the city, I think you can pick a multiplier that gives you about the same current production cost for an unsnake-like city and give players a strategic choice to make when thinking about snaking...

that sounds overly complicated, the AI will never understand that...

Something else: are improvements expanding ZoC to blame for AI unleashing monsters so frequently?

I imagine AI can easily be taught (and probably already has been) not to settle in a spot that will immediately unleash a monster. However, with autoplacement, it seems impossible to prevent your ZoC from accidentally expanding over a lair that was previously safe. I often find myself manually placing improvements away from a dragon just to avoid waking it, which isn't something that the autoplacing AI is capable of.

If ZoC expansion is controlled by specific buildings only, AI can see exactly where the ZoC will expand when queuing up a monument or town hall, and make a decision not to build those if it is afraid of unleashing a monster it can't handle.

This seems like the most important point to me. One suggestion for mitigating this is to increase the initial city ZoC radius to two (matching that of outposts); this means it will not be a problem for the vast majority of situations. If I still chose to build to the edge of that ZoC, I am ok with being attacked without warning; after all, I am effectively building houses on the edge of civilization, and if I build my house within walking distance of a big dark forest I should not be surprised when I am attacked by a wolf in the middle of the night.

If you want an advanced warning system, build an outpost. Isn't that exactly what outposts are for, historically?

I never understood why snaking was hated in the first place. I liked building my cities strategically to allow access to new resources.  Does such a thing really make people mad, or make the game unfun to some people? I don't get it, and I never did. I stopped playing the beta because Brad threatened to remove the city customization anfter the second beta. We have been arguing about this for over a year now, but the vitriol against city snaking has never made any sense to me.

I always liked the gameplay element of allowing the ZoC to expand with the physical building of the city. It is a unique element to Elemental, and it allowed new strategies for building cities. Removing depth from the game frustrates me, and I can't understand why so many want to simplify the gameplay mechanics.