Let’s talk about: CITIES

There has been lot of talk about buildings and resource mechanics which both impact the city development. But I am surprised that I didn’t notice much talk about one feature which makes Elemental very distinctive from other 4X games – buildings are being build directly on squares on strategic map.

Of course, this feature was discussed a bit, especially, when cities could have line shape. Also recent suggestion whether tiles can have 3x3 subtiles instead of 2x2 (it is not possible due to engine limitations).

I see some occasional mentioning here and there, but generally it doesn’t seem to spark too much attention. (I admit that I do not follow forums rigorously though, so I most probably missed some discussions about that). Now this may be good, because people think of that as natural. I personally am still a bit uneasy of that.

First what I like:

-         no city/planet/castle/star system screen

-         (potentially) good overview of what each city contains. (Tho, I think that current building icons a rather dull… perhaps because of that unifying beige/brownish)

-         cities are influenced by landscape (will probably look very well in 3D)

There are still issues which I have troubles accepting.

-         cities are too large/spacing is too small.

This is for sure influenced by current balance as well, but although I start building cities “reasonably” away, I end up with circles of radii 1-2, separated by empty space of width 2-3. Thus perhaps 1/3 of whole map-space are cities! Me not likes.

-         consecutively, friendly units have huge movement bonus. Effectively they can move double the speed when using friendly cities on their paths.

-         consecutively, Elemental might turn into enemies wandering in narrow spaces between cities, while you will be able to defend them with quite small force, because of your large mobility advantage

So what should be done? I was thinking about 3x3 instead of 2x2 as well, but since this is not possible, other solution should be found. Some random thoughts

-         even stricter city size limitations (Galciv style – limit of developable planet space) That is what we already have in game. This is btw. something I don’t like much. It is too artificial, development of the city should be limited by some mechanic, not by the table.

-         some sort of penalization for too neighboring cities. (Civ style – cities are using neighboring tiles, so if you build them too close, they will have to share -> thus lower effectivity)

-         buildings are just graphics – eg. city would be still one tile, central building. This would probably look very weird/bad.

-         units move at their speed even inside the city… but this breaks the scale even further.

-         fewer city buildings. But this may lead to too simplistic city development.

I don’t have real suggestion, but I would prefer some sort of penalization system. Some sort of mechanic. So you can either have small villages close to each other or metropolises spaced out. From engine screenshots it seems that scale is quite small -> we can see lot of details, like individual trees and so on. Perhaps if city could somehow harvest or utilize much larger area than it is right now…I have absolutely no idea how to solve problem with units speed nicely, tho.

When I look in midgame on "my kingdom", I see urban conurbation, too many people. nature conquered by a man. not a landscape with people who are still more or less fighting for survival, reinventing stuff like "market", "villas" etc. My units moving from border to border in almost instant... I think that all this is wrong...

Your thoughts? You think that current system is at least okaish?