I thought at one point there were talks of a governor stat.  That the cities wouldn't grow past a certain point unless you had a governor that would allow it.  I believe the example was do you use Ranger man as part of your army, or use him to take this city to L3 as he has a governor rank of 3.  Did that disappear?

I'd still like to see something like this.  With a couple of other features.  For example say Druanna can build up a city to L3 based on her governor rank.  She is also a Druid, thus using her will grant you some bonuses to food production.  Now if you don't want to worry about setting up the city, you put her in charge of it and she builds based upon her background...in this case probably focused on building farms, and using the environment as best she can.  Now Drake comes along who is a Military expert and we put him in charge granting bonuses to training and troop building and he expands the city based upon his ideals of military conquest.

Yeah, I agree with this. (Posted something similar in another thread. )

I also think that Gardens are the bigger culprit at this point. To grow a city where your food resources exist, you just build houses. But to do it when food isn't adequate, you build houses AND gardens.  You need 2 gardens per house (IIRC), and that just chews up more space and adds more annoyance.

If the number of gardens was capped at say 4, it'd provide enough to grow the town a bit, but after that you'd need to use "real" resources like fertile land or bees to grow it further. Which also makes sense, who ever heard of a city that could feed itself entirely off gardens?

The houses themselves serve the purpose of allocating food resources. Gardens really just let you circumvent the limits on food resources by building more. I think we'd really be better off without 10 gardens in every city.

Agreed. Putting a cap on farms could also make people think twice about starting a city in a stupid position and would perhaps encourage conflict over the food rescources on the map. Also, I think there should be an additional City level for your designated Capital.

Also, I really like the idea mentioned in this topic (https://forums.elementalgame.com/376517) by one of the devs about having a governing stat on champions that can limit city growth.

I don't see how each garden being half as productive as the previous one makes any more sense then a hard cap. Besides, other things already have caps, such as schools and markets. It's consistent, at least.

I didn't say anything about local. When you hook up to a food resource, you use houses to decide which city you want to spend it in. That doesn't change if gardens are capped, except that the food resources become more valuable because past tier 2 you can't grow settlements without them.

If you want to build multiple cities it becomes a problem, as even one farm won't get a city to tier 5 without copious garden spam. Big cities require multiple food resources, so you won't have many big cities. I think that's the point, but garden spam lets you cheat some and grow bigger then your food resources would normally allow.

I tend to like that, as with gardens capped you'd wind up with a handful of big cities (depending on map size) supported by larger numbers of villages and outposts to capture resources. The cities then become more important.

Yeah, the problem for me isn't complexity but tediousness.  Personally I think smaller cities with buildings that are more effective would be more interesting.  My garden or whatever just produces 1 food (can't remember if that's true or not), make it produce 4 as an example but have fewer city build areas.  My individual choices right now don't seem significant enough and I hate building masses of the same buildings.  Just not fun or interesting.  Also do we really need so many buildings that do similar things?  School gives 5 research, scholar gives 1, town council gives 1, ....  Other games like MOM might have buildings like this also but you are limited to just 1 which makes a difference.  Would rather have buildings have upgrades than have masses of similar buildings.

Since Frogboy changed things already, from the 'did you play beta 2 this weekend' thread:

Second, remove the other hard caps.

Third, because we have some hard caps does not mean it's ok to add more.  In fact just the opposite -- it's reason to not add more.

I assumed (yes I know...)...  Seemed like 1 fertile grounds affecting all cities gives one fertile ground too much power, but perhaps that's quibbling on my part.

So with all the food and housing techs I've researched 1 fertile ground (42 food) can support 10 villas (1240 pop) with 2 extra food.  No gardens needed.

I just don't like hard caps to achieve this (or other design goals).

I have no problem with the prerequisite you mentioned. It's about macromanagement versus micromanagement. Streamlined versus tedious. Informed versus being in the dark. Taking your example, having a menu that indicates connectable cities would be a useful tool.

From the menu, select a route -> background calculations check if that route is secure or not -> if not secure, a warning message indicates that there's some cleaning up to do.

With something like this, the player would have a better grasp of game mechanics. Micromanagement would only be necessary to clean up a particular route.

Right now: builds caravan... where's the nearest city?... *zooms out*... *finds city* ... *sends caravan to city* ... *does something else in the meantime* ... *goes back* ... *scratches head* ... huh... where's that damn thing? ... sends another caravan... *watches closely* ... what? I need to kill that stupid critter first?!? Where's the telepathic uplink for this kind of information?!?!?!

I do have a problem with this sort of thing.

The wildgame tile gives a x2 food multiplier.  I would argue that city location is hands down the strongest on the map.

I'm in the less is more camp when it comes to city management. Frankly, I don't see how you will ever satisfy everyone with one method because the micro managers will never be happy with a automated system and those of us that would rather not be bothered will hate the micro management. Trying to hit the middle road and make everyone happy sounds like a pipe dream.

Ultimately I think you will have to build the system that the micro-managers are willing to live with and put in enough automation so that the rest of us can play the game.

Here are a couple of suggestions - not based on any method, just some things that seem like they could make the game easier:

Make builds events, or at least be able to flag the game to alert you that something can be built in city X. I see this as something like a cutscene that states that the city govenor is petitioning you for funds and resources to build the following improvement(s). The Sovereign can then approve or deny the request. This keeps me from having to check each city to see what things are in need and which could/should be built. You could give each city a build queue to serve the micro-management (mm) crowd.

When a hero enters your city zone of control, an event notification is generated allowing you to interact with them. Possible interactions could be: Hire for a certain job (i.e. kill local monster), get random information, Hire for city or kingdom use, ask them to leave your territory, carry a message to another sovereign.

When a hostile creature enters your ZOC, a message is shown which allows you to click on the message and takes you to the general area so that you can deal with the situation.

Do away with housing altogether and make it something that the city just does while it grows, if the city population grows, the houses automatically created and are shown in good shape and appear around the town. If the town has a negitive growth, excess housing becomes slums which takes down the city prestiage. As growth returns, the slums are slowly cleared away and nicer housing returns. You can also have a event that allows your sovereign to deal with city slums by making moral decisions (like in GalCiv).

We need some quicker method to move trained units from a city other than clicking on them one at a time.

Just some thoughts.

Great discussion so far. Looks like Frogboy is actively reducing the busywork and increasing the strategy. I'll wait for the next version to see how much things have actually changed though.

Viewpoint #3:  Cities are too simple, but building them is too complex.

It's retarded, to put it mildly.  A city with two houses?  Food and shelter is abstracted and annoying.  Building housing in games has always been an irritant, the more realistic the game it's placed in, the more idiotic it becomes.  It's almost rational in games like Age of Empires, even if devoid of real need and just something annoying you have to get out of the way.  It serves zero purpose in a game where population grows by itself.

If they can figure out how to shag each other, they can figure out how to build new houses to go with the results.  It's only been happening for millions of years with zero need for top down control.  If we plan to mate them manually as well, I'll give up this argument.

The gardens being placed manually, loathed just as equally, suffer the same problem.  I've raised one myself.  The Mayor didn't till the back half of the yard up for us.

Organic populations should have organic housing and food production.  They should even have an organic economy.  It wouldn't be the entirety of it of course, even a comparably loose system such as modern democracies have are rife with government established production.  It would cover the basics though.  you shouldn't have to build markets, they appear all by themselves wherever there is trade.  Trade simply requires goods, services, and a population.

You plop down your city.  You build up a central point for leadership, defenses, production sectors to supply them, security for the populace, put in wells where there's no natural water source, clear roadways to ease travel and encourage utilization of the area.  You build up defensive positions to protect your city from invaders, clear out banditry, keeping order so that your economic activity isn't being interrupted by violence.  You guide your production by employing the populace towards the ends you need met, but you're never the sole employer.  A farmer with food he can't use trades it for things he can, supplying the other components of the economy through the market stalls.  Someone becomes a merchant shipping grain between cities, instead of just a stall owner, when the city has more food than it needs, and less than it could use of something else.  The farmer himself becomes a farmer by traveling to your new center of power, providing safety and support to the surrounding region, because it's the only intelligent place to farm, and everyone has to eat.  He picks out a nearby spot of land suited to the task, clears it, and starts his work.  He'll probably build his house there too, why walk back and forth each day?

You now get added strategic and tactical depth, while vastly reducing the need for micromanagement.

I'd also give up on the rigid tile based placement of structures to make things look better and have more flexibility in placement.  We already have four sections for a single square.  Why not toss the sections and have a build area buffer covering half a tiles worth or so around existing buildings on which you can place objects of varied size in whatever direction you feel like?  This is a fairly minor irritant though.  An aesthetic peeve more than a major game play improvement.  It would make mountains out of a mole hill for how cities look in combination with organic systems.  Those of you with an artistic bent would find designing a picturesque city a challenging source of entertainment in itself.

Organic City Growth is the Future!!!

This is centered around two major tenets, one game play based, the other essentially game-engine based:

Choice of Essential Buildings:

- There are X number of strategic/player choose-able plots within the central city area, as determined by city level
    - Building chosen influences both the function and look of the city
        - These major buildings would affect the capabilities of the city in question.  They should be relatively unique per/city (i.e. no spam of one building type), yet there should be more building choices than building lots available in order to provide opportunities for cities to either specialize in a certain area or to be a less skilled jack-of-all-trades.  There MUST be specialization *to an extent* in order to avoid a nation of cookie-cutter cities!  Also increases the strategic nature of cities and sovereign choice
    - By lowering the amount of times a player is forced to stop back at the city, and lowering the "make work" factor, you are easing large map/end game scenario tedium for the player while simultaneously opening the opportunity to develop governor options along the lines of SMAC (Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri)
    - Depth and strategy can also be increased without any increase in tedium by allowing for building upgrades and/or (preferably "and" ) building feedback/interaction, the former which can increase game length and strategy, the latter which provides further strategic choices and consequences for the player/sovereign

This also avoids issues with hard caps and realism.  Some options are obviously going to be one-per-city/faction/game world, while with others, players will have to balance the increased benefits of multiple instances of a single building type hurting their production/abilities in other areas (specialization versus Jack-of-all-trades!).

    
City Development Should *Develop* According to the Sovereign's Wishes and Reflect His or Her Choices
(aka The Sovereign is *not* the Urban Planner!)

    - Housing/minor shops/other buildings are aesthetic fillers (not buildings options for players) and would be procedurally placed around and in between player-chosen buildings, this is advantageous at two levels:
        1.) Avoids the busywork and monotony of individual building placement spam.
        2.) Provides the opportunity for much more realistic and natural looking towns/cities
    - This would at the simplest level require a set of basic building designs for fillers (huts, villas, small shops, etc) that would be replicated and modified for various city conditions (e.g. industrial/leisure; economic/military; poor/middle/upper, etc).  The filler buildings/houses would not have to be drastically different from each other (i.e. you could use the same basic building blocks), just enough so to convey the sense that the player's choices in building choice (and hence city role) are in turn affecting how the city looks and feels.
    - I would not go so far as to say this development would in turn affect city development on its own (a la the random factor mentioned by Nathikal in post 12).  While it would certainly be cool to have another factor affecting city development, I think in this case having the surrounding city elements simply responding to player choice of strategic buildings avoids some tedium and a potential nightmare on huge maps/long games of having to choose between bulldozing/redistricting/etc. or dealing with negative effects of a random development.
    - In short, these buildings/props should be worked to provide quick visual cues to the player of how his/her city is performing, it's general purpose, and should be a sort of reward/feedback as to that player's choices in city development.  Reward, not busy work!

Other things to consider:

Provide a generic bonus to cities that have a governor of sorts, this:
1.) Provides a strategic choice of whether you want a champion boosting your cities or boosting your armies
2.) Avoids "over-complicating" things by adding another stat (governing) to champions to worry about

Ensure that the civilization building portion of this game remains strong!
    - This is a 4x game, not just an adventuring or RTS game.
    - City building can be fun, strategic, and gratifying provided tedium/monotony/micro-heavy "make-work" is cut down, while still ensuring that the player is responsible for making decisions that will have strategic consequences. In turn, these choices must have consequences in the game world, such as with city growth, unit options, etc.

In short, the player--as sovereign--should feel as such.  The player should be forced to make strategic choices (initial placement of city, development of city's capabilities, etc.) and the cities (and ideally game world) should adjust and respond accordingly.  The player is the *ruler*, not the urban planner--strategic choices, not hut-laying!

    
For futher elaboration, I noticed that Nathikal also has made similar points, see his full post on the

The "why" is that food is a global resource.  Any town can access any other town's food without any trade being established.  It's just one big pool.  Houses serve to direct the flow of food throughout your empire.  They are like magical beacons that serve as incoming teleportation pads for the food in your empire.  This makes growing cities based on available food difficult, because you wouldn't be able to direct which cities grow and which cities won't....unless you move away from a global food system.

Now whether or not this system is the best system is debatable, so I'm not saying your idea is a bad one, just that the devs are really attached to the "Food as a global resource" idea.  So you'd really have to "wow" them to change their mind.

From frogboy:

"Food is global because it's consistent (i.e. other games have "global money") and because it provides greater strategic options to players. The reason every TBS game seems to end in a grind is because each city is a civilization unto itself. There is no real thought in what city you should take first.  In Elemental, there is a reason to go after a particular town because resources are global." (https://forums.elementalgame.com/380363/)