Major changes to city building? Noooo

Well, you can get that without having 234 improvements for the same thing

there will probably be lots of stuff to build, but the things you build will be more diverse.

This will include buildings you can only have one of within your faction (like the palace), and other things that involves making choices, rather than spamming the same buildings over and over again.

Remember we can't build everything yet. The magic buildings aren't in.

So while you won't have 12 Gardens in the city anymore, you do need to make room for the Tower of Arcane Pwnage, or whatever they're calling the things. Faction unique (ie: one per faction) buildings aren't in yet either, and he also mentioned working on those.

What's changing is that you can only build one of most things per city, but there is still lots to build.

I don't like current state of city building. Frankly, it is really difficult to say what is bad in it because of its newborn state. No unique buildings, no magic-related buildings, no balance to speak about.

And yeah, I do not like cities which are full of gardens, the look somewhat strange.

I see the reasoning behind it but from an rpg standpoint...huge cities should be allowed to have more than one granary or pub or what have you. I feel the level 5 cities are way too small as it is.

Maybe wait for the update to see the changes before saying "Noooo"?

I'm sure there will be plenty of things for you to build, and as Tridus says, half the stuff isn't even in the game yet.

I think there's a lot of potential with what we have. Does the game need a major city overhaul? Yes. But don't forget that other parts of the game and the UI are undeveloped making the city situation seem worse than it actually is. Once there's a greater variety of strategies I think we'll know better how to deal with cities.

The current city building didn't add diversity. you were forced to build gardens and houses, effectively making less choices as to what buildings to add to your city.

Plus several buildings did exactly the same thing but just had a different names, which doesn't really serve any purpose apart from losing the player.

I don't buy this. People forget in Beta 1 there was an "imbue farm" spell which effectively increased food production by sacrificing essence, and a "imbue city" spell which increased the capacity of a city.

The strategy is to make food production effective so you use less space on gardens. I keep telling people: It's not the gardens, it's the lack of upkeep and relative cheapness of making cities. If you want to have a diverse city with a lot of functional buildings and few houses and gardens, you're going to have to find the resources or sacrifice the essence.

I don't think every dicision can be made by a poll and I don't think that their are going to be less city improvements, just less endless spamming of the same improvement. That should be good news for you as it means that you get to build more interesting cities.

From my own experience I found city building to be fun but did get sick of being constrained by having to spam a lot of houses and gardens so the changes sound positive to me.

That said we will see how the changes play out, it won't be hard to change the balance back in the other direction if the feedback they get after people have had a chance to try 2A is that people miss having cities comprised of mostly spammed gardens and houses.

There isn't less stuff to build. We are greatly reducing repetitive building (unlimited gardens, multiple workshops, multiple studies, etc.).

In XML, we can, literally, define how many of a given improvement you get per city level, per faction, etc. So we're playing around with balancing this because we were finding that building up a city was more chore than fun.

I like to say Nooo or sometimes NooOOOoooOoo

Anyway, I just wanted to voice my opinion and make sure they know there is a segment who enjoys carefully crafting large cities. The way it is now is enjoyable for me, and if they want to dumb it down then I hope they just throw in an 'automate city building' type option.

I know posting on message boards can come across as very caustic, but that's not my intention - and yeah, maybe they are not dumbing it down but actually making it more complex or at least just as complex. That would be nice, but I still wanted to get my 2 cents in there chum.

Ok that sounds fine - I guess I'll wait and see the changed before I comment further.

That said, I kind of like being able to build multiples - it really lets me customize a city in any way I want. I can build multiple barracks to turn my city into a super unit producer - or I can build tons of merchants to get the cash - or food or etc.

This smacks of thinking ahead.  Were you dropped as children?

I for one like the changes, and hope they will take them even further, there is no reason to build xx same buildings, over and over, its just tedius and drag the game alot...

I hope, we get less spamming and more meaninfull choices during the city building.

Also I would like to see increase in turns needed to build something, so you would have to make choices, what to build and where and when, that would also speed game alot, instead of building every turn in every city something.

You can still do that. But the difference is that I think it would be better to have more improvements that you can only build 1 per faction to do that rather than cranking out a gazillion shops.

For instance, we put in the Royal Mint today which is a 1 per faction building that increases gold production.  There are similar things we can do for food, materials, metal, crystal, you name it.

Not only is it tedious to build 5 of the same building, it is visually unappealing. 

It might be more interesting to have building tiers. For example you have a the command post, to train troops. Then you have a barracks to improve training troops. Then you attach an officers quarters onto that to further improve (and is more expensive, those officers do love their space!). Finally, you have the 1 per faction Millitary Academy, which greatly increases troop training speed and adds +1 HP to all troops trained in that city. (Example, no idea if that exists.)

To me, that's more interesting then "spam 15 Barracks", and where the super building goes matters.

You could do the same thing with Gardens, Greenhouses, Arboretiums, Magically Infused Vineyards, etc.  Just spamming Gardens in any city you want to grow is kind of lame, but if you can build up a city to be a super-agriculture center by attaching things onto the Garden it has, that could be neat. You'd also really want to protect that city, given how much damage losing it to invaders would do to your food supply! (And for the enemies, I just created two example cities you probably want to siege and cut off the trade network.)

Brad - Is it possible to make tiered buildings that need to be adjacent to their lower tier versions? Ie: Have the command post, then the barracks next to the command post (and the theoretical officers quarters next to the barracks)? Or would that just annoy people with housing placement around them?

Personally I was pretty happy to see Frogboy's announcement of changes to the City Building.  I found having to build a whole bunch of houses each time the city grew in size rather boring.  With one city, focusing on city building was manageable.  But I can't imagine having to babysit five to ten cities with that level of detail. 

My only concern with something like this, as I said in one of the other half-dozen threads on this same topic, is whether there is ever going to be a time when you are _not_ going to want to take advantage of this adjacency.  If you build an officers quarters, like in your example, is there any reason a player wouldn't want to put it next to their barracks? If it's always the obvious choice I'm not sure what the point of requiring the adjacency would be.

i have to agree with most everybody else, i like a huge city as much as anybody.  however, it is just simply useless to build 4 farms that could do the same thing as 1 farm.  what i want to see is building that force you to make a decision at some point around 3rd city level.  because you can't build everything, you have to decide on specialization or a balanced but weak city.  at 5th level  i would like to see some uber buildings that might use more than 4 city slots. example:

Colossal statue - takes up 4 spaces, but requires 6 city level points or whatever.  this would have a huge increase in prestige(hopefully we will still need prestige for something after 5th level), also it gives sight of 10 squares(like a watchtower).

@Xtropy    To me the choice is enhance an existing building or build something new.  The adjacent addon should occupy a tile.

Right, but the choice to enhance an existing structure or build something new has nothing to do with adjacency.  This "choice" exists whether or not an "officer's quarters" is built on the other side of the city or directly adjacent.

I'm asking about the point of adjacency, not the choice as how to spend available tiles/resources.

If someone who builds a hypothetical officer's quarters is _always_ going to put it next to a barracks to gain whatever advantage the officer's quarters would get by being built next to the barracks, what is the point of requiring the adjacency, because when would someone build an officers quarters and not put it next to the barracks?

Off the top of my head I can think two ways the adjacency could add a real choice or decision,

1) A barracks can gain advantage from multiple kinds of "add-ons" but can only have a subset of those connected to it at any given time.  For example, a barracks could have an "Officer's Quarters" next to it and armies built from the city will gain some sort of leadership/morale bonus, or alternatively the barracks could have a "Arcane Warfare Academy" built next to it and armies built from that structure could gain some sort of of resistance to magic.  However the player would have to make a choice, as they couldn't build both next to the barracks. 

Of course even this doesn't really require adjacency to be implemented, because upon building the "Officer's Quarters" the developers could design it so the "Arcane War Academy" is no longer able to be constructed.  In doing so the adjacent requirement becomes moot.

2) The add-on structure could alternatively enhance several kinds of buildings, but you have to choose which by building it adjacent to the structure you wish to grant the advantage.  For example, an "Arcane War Academy" could still be built next to the Barracks in order to give your armies a magic resistance boost, however it could alternatively be placed next to your schools in order to boost research, or spell points or whatever.

So I'm not saying there aren't ways of creating choice and strategy around the idea of adjacency, but in all the discussion surrounding the topic I rarely seem to hear the strategies and choices afforded by implementing adjacent structures enhancing existing structures.

This means that we can change this stuff [Ex.: # of gardens / settlement etc.] via modding? Nice!

Awesome! 

That's definitely a real concern. I also wondered at the very end of my post if it might just annoy people because you have to plan housing around where the attached upgrades will go later. Ie, you can't build the officers quarters yet because your town is tier 1 and needs to be tier 2. So you build houses, but you can't build them anywhere that they'll block attached buildings later on.

That might very well be more annoying then anything else, in which case having it not need to be connected would be better (so long as it's in the same city).