Demiansky

Join Date 03/2008

+59

[Suggestion] Shrinking cities, subdividing squares, no more clutter!

So let me begin this post with a story.

When I first started my D&D merchant campaign with my friends 2 years ago I drew up a map for their starting region. It had a great amount of detail. Mountains, meandering rivers, city states, pastures, rolling hills, forests... you get the idea. The map was meant to convey to the players a sense that despite a few bastions of civilization, world was a wild place with scarcely charted wilderness and unknown (and therefore, perhaps limitless?) opportunities.

But there was a big problem that ruined my players' sense of emmersion. That being: the cities were too big and too close on the map. Basically, those vast, wild tracks of land looked more like unmown backyards upon a glance. So what was the solution? I erased the cities and redrew them at 1/9th the size. It's amazing how this small detail influenced their perceptions.

So how is this story relevant to Elemental? Okay, so one thing I've been very concerned about so far in this most recent incarnation of the beta is the sheer size of cities on the map relative to other cities. It's a fun concept to be able to place city buildings wherever you'd like and have them actually appear spatially on the world map, but the problem, I'm sure we can all agree, is that once your cities start growing even a little there is more distance across a single given city than there is distance between cities. So basically what we end up with is a nasty amount of clutter and a world that is filled with urban sprawl. Ultimately, it gives the world a very tamed feeling, even from the onset. I think the emmersive feel of the game would benefit greatly if there were vast distances between cities, with only the late game making the world feel more "domesticated."

So what would be the easy solution to preserve a city's "spatial presence" on the map while remedying the sprawl? Do what I did with my D&D map: scale down the size of a city. Practically, this would involve subdividing a square on which a city is built by either 1/4th's or 1/9th's. Now, when resources could only be acquired by snaking a city over to it, this prospect wasn't possible. Now, however, that resources can be claimed via region of influence, massive, gangly cities aren't necessary anymore. City building would still be identical, but there would be substantial distance between civilization hot spots and a much wilder feel. Resources can be reduced in size as well, graphically, to make the world seem less cluttered. The land space it takes up can remain the same, but simply draw a "lawn" around the resource.

And there are other ways to reduce the clutter of civilization as well, but they have more bearing on gameplay. If it were up to me, I would build in limits to a player's expansion based upon a resource. In other words, there would be far more resources on a map than a player could innitially claim through plunking down cities. Not only would it force a player to choose their cities wisely, it would also add distance between urban areas.

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I don't agree at all. A level 5 city that only takes up 3-4 tiles doesn't have anywhere near the feel and awesomeness factor of it taking up 10 or more. I absolutely love big sprawling cities.

They only change necessary to deal with the problem you describe is that minimum distance between cities should always be calculated between the closest city improvements, not the city centers (Meaning, you can have 2 city centers that are 10 tiles apart, but build improvements towards each other such that there are only 4 tiles between the edges of the cities). Then, just forbid building improvements towards another city if it would be closer than 10 tiles.

And you're done. This will guarantee that every city edge is at least 10 tiles away from any other city edge.

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Quoting Annatar11,

reply 1

So what would be the easy solution to preserve a city's "spatial presence" on the map while remedying the sprawl? Do what I did with my D&D map: scale down the size of a city. Practically, this would involve subdividing a square on which a city is built by either 1/4th's or 1/9th's.

I don't agree at all. A level 5 city that only takes up 3-4 tiles doesn't have anywhere near the feel and awesomeness factor of it taking up 10 or more. I absolutely love big sprawling cities.

They only change necessary to deal with the problem you describe is that minimum distance between cities should always be calculated between the closest city improvements, not the city centers (Meaning, you can have 2 city centers that are 10 tiles apart, but build improvements towards each other such that there are only 4 tiles between the edges of the cities). Then, just forbid building improvements towards another city if it would be closer than 10 tiles.

And you're done. This will guarantee that every city edge is at least 10 tiles away from any other city edge.

Lol, "awesomeness factor." Uhm, you make my point perfectly. It's silly to say that a city's awesomeness factor is contingent on how much of it us splattered across the map. How formidable a city feels is generally defined by how big it is relative to other cities.

And as an aside, my main issue the percentage of land space that the total sum of cities consume. I mean, if this were a Civ game, a landscape that is physically dominated by sheer size of cities and its subordinate improvements is fine. It adds to the feel the game is trying to get across.

But Elemental is a fantasy game that is supposed to have vast, untamed wilderness. In pretty much any fantasy setting I can think of, in anything but the most urban landscapes cities are punctuations in the wilderness: a wilderness where roaming beasts and raiding bandits dwell. If half the landscape is consumed by your perception of what a worthy, "awesome" city is, then wildernesses are just hiccups.

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I Like the big city's as well, makes it feel more real, I hate the way civilization crammed anysize town or city into one square, and controlled for you the expansion of the city in 4, I like having control as to how the city expands, If I build it into a mountain, or a forest, or spread towards the water.

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While maybe a reduction in city size is not a bad thing and making each game square hold 4 structures would go along way to helping this... that would be the most I would do... as it stands i have no real issue myself but I can see your point...

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I've thought about this as well. You wouldn't be reducing the amount of buildings, or the sense of presence on the map that makes them "awesome". You'd just be using the same number of smaller tiles. Even on larger maps it feels like I'm playing on a kind of small island and not a continent. Breaking the city grid up further and adding more space between them would definitely help with that. It would also open room for addons to resources like a little farming village, or watch towers on your mines.

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Quoting Sushikawa,

reply 5

Exactly. Maybe it's just me, but I feel like I'm playing a game of Tropico or something. I don't really have a sense that I'm exploring some larger world.

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I think a very simple solution to decreasse city size whiout major changes would be to simply reduce all 4 tiel city buildings to 1 tile buildings. The size mattered (in terms of gameplay) when there were tile restritcions. However as those no longer apply some of the 4 square buildings should only require 1 space. Only the fortress and the City Center should remain at full tiles.

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I agree with the OP. I don't want to use the word despise in how I feel about the city/urban sprawl, but I definitely dislike it. It breaks the immersion feel, clutters up the map (which given the supposed background of devastation further breaks the immersion), and just feels out of place to me.

What I'd like to see is something that takes a little bit from different games, and a little bit from what is already there.

Here is my idea (probably way to late to include but I'll throw it out there for maybe an update or expansion):

When you found a city it starts just as it does now (and any other tile based TBS game whether MoM or CIV) a single overland tile is occupied by your 'city'. When you want to build buildings instead of plopping them on the map and getting the current urban sprawl you get a small city window where you place your buildings, think MoM but you get to place which you want buildings and where you want them (these are building that would go inside a city wall so farmland, etc. would be out), but on an internal city tile. Thus keeping the tile idea the same as they are now but instead of putting them on the map and taking up a single quarter tile or a full tile you'd do the same but on a city map instead of the global overland map. Furthermore the current number of 'tiles' available to place stuff which is limited to city size would remain. What would change here would be how your 'city' looks on the map. The more buildings your have the more special things your city would represent (think AoW 2, build a Builder's Hall and the city icon would change a bit to reflect it). The art department could go really all out there if they wanted or be more modest if they so chose.

Next would be as your city grows in population two things would happen. The original tile would fill up with housing (again think of AoW the higher your city level the more it looks filled out with housing), but you also now get to place another full overland tile next to your original tile, and they would merge. So instead of one overland tile it would spread across two tiles. In addition your city screen would get more internal tiles to place new buildings. This would continue on till you reach level 5 where your city just fills out completely. You wouldn't get another tile to place but you'd see all the four previously placed overland tiles fill out and some spill over outside the walls (much as you'd see in AoW when you reach the maximum city level).

For a quick visual representation of what I'm talking about:

A new level one city on a map:

|--------------------------|

| |

| X |

| |

|--------------------------|

X = unfilled overland city tile

As you build buildings and the population fills out your go to level 2, you also get to place a new overland tile:

|--------------------------|

| |

| OX |

| |

|--------------------------|

O = filled in overland city tile

Level 3:

|--------------------------|

| |

| OOX |

| |

|--------------------------|

Level 4:

|--------------------------|

| |

| OOOX |

| |

|--------------------------|

Level 5:

|--------------------------|

| |

| OOOO |

| |

|--------------------------|

Now the neat thing about this set up is you could have unique cities across the board. Not only in what buildings your place in your city through the internal tiles (which would still be limited by space) it would be further visually represented by the art of the city on the overland map, but you could also build your cities in unique directions. For the example I did a simple straight line, perhaps it is following a river on one side, a coastline, or a mountain valley. However a city could be built in 2x2 square, a L or Z shape (like the tetris squares), or even the truncated T shape. Each city could be unique in in how it is built. Heck if the art guys got the time you could include things in the art like a city with a river going through it (you could make it show bridges...heck make it a building only available to cities that choose to do that (takes up one tile but offers X bonuses).

I think this would eliminate urban sprawl, but leave the idea that cities can grow big if not so big as to break immersion.

Well that is just my two cents.

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Even though I've hardly done any fighting at all in the builds so far, my main vexation with the sprawl-snake-starfish thing is that it seems pointless bother without a framework that supports both wall-breaking sieges and urban combat after the attacker has established a beachhead of some sort. I like playing with Legos and I don't think the prefix "sim" implies an insult, but cities so far seem like they offer too little fun for too much clicking.

Probably what I want is more abstraction, so what I focus on with cities are 'important/special' things and not the bother of laying out housing districts in a game that will never take account of whether housing is in a 'good' locale or whether an attack is coming on the opposite side of town from my barracks. Given my impression that the manual housing thing will survive RTM, I'd settle for a scalable framework along the lines Annatar mentions as long as the numbers are chosen with the idea of making traditional wall-to-wall city spam more or less a victory condition in its own right and not the inevitable byproduct of any viable strategy.

I guess that in my heart, I'd rather see a real twist on 4X tradition and have a game where one city (metropolitan region) was the norm and getting your act together to dominate or ally with multiple metro areas was the challenge. You can change the graphics all you want, but in the end this sort of sprawl-oriented modeling always ends up functionally as ugly as Civ 1 maps after every continent had railroads for long enough. The world behind a chain-link fence. Ugh.

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I like this idea as well... Like you would just zoom in on the tile and place buildings. But then I have to ask why we're positioning buildings if it doesn't matter... And if it did do we really want all the micromanagement?

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I agree with the OP. The size of cities and (resource) buildings compared to the map reminded me of Age of Empires and other RTS games, and not in a good way. One of the worst buildings is the Stables, taking up an entire tile with one building.

It would help the feel of the game a lot if for example farms and stables had one sub-tile containing a few small buildings, and the remaining three being fields or pastures.

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I am aesthetically displeased with cities too. I think much of the problem is a lack of real "form"... these cities don't have streets. They are essentially a bunch of buildings heaped together with no rhyme nor reason.

Huge cities wouldn't bother me if... well, I guess since I've been playing with 9 opponents on an enormous map we all start out fairly close together. Still... it feels like the world sizes are small. I just kinda feel like you should have to really "travel yonder" to get to your nearest neighbor, through threatening forests and dark mountain ranges, to war and to trade.

I'm having a hard time really thinking about how to truly address this particular issue. It's important to everyone who was sucked in by the promise of a dark, uncontrolled world. I hope that they re-balance things to be more epic.

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There are two things that come to mind to answer this.

First, the map size for the largest map is supposed to be utterly massive. What was it, 10x the largest Civ IV map? In that case, it'll easily get to the point that if I have 5 cities and everyone else has 5 cities, then overall there will be only a few cities on the map, with lots of non-city stuff between.

Second, I think the map in general appears too random. Given that it's a random map generator...yeah, I'm not totally surprised. But really, wandering the landscapes and seeing a bunch of random stuff takes away from it all. I don't get the feeling I'm in a great post-cataclysmic world. I get the feeling that someone took a shaker and peppered the landscape.

All-in-all, cities just need...something more to them. I mean, really, here we are in a world, bringing life back where death used to be. Or death where life used to be. Whichever. I'd like for my cities to have opinions, comments, problems...in GalCiv, planets had their brief, special moments. It was easy to make a planet a 'focus' for one thing or another. I liked that. Late game, I usually had one or two planets that were production planets, with a number of others focusing on keeping citizens happy.

Ways to fix it...hm...

I know that for the campaign map, at least, there are named landmarks. I'd really like to be able to name noteable landmarks in game. If the world is truly massive, we'll be able to distinguish between lakes, rivers, and mountains. It'd be useful, too, when planning out wars and combat.
Cities need more...character. ATM, each city isn't special, it's just a bunch of similar buildings. One of the first things I plan to do for my faction will be make a slew of new buildings to throw into the mix. Either way, it'd be really nice if cities had some natural roads and whatnot. If I have a level 5 city, I'd love to see people randomly walking around. If I have a bunch of soldiers in a city, I'd love to see a group of them walking around on patrol. Cities do need more life put into them.
Cities are all pretty much just carbon copies, it seems. I captured one of Relias' cities, and it was...surprisingly similar. Anything that could be done to make such cities seem less similar would be nifty. As to what, exactly, I don't know.

Another idea that just struck me...involves building cities at special locations. Perhaps in your explorations, you find the ancient ruins of Al-Ashteroth, Hallas, or Malaya. Building a city atop these ruins yields special, unique benefits. You get techs that are only available from having a city on these locations, as well as certain boosts to the city's stats.

What about Ithyrl, the resting place of the demon-lord Kroxir? In our travels on some random map, we come across the ancient dungeon. Our champions visit it, and we're presented with a choice: release the demon, or build a city with the sole purpose of keeping Kroxir bound. Suddenly, our faction goes from a normal one fighting with everyone else to the keepers of Kroxir, just with one city. And perhaps a target, should others wish Kroxir released.

And I'll be totally honest...I'd love to be able to see a massive city and think to myself, "wow, that's...that's big." Now, if I see a massive city, I glance back at mine and think to myself, "well, that's normal." A metropolis should be a great achievement, not the norm. And a metropolis...should be so much larger than other cities that just having one should make every enemy turn and just walk away in shame.

Things like that would add to the landscape, not to mention having the ability to build cities on special locations would give more connections to the land, and make special, rare cities that are actually something unique.

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Hehe ... well assuming Tactical Battles (for a city) are based upon the actual city's layout ... then I would like for some population to be lost for every attack/defense on a house tile.

As well as for buildings to be able to be destroyed (90% damage), and catch fire, and and ....

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Besides from bumping

I also dont like how much the cities sprawl (issue 1), and I have to agree that even building one is "too much clicking for too little fun" (issue 2) as someone stated above. While I can get along with sprawled cities, I dont really understand why I have to position the building manually. It is a choice with no consequences, so why bother?

Also I have been struggling with what benefit/choices the city sprawling brings? Is it really just eyecandy and/or easy to view whats part of the city? E.g. there is no penalty for making too large cities or too "unnaturally" shaped etc...

To me it really seems like lot of effort and functionality is invested in this, but there is no real purpose

btw. IIRC it is not possible to divide tile even further (e.g. to 3x3 instead of current 2x2... engine limitations)... Pity it would have been nice way to reduce the sprawl (issue 1) with that

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