City building square limit and resources problem

Yeah, I agree. You encounter the same problem even just while you're building the improvements. A resource outside your city will build its improvement quite happily. But a similar resource that is connected to the city will be added to the city's build queue, meaning its construction will be delayed (sometimes quite significantly) by real city buildings that you're already constructing, or by other resource improvements.

The game really shouldn't be penalising you in such an unfortunate way, because the current system incentivises completely counter-intuitive behaviour like trying to carefully snake your city building around such that it doesn't touch the resources, which is basically an even worse manifestation of the city snaking that occurred in the very early betas. Basically, if it's a choice between having nice pretty city shapes and actual sensible gameplay, I'd much prefer the sane gameplay, the way it worked in the late betas. But really there's no excuse for not having both.

I think - and I'm going out on a limb here - you're being penalized for that adjacent resource block of squares because it cannot be destroyed by wandering monsters/bandits. Well - they'll have to take your city to do so. Resources that are floating out there all alone have no protection, and a wandering monster can destroy the building on a resource without you being able to do anything about it (unless you have troops there). But if it is part of your city, it is protected by city defenses, and so it costs those [incredibly] precious building spaces.

Actually there's two huge benefits. The first is that it can't be destroyed without conquering the city. The second is all those +% economic buildings you can build within a city start affecting it.

Pretty sure the % econ buildings work no matter where the thing is located. As long as the resource says it's linked to that city, it gets the bonuses.

Ah, this explains why some of my cities ran out of space so early on.

The buildings boosting production work just fine on resources not connected to the city.

About the protection we'll have to see after the 0 day patch, in the current version I had exactly 1 building destroyed by the AI in over 300 turns.

I've had two things burned down, one by bandits and one by an enemy caravan that was passing by. Yes, a caravan burned down my mine, the popup actually described it as a "gang of caravans" which I found hilarious.

I'd like to know how you figured any of this out, because in my game last night my capital got locked up for free tiles, completely wrecking my ability to add buildings I wanted to build or add housing to grow the city, and I had no effing clue WTF was going on.  The whole time I was thinking, any day now, I'll have more free tiles to work with...ok, it's been 100 turns...where are my tiles...any day now...  I could not find any in-game clue in the UI or hedge-a-ma-thingy (why can't the journal/help be named something human beings can spell and pronounce?).

Knowing the details just makes me say, this really sucks.  :/

So basically, having a lot of cool resources in/near your city is a bad thing.  Who'd a thunk it?

Is the city tile size arbitrary or are there ways to increase that number? My first city in my first game ran into those problems of running out of space and couldn't grow beyond size 3. It was a WTF moment for me. Anyway, I think what I will do is build a 1 tile radius around my farms from now on, just so they are protected and yet not connected. Man my cities are gonna look funky with the giant gaping hole in the middle. I'd have to think this will be fixed at some point though.

This is an annoying gameplay issue, which detracts from the otherwise generally micro-management free city buildup. Please look at fixing this.

Are people really running out of space due to the 50 tile limit? I haven't run into this problem yet and my capital was getting pretty big last night. Any way, if it's really an issue, seems like the easiest solution would be just to raise the limit to 60 tiles or something? Might even be somthing that you can easily mod yourself in xml file.

Maybe they are building every building regardless of whether or not the appropriate resources are linked to them? I've not run into the limit yet either but then most of my cities don't have every building available.

So the sensible thing to do is actually to build your capital a square or two away from the starting resources. That way you can build away from them without having to snake around them.

Hmmm, I did not know resources couldnt be burnt down if they were 'connected' to the city. Wish I had! Id've given up a few slots to stop the damn bandits from killing my gold mine every dozen turns or so. Had to eventually park soldiers on it.

But I do agree they shouldnt force you into some counter intuitive building strategy without at least making it plain the benefits and costs, which they currently do not do.

Also, question: Do bonuses 'stack'? Say, if I build walls which give a bonus to defense, if I build TWO walls, does it stack?

My capital has in its immediate vicinity: 3 iron deposits, 2 lost libraries, 1 farmland, 1 orchard, 2 shards.

Not all of those were there in the beginning, some of the adventure research reveals new resources. But still, if I hadn't rebuilt and snaked my city that's 36 of the 50 building slots gone, just for resources. After rebuilding it was only 16 slots. The fact that I can game the system tells me it's broken or at least poorly implemented.

Easily.  Alarmingly easily.  If you end up with several resources in range and you build houses to level your town, you'll run out of tiles fast.

Well, I completely disagree with you and I also fail to see any reason to bring up "other games" - whatever that refers to.  In any game like this the choice to build or not build is yours, as is the choice to specialize or generalize.  Gameplay should not force this - it should be your choice.

Specializing cities should be a choice, not forced.

You can easily have several resources nearby in a good city spot.  Of course you want to use them.  Many resources appear later, so no matter what you do you could easily get a lot of resources "in" your city and if you need to intentionally avoid them to keep tiles free for buildings, that is just stupid.  There is no other word for it.  You also, thru research, unlock the ability to build a TON of buildings and with all the resources you have you can easily build them without pick and choosing.  And on top of that, you can level your cities - so of course you want to level your cities, which requires a LOT of tiles of housing.

There is no logical reason by cities should be limited in how many tiles they occupy unless it is tied to some kind of civic tech - that would make sense, that you have to research stuff that lets you grow bigger.  There is a ton of stuff you can research in the game so logically tying tech to growth would fit.  Or tie it to influence.  Tie it to something.  An arbitrary limit is just flat out stupid.  The only thing that should ever firmly limit the size of your cities is running out of land to build on.

If you want forced specialization or limits on number of towns or sizes of towns, the way to do it is to reduce the resources you get, not have artificial limits.  In my games, I have so much material, easily amass gold, etc - I can build anything I want to build.  Building leads to more building as you jack up the resources with bonuses from buildings.  The game design itself encourages building up and growing.

Seems a bit much to lose four slots, but maybe Stardock is purposely trying to make resource rich cities have to stay smaller and more specialized.

Regardless of whether the mechanic is good or bad, it should at least be consistent.  Either building on a resource should always cost the city labor and improvement slots or it never should.  Having it only happen when there's another improvement adjacent to them doesn't make sense, and encourages counter-intuitive decisions like deliberately avoiding building towards resources to spare yourself the cost.

I like having a space limit on buildings, though I think it would be much more interesting if this were based on town size/population rather than just a flat figure that you suddenly hit.

And the space limit should be clearly displayed to the player.

But its ridiculous that non-town resource buildings count towards this if any only if they touch the city.

Agreed

I can't stand this "feature". Hopefully, if day-0 doesn't fix that arbitrary 50 tile limit, there'll be an easy way to mod it out. If it must be kept for "balance", at least let us research it away in the "civilization" tech!

They seem to have introduced a glitch in 1.06 that's actually causing _more_ resources to spawn

In any case building AROUND resources is really counter-intuitive, but if you don't do so, a large city can easily get building capped because of resources touching your buildings.

So that's why a lot of my cities suddenly became unable to build more buildings. I really hope they make this more obvious in future patches as I had 3 smallish cities that couldn't build any buildings and I was completely mystified as to why as the UI doesn't tell you, it just grays out the building options.