suggested *ideal* number of cities..?

from Stardock Forums

I only have a few false starts under my belt and I imagine the answer to this will become apparent in time.. I only read a couple of preview articles before placing my pre-order but I gathered from them that Elemental was (at one point at least) designed so it could be played and won with only a few specialized cities in a kingdom. This idea appealed to me as I hate the sprawling mass of cookie-cutter cities which proliferates as most "4X" games advance.

So I've been trying to play Elemental in this fashion, scouting out likely locations for big cities, but my AI co-players seem predisposed to grabbing land left, right and centre, building seemingly large numbers of cities with no hope of them becoming large specialised mega-cities as the game progresses.

So my question is, is building a few big cities still a viable way to play Elemental, and if it is the case do the AI players know this?

elemental
7,149 views 6 replies
Reply #1 from Stardock Forums Top

There isn't one - basically, grab every important resource you see in sight, that's the path to victory.

The way the resource system works, nearly all buildings that you unlock through research provide modifiers to the base income, and without a resource attached to the city, most of those base income levels will be 1 or 0. You can't boost food production without a food resource to boost, same for metal (and I'm not even sure if there are any crystal boosters).

There are a few buildings that do give gold, arcane, or tech knowledge, but they're fairly rare.

So in that respect, large cities are the only way to play Elemental, as you need the multipliers on your base resource gain to maintain a high level of resource output, and you can't put down the buildings that give those multipliers without a city that has been leveled up.

Supposedly there's some sort of city maintenence cost (I've seen buildings that purport to reduce it), but I wasn't able to locate what the maintenence cost actually _is_. Presumably it's there to give a gold penalty to building up lots of small cities solely for an area of influence (with the overpowered teleport spell, having 'waypoint' mini cities is useful/critical on larger maps).

Mostly, your city size/expansion is limited by food, rather than gold - you can't actually grow a city without food, so if your food income is too low, you won't be able to grow new cities, which in turn limits your ability to get dispersed resources into your area of influence.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

The AI is still a little dumb, but from what frogboy's said they're working on it.

 

I personally find myself marching in with fairly small armies and wipeing out the AI because it's over extended itself. So far i build cities where there are resources i need and then specialise to make the best use of those resources and so far the AI hasn't managed to conquer a single one of my cities. (this could be due to me teleporting around the map and picking up all my forces like an arcane mini-bus when i see troops comeing)

 

So in my opinion after a few games with varied settings, build as many cities as you need, don't feel pushed into expanding if there are no resources to grab and don't forget that if the AI does manage to stake a claim to a piece of land that you particularly want you can always bludgen them to death and take it from them.

Ashes of the Singularity II
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Food is also used for some buildings such as the market. So really, food is your biggest problem. If you find a number of fertile grounds and some farmers, you've got a nice head start.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

I had about 40 cities in my last game.  I was building them around every resource I found and then i would fill in the empty area with cities as well.  Once you research the adventure tech that lets you see additional food resources, you're pretty much overflowing with food.  I still had a bunch of spare food even though 35 of my 40 cities didn't have a food resource next to it.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

yeah it's true. You can prettymuch explode over the map once you have enough food tiles, particularly if you make use of farmers. But if you dont want to you dont HAVE to.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

The theoretical reason to have a single overpowering city would be that almost all buildings work on % multipliers. Thus, the more resources you can get under a single city's belt, the larger an effect those multipliers have.

 

That said, in practice it's simply faster to build cities all over the place as your food allows, because you'll end up with a huge income either way.