[Suggestion] Better and deeper city building idea

I think I have a pretty awsome idea here!

from Elemental Forums

I had an idea during the original Elemental beta regarding city building, which I still think is really cool because it discourages snaking and makes the city building much deeper:

Imagine if instead of having certain higher-level buildings come through research, they'd be created through good building placement!

Let's say we have four war-related quarter-tile buildings (let's just call them barracks, stable, training grounds and war council). On their own, they give their usual individual bonuses, but when placed adjacent to each other in one whole tile, they'd morph together to form a whole-tile "war district" which gives all the ordinary individual bonuses plus extra efficiency bonuses, and possibly access to a new trait for use when designing soldiers (or whatever unique thing you might dream up). Same thing with market districts, industrial districts, magic districts and so on. Imagine Stormwind in WoW if you've ever been there.

Imagine how much richer and more realistic the city building would be. An alchemist would have his shop next to the enchanter, the school would be next to the library and so on. At the same time, it reduces the number of buildings by instead of having one "barracks" and one "war district" (or "war college" as they may be called a.t.m.), the barracks would become a part of the war district, which in turn reduces the amount of buildings available for snaking without removing content.

I might be biased since I came up with the idea, but I can't really find any negatives in it. The argument that it limits variation by forcing the player to place certain buildings a certain way is not really a good counter argument to me, since for example placing stables and barracks on each side of a city is completely unrealistic (at the moment, I just sort of plunk out buildings wherever they fit, with no regard to realism), and any real city would strive towards creating districts like these; and the bonuses they'd give in-game would very realistically portray the bonuses that a real district would give, due to giving more efficient co-operation between buildings which depend on each other. Furthermore, the player wouldn't be forced to build like this, he could still snake and ignore the bonuses; and that would only increase variation in city types rather than decrease it, in my opinion. Have an efficient city, or have a strategic city. Your choice.

9,377 views 11 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

I can't express how much I wouldn't want this.

Playing sim city with every city in a large game would be a total nightmare, and that's ignoring how the AI would handle building up cities that it conquered/you took from it.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

How would it be "playing Sim City"? The game already draws a grid for you to place buildings on, and when implementing this it'd be enough to highlight the tiles that would build towards a bonus; and not bothering to place a building (just clicking build), the game could automatically place the building in the best slot. If anything, it's less "Sim City" than it is now.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

From a dev perspective it would be easier to just have one improvement that you can upgrade. Combining all those improvements into one would mean alot of extra work. 

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

I really do not like this idea at all. It sounds absolutely awful in terms of "fun". I might enjoy this once or twice, but is it something I'm going to enjoy doing 100 times? Absolutely not.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Heavenfall, reply 4
I really do not like this idea at all. It sounds absolutely awful in terms of "fun". I might enjoy this once or twice, but is it something I'm going to enjoy doing 100 times? Absolutely not.
End of Heavenfall's quote

Totally agree. 

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Heavenfall, reply 4
I really do not like this idea at all. It sounds absolutely awful in terms of "fun". I might enjoy this once or twice, but is it something I'm going to enjoy doing 100 times? Absolutely not.
End of Heavenfall's quote

If you read my previous post you'd see that my idea doesn't entail doing anything if you don't want to. It's not like you'll have to bring out a ruler and measure the screen every time you're going to build something! Is the current system really any good at all? Spamming out the same buildings in every city with no concept of proper placement or realism, just sticking the buildings where they fit?

The game consists of three major parts - adventuring, battling and city/civ management. Should the civ management really be reduced to choosing a research item and spamming out as many buildings as you can in each city? Furthermore, there is no penalty to snaking out your city to block off passages in an utterly unrealistic manner. With this idea, you could mush out buildings by simply allowing the game to place them for you (see last post), or you could, as I like doing, concentrate on building as beautiful cities as possible (which is currently almost impossible since any city with more than 10 buildings looks like a mess).

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

If I'm not going to be doing it, and still get the rewards, what's the difference? Add a whole new set of parameters that have no impact on the game? Talk about useless gameplay feature. It's a hammer where we need a chisel. I agree that cities sprawl terribly, but this is not a fix.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

I think it's a terrible idea for the reasons Mtrixis stated.

- AI can't handle it without significant programming time.
- Management of multiple cities should be streamlined as much as possible.
- Adds nothing to gameplay which couldn't be added in a less convoluted way.

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Heavenfall, reply 7
If I'm not going to be doing it, and still get the rewards, what's the difference? Add a whole new set of parameters that have no impact on the game? Talk about useless gameplay feature. It's a hammer where we need a chisel. I agree that cities sprawl terribly, but this is not a fix.
End of Heavenfall's quote

How is it not a fix? It reduces the number of active buildings in a city, it encourages building in whole tiles instead of building one quarter-tile here and there, it adds to immersion by imitating pretty much any real city out there.

Do you judge the game only by numbers and stats? The added immersion from building realistic cities is enough for me to drool over the prospect. The cities that currently exist in Elemental look like someone took a box of Lego and threw its contents on the ground. Even if you reduce sprawl and snaking by imposing limits on how much you can build, the cities will look like crap and the city-building part of the game will still be reduced to churning out cities with no regard for their contents. I see city building as one of the most important parts of a civ-style game, and without dynamic building in some way, it's just an awful game mechanic that can just as well be replaced by single-tiled cities à la Civilization.

Reply #11 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting seanw3, reply 9
Zamul, what about this?

End of seanw3's quote
">https://forums.elementalgame.com/415634 [/quote]

It's a similar idea, but in my opinion it has some problems. Like a granary upgrading to a "bread district"? A granary is one quarter-tile, so how would it expand into something worthy of being called a "bread district" if there happens to be buildings around it, for example? But it has many good points all the same!