21JUL11 - Mobiles, other

I agree with what you're saying Kumo.

But I still think there is a problem with people who spent a long time building up cities on 5 food plots suddenly becoming limited to a greater extent than people who built on 7 food plots - simply because they were unaware that 7 food would become to essential later on.

Hence the current change is going to force some veterans to chose between rebuilding their almost their entire account, or settling with a significant disadvantage to those who built their cities on 7 food tiles.

Not only that but these changes are going to make "demolishing your first city to build on a 7 food tile" standard advice to new players - which just smells of poorly designed game mechanics.

GM Stormcrow wrote: Ander wrote: The side effect is that after building up the city to a population equal to their food production, most people would put taxes to 100%.  Not necessarily - if there are renewed purposes for Wood, Clay, Iron and Stone in terms of "Tier 2 building support" at the same time. SC

This actually is a very good idea. Could I also suggest that the ability to have more than one building on a sovereign square might compliment this? concept? Though perhaps only one building of any given type per square, just as happens for most buildings inside the town itself.

My thinking is that Sovereign squares represent a buildup of population outside the city walls. There doesn't seem to be any reason why I shouldn't have a food sovereign building AND a cattle production sovereign on a single tile, or a food sovereign building and a building that helps me build troops. Nor does there seem to be a reason why I couldn't have a food sovereign building and a clay sovereign building.

Obviously this leads to some serious balancing issues to prevent players from putting everything on every square. Here are my proposed fixes to that:

1. Basic resource sovereignty should still be free for the FIRST building you put up. However after that each new building should have a flat 150 gold cost. So having a farmstead and a mineshaft would cost you 150 gold. That's equivalent to supporting 50-75 tier two units. Having a single square supporting a farmstead, a mineshaft, and a logging camp would cost 300 gold instead of 150, equivalent to supporting 100-150 tier two troops.
   
   
2. Keep the basic system of having advanced unit production sovereign tiles cost resources to maintain. So that if I have a saddle maker and a cattle ranch both at level five, that's the same as if I'd gotten (somehow) my saddle maker to level ten.
   

The overall thrust of this suggestion is to make sovereign squares, especially those closer to your city, more valuable, and more of an extension of the city itself. A heavily built up sovereign square would still be more expensive than one that wasn't so well developed, but it would be providing more bonus', and if it were closer to the city walls it would be easier to maintain those increased costs.

The end result of this would be a balance, causing the city to grow naturally in "rings" with the most valuable squares being either the first two rings around where you settled, or squares further out with an extremely high native bonus, such as a 20 food square or a +3% to swords square.

I'd suggest that any terrain transforming  spell that adds food should do so at a net loss to other resources. For example I might get one extra food square in return for two other plots. Making the new square allocation similar to a jungle square.

So you can have your 7 food mountains, but they have lost four of another random resource, and of course mountains don't tend to be on terrain that is otherwise rich in food so your not getting great food sov squares to boost your production, or a great ability to get advanced resource sov squares that require a resource upkeep, or tier two buildings that work in the same way.

I honestly wouldn't mind this being able to be repeated to get eight or even ten food plots, so long as it was always an exchange of one plot for two.  The "maximum" ten food terrain altered city can grow huge, but . . . at what cost? It's all farmland and no industrial capacity. So it has to buy basic resources on the market, or the player has to build a "huge" logging, mining, or clay gathering city right next door, which obviously would be comparatively tiny in it's food supplies.

This would benefit older players who build their 5/5/5/5 cities in a cluster as they could specialize each one and quickly ship resources around using caravans. Indeed there might be an option to have such a "metropolis" show up on the map as a single huge city that takes up multiple squares on the map.


Edited by JohnChance - 29 Jul 2011 at 01:33

I did say "almost" but fine, 7 food tiles are exacty 40% better mister picky 2/5=.4