{The List} Cities vs. Villages

[Ivan Shadow]

One of the pains in civs was the need to manipulate hundreds of units and cities. It was especially critical for large maps. Governors do not solve this issue. I wonder if anyone use them at all? (It is not a bad idea in general but they don’t help much that’s why many players turn them off.) One of the solutions to this challenge could be introduction of the following concept.

I suggest two types of cities. The first one is an ordinary city, which produces units and structures as usual and another one is a village. It has the same radius as a city but it does not create units. It simply generates resources and supplies chosen cities with these resources or in other words add to chosen cities’ shields, science, and food production (if linked with a road). This will allow players controlling huge territories and at the same time have only few production centers, which are easy to manipulate. The drawback is that the more villages you link to a city the more pollution and waste it generates. (A limitation on the number of villages supplying one city may be also imposed.) Such an approach will create a completely different city management and units/structures production scenario. The main idea is that it should save a real headache with managing large number of cities producing dozens of units and structures.

The time which players will save with this introduction could be spend on something like resource management instead ;-) I’m a true believer that resources should be storable, tradable and consumable like in Colonization and Imperialism. All these will create a completely differently balanced game.

[lajzar]

Ivan, that was your first post (ever!), so you weren't necessarily to know. But putting { The List } before a thread is only for threads being created for the purposes of compiling all thoughts from everyone on a given broad topic, not for starting new discussions as such.

http://www.apolyton.com/forums/showt...hreadid=105465 for a better explanation.

I can see all sorts of balancing problems with the system you propose anyway. Supposing I want a library city improvement. Does it boost all the satellites? If it does, why would I ever make any city that isn't a village, and so save a fortune in city improvement maintenance? If it doesn't, I have no reason to ever build a village.

Do waste shields go on to the next item to be built? If it doesn't, I have no reason to build a village, as they exacerbate the problem of lost production due to the item being finished.

Supposing a village gets captured? Does it remain a village attached to the nearest city, get promoted to city, or what? What happens to all the virtual city improvements it had?

If a city gets captured, what happens to its villages? Are all their virtual city improvements lost? Does one of them get promoted?

It's an idea, but I see far too many balance and gameplay issues that need resolving. And it looks like too much work to fix that will end up making it not civ in the end.

And colonisation level resource management is definitely not civ; not my kind anyway.

[chrispieX]

I quite like this as an idea - doubt it would ever get in to the game though. I assume that each city can only 'support' up to x number of villages, and maybe the reverse - a requirement of having to build y number of villages before new cities can be built (though I suppose that would prove frustrating).

As for capturing villages, well that would become an occupied village, and only give production to the occupier if they can connect it, otherwise they will need to capture the city to make use of the village. If you capture a city, I assume you get all it's villages too.

Anyway, I like it - but unfortunatly as I'm sure lots of people will say, not civ

[Dauphin]

The same thing could be acheived by cities having larger maximum radii, based on size?


Uh-oh, I suggested a CtP2 idea....

[Ivan Shadow]

Sorry friends I didn’t know the rules and regulations ;-) It’s my first time on this resource. ;-)

You are right about balancing issue, but if properly organized it could be a good way to resolve city management difficulty. It is a matter of thinking over of some of the details ;-)

>I can see all sorts of balancing problems with the system you propose anyway. >Supposing I want a library city improvement. Does it boost all the satellites?

You are absolutely right no one will build a village if it is not affected by city improvement. So in order to balance it all these satellites should be affected by city improvements.

>If it does, why would I ever make any city that isn't a village, and so save a fortune in city improvement maintenance?.

Good point, I haven’t though it over yet. ;-) What if maintenance costs = maintenance costs x number of satellites? If you disconnect a satellite from the city its maintenance costs are decreased respectively

>Do waste shields go on to the next item to be built? If it doesn't, I have no reason to build a village, as they exacerbate the problem of lost production due to the item being finished.

I didn’t quite understand this problem. ;-( Waste shields are generated by cities anyway. Villages are supposed to add to city’s pool they will not fight this problem. A city must has something in its production queue

>Supposing a village gets captured? Does it remain a village attached to the nearest city, get promoted to city, or what? What happens to all the virtual city improvements it had? If a city gets captured, what happens to its villages? Are all their virtual city improvements lost? Does one of them get promoted?

Villages are affected only by improvements of the particular city they are connected to. If the city is captured by enemy all villages belonging to this city lose all improvement bonuses associated with the lost city. As soon as you re-link villages to another city they will gain improvement bonuses of this particular city. In case of the village capture it will still remain a village. Computer opponents will have an opportunity to either link it to his/her cities (if provided with a road) or upgrade it to the city (let’s say settler will have an opportunity to upgrade villages to cities and vs)

> It's an idea, but I see far too many balance and gameplay issues that need resolving. And it looks like too much work to fix that will end up > making it not civ in the end. And colonisation level resource management is definitely not civ; not my kind anyway.

The idea behind it is that very often in order to win the game you have to occupy as much territory as possible regardless its strategic value. The only way to do it is to build your own cities, otherwise your computer opponents will do it for you ;-) As a result the common strategy is to build as much cities as possible securing your territory and preventing computer opponents from entering your empire’s domain. A lot of such cities are build in deserts, mountains and other not very suitable places. Still you have to pay attention to controlling production queue of all such cities, managing happiness, etc. By the end of the game managing cities is rather difficult since you have to manage a lot of them. My idea is to try to suggest a mechanism to reduce the number of cities required to win the game and hence reduce the time spend on manning all these cities. In theory you need only up to 10 cities to produce all the things your empire may need. But in reality you end up controlling several dozens of cities. By introducing satellite villages you will have an opportunity to occupy as much territory as before (e.g preventing computer opponents from claiming it) and at the same time stabilize the increase in the number of cities.

[GePap]

I really like the idea, and it sounds very easy to implement-it would work somewhat like the harvesters in SMAC.

Some ideas on this: villages would NOT be cities. They would be like radar towers or outposts-unlike them, it would claim a territory and collect resources to be sent to a nearby city (you decide which one, but it has to be within a certain distance until RR's came around)-now, it collects food and shields, BUT NOT TRADE. Instead, they would produce a few gold per turn as tax revenue.

Villages would be destroyed when captured. They could only be built on squares that allow for farming. They would confer a defensive bonus to units in them.


The point of makign villages is you get food and shields for cities, claim space without having to put in a city and worry about unhappyness, or increasing overall corruption.

Finally, you would be able to convert a village back into a population point as a worker.

At any point, of course, if you feel a village is not enough, replace with a city.

[Ivan Shadow]

Right, that’s exactly what I meant ;-)

[Plotinus]

I'm not sure about this idea, simply because it breaks up the "flow" of the game - it seems to me to be simpler and more fluid to have only one basic kind of city, which can be adapted as the player sees fit according to placement, building queues, etc.

There's also the fact that, in my view, there are already villages in the game - I like to think that the population of a Civ "city" don't all live in that one square, but some of them are in the surrounding X radius. The fact that cities "control" and work the surrounding area models the urban-rural interaction. When you move workers around in that radius, you are in effect deciding where the rural population will be.

[Dr Strangelove]

I have never found that the number of cities I owned was too great to manage. At times however I have been frustrated because I couldn't take advantage of all the resouces in my nation and still have my cities spaced to maximize their territory.
It would be kind of cool to have flexible city boundaries, i.e., to not have a city rigidly limited to a cross-shaped 21 square area. Suppose it were possible to somehow designate squares outside of the 21 square area as "supporting" areas, contributing food, wood and other resources?

[GePap]

I think villages would make sense if only becuase right now food can't be moved around-so highly productive cities. if surrounded by mountains and hills, remain small becuase of lack of food, yet in reality, such cities could be made substantial, if food was imported to them.

It also gives the player a way of claiming territory cheaply, by plopping down a village.