Plans for D8

[Gary Thomas]

Certainement! Mais alors vous devez traiter mon francais de college!

A votre sante.

[Simon Loverix]

Bizarre. ça me parait egalement la même chose, dans ce contexte.

Second try:
If a city is a center, how do we handle an area (polygon or square) with multiple centers?

[Mark_Everson]

Only one city (if any) would be the provincial capital. The only other functions of cities are to have markets. There's no problem having multiple markets in the same square/polygon. So I guess my question is what issue were you thinking of being a problem Simon?

[Lord God Jinnai]

Originally posted by Mark_Everson
Only one city (if any) would be the provincial capital. The only other functions of cities are to have markets. There's no problem having multiple markets in the same square/polygon. So I guess my question is what issue were you thinking of being a problem Simon?

What about multiple national capitals?...obviosuly that's mute if there is only one province....

[Simon Loverix]

Well, if those cities behave the same why are there several ones? If they don't behave the same there could be problems when some cities join a rebellion and others do not. Or when one city is conquered and another one is not, how much of the territory belongs to which city? When there are different ethnicities or religions, how are they divided between the cities? How many cities in one square? Are suburbs cities? When several cities grow together, what is the name and position?
If we stick to squares, it would be more coherent to assume there is one capital, assuming all other urban areas of that square are included under that title. Cities would not need to be kept track of separately from the rest of the square, so industrialisation FE could be more fluent: it doesn't matter where the production increase happens, in town or not. That would be simpler.
Using polygons, the exact position of the cities can play a role, but there is a cost in calculations and complication.

It could even be interesting implementing things such as Jewish gettos and Greek trade enclaves, but I don't think it is good to implement much sub-square issues, since we're avoiding micromanagement.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Simon:

Originally posted by Simon Loverix
Well, if those cities behave the same why are there several ones?

I don't think close-together cities would be very important in a whole-history game that a player starts from scratch. Its more in my mind just a capability for scenarios. If in FE Italy there were many squares with more than one noteable city. If I were the scenario designer I'd probably skip them, but for some its important to have everything as correct as possible. In short I don't view this as something of major importance for the game, but just a nice detail feature. For that reason I'm not really into discussing it in great depth.

If they don't behave the same there could be problems when some cities join a rebellion and others do not.

Why would this be a problem? Cities would be like squares, with their own population, land etc. If one square rebels and another doesn't there's no big issue IMO.

All your other points seem to be non-issues also if we use polygons with dedicated land for any city. City land could then grow according to some TBD algorithm. Cities could merge if conditions were right, and the name could just become a hyphenated concatenation of the two names.

Whether all this is worth it, I'm with you that I'm not sure it is. But most of the people commenting here seem to think it is. If it turns out its more trouble than its worth, we can always ignore it. But IMO its simpler in terms of bookeeping and algorithms to treat a city and hinterland separately than have complicated algorithms to determine on the fly who is in the city and who isn't. YMMV.

[LDiCesare]

Several cities in a square are worth having. Often, countriside has been controlled by one force while cities remained in control of the defender. Such "sieges" could last several years (Catharres for instance). Thus having several cities in a square which are controlled differently would be OK for me. If the only problem foreseen is complexity and potential slowness, don't worry. It is not more complex to have several cities instead of one, and complexity will be incurred only if such multiple cities happen, which is not clear right now as we don't know how cities are formed. They are currently designed by the scenario, and the scenario make can put them and test performance, and skip them if he wants to.

[Simon Loverix]

I'm not against the principle of several cities, but only a little worried that it is almost asking for micromanagement. But we agree that we could omit it when the complexity outweighs the benefits.

[Nadexander]

Originally posted by Simon Loverix
It could even be interesting implementing things such as Jewish gettos and Greek trade enclaves, but I don't think it is good to implement much sub-square issues, since we're avoiding micromanagement.

Micromanagement isnt synonymous with detail. Just because you have all this extra info deosnt mean you need to manage it directly.

[Simon Loverix]

Agreed, but if such things are hidden in a detail pane and managed automatically, most of the players will never know it's there. Adding details that do not require fundamental changes in the way the game works later is rather easy, as opposed to pruning the excess fancy stuff without function.