[Suggestions] Making Terrain Meaningful

I'm pulling this topic out of a post I made earlier because I want to expand on it and get a few more comments.

Terrain is still relativity meaningless. The grain and resource addition to city placement is cool. But ultimately its only interesting for about 5 minutes each game, when you hover your mouse over the "settle" button to find the spot with the highest yield near whatever resources you want to grab. It needs to be dramatically expanded upon or it will remain just an interesting side note within the game.

Here is a system that I propose that I think would take the current system and make it much more interesting.

Make city yield tied to a total (or average) of the squares surrounding the city. For instance you put your city center down on a 4,3 square. But its surrounded by a 2,2; 2,3; 3,4; 1,1; 1,1; 0,0; 0,0; and 0,0 squares. Your total yield is then 13, 14. Basically, this is simulating the farms, mines, logging camps, fisheries, etc. that your citizens are actually working on a daily basis near your city. I would go so far as to make any tile that is actually occupied by buildings not contribute to this total. And if its half or quarter occupied it only contributes the open portion to the total. I.e. the only tiles that matter would be those fields and forests outside the city. Is the food production of a city really dependent on the fertility of the ground underneath downtown?

This system would continue as you expand your city with additional buildings. So if you expand out towards those high resource squares you get a good production city. If you snake towards high food you get high pop. This would have the added effect of making the building placement system (which is right now purely aesthetic) much more interesting and meaningful.

Additionally, this system for city resources could be combined with the ability of opposing armies to raze tiles surrounding cities and not just resource improvements. Each turn an enemy army razed a surrounding tile the resource or food yield would drop by one, and the enemy would get some small amount of gildar (perhaps you could make the decrease only temporary, say 50 turns or so). Thus you could hide your army in your well fortified city, but while you did that the enemy could be truly putting a dent in you city's production and food potential, rather than just raiding a couple resource tiles that you can rebuild in a few turns.

Not sure if this is implementable within the current engine, but it seems like we're much closer to it now than we were before.

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Another great idea, which also shows that sometimes (well, most of the time), just copying ideas from those great classics is the way to go - this kind of terrain management was in Civs and MoM, two of the best games of this kind.

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At the moment each tile's yield is the average of it and the surrounding tiles you know?

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Then this is definitively not apparent. But the broader complaint still stands, after you place your city down you never really interact with the terrain in any meaningful way again. Whether that initial number was just the yield from the one square or an average across 9 doesn't really matter. The big thrust of the suggestion is for the terrain to drive some sort of decision making beyond the initial selection of city location.

Take civ for example. Terrain drives city selection, but it also drives decisions about improvements (both when to improve and with what), defending from a city or going out to defend the country side, etc. It plays a huge role in the game, as it should. War and empire building is about controlling land.

Right now we have a marginal improvement from the state of elemental, which was essentially a space game (with iron mines and food resources instead of asteroids and planets) with a different skin. But that marginal improvement, the fact that land has some sort of production and food potential associated with it, isn't really being used to drive any meaningful interaction and decision making beyond initial city placement. The idea of terrain yields is obviously from civ, but all of the other factors that make it interesting in civ haven't been included.

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I dislike having to micromanage all the land. I never liked that par to Civ games. And the autoworker function never got it right. I like having meaningful nodes and the grain/material system. It is much less to manage so I can get through a turn quicker. Land decides what improvements I can build, how large a city will become, how much research I will get from that city, how much gold and other resources I will get as well as how quickly I can produce. That is more than enough depth and it doesn't take more than a periodic look at the city details screen to manage.

I am quite satisfied.

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Quoting seanw3,

reply 4

Agree, there is a micromanagement vs. ease of use question. I wouldn't mind so much having FE fall on the ease of use side of the equation. My biggest problem comes down to the fact that it dosen't really drive any decision making after the first step of city placement.

What effect does that 4,3; 4,4; 6,4 etc. have on how you play the game? Very little currently. Yes it changes the raw number of how big or how productive the city can get, but all that is just baked in as soon as you plop it down. A simple system with lack of micro is great. But that simple system has to also drive meaningful decisions throughout the game, or its just not very interesting.

These are my questions. How is the terrain system as it stands now driving how you play the game? How does it change your strategy? How does it change the way you approach a tactical situation in which a slightly stronger enemy army is approaching your city? How does it change your research goals outside of a few small level 1 or level 2 improvement unlocks? How does it change how you manage each city and what improvement to build?

My current answer to all of these questions is that it doesn't affect them. I still feel like I'm in space, just space with 4,3 3,4, 6,2 painted on top of it.

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