Slitherine

Hi gents,

Just a query about Capital cities: I would like capital cities to have a building bonus. Once you get it to brick level 7, give it 3 free building slots instead of only 1. That would differentiate and emphasize ancient capital greatness.

Thanks
Miki

I'm not sure limiting city size by a vague brick resource really makes sense for future games anyhow. After all, Rome could import bricks, or anything for that matter.

I'm not overly fond of the artificial limit to city size based on a single resource, such as brick. I CAN see making the cost of upgrading the city beyond a certain size prohibitively expensive, as the additional resources would need to be imported. As it is now, the cost to upgrade the city is far higher than almost anything you could possibly build in the additional space. While it creates a set of "choices" about what to build in which city, it feels really fake to not have a herbalist or a shrine in a city just because there isn't enough room.

Also, expanding the size of a city should REDUCE the population pressure, rather than just allowing a higher population limit. Granted, a medium city at maximum population should still have a higher level of unrest than a small village at maximum, but expanding the medium city to a large one should allow some elbow room, lowering the pressure slightly until the population grew again to fill the void. As it is now, if you don't expand a village, you can just ignore such details as shrines, herbalists, and other happiness-inducing improvements, and the people will still love you.

As for resource collection, it would be more accurate to have a higher level of a resource provide a greater base resource output per worker, rather than allow you to build larger facilities. A brick plant in a location with a brick level of 5 should be much more efficient than a brick plant with only a 1 or 2 brick level, but you should still be able to build the bigger facility. MOST locations should have a food level, even if only at 1 or 2, except for a few deserts or other barren wastelands. In short, you could get a small amount of most basic resources (food, brick, and wood) anywhere, but it might not be economically feasable (and a waste of limited manpower) to do so at some locations unless you had no other source. As it is now, a location with a 7 or 8 level of some resource will provide no real benefit over one with a 5 or 6 until very late in the game, when such high level facilities finally become affordable and technologically feasable. So far, in Spartan, I've NEVER built a level 7 resource production facility, as it is far cheaper to build another low level plant in a freshly conquered city instead. Making a level 7 source provide 7 units per worker as opposed to 2 or 3 suddenly makes those higher numbers valuable right from the start of the game.

I'm getting tired of "upgrading" the city like a building as it is. As far as I'm concerned, if the proper conditions are established for growth, a large town would upgrade itself. Perhaps this discussion should be continued in a Legion II forum.

I like the notion that a city with an administrative center could grow larger than one without, it seems quite realistic. But I see no reason why this concept should be limited to capital cities. Why can't every city have the abilty to benefit from efficient administration?

I think it would be interesting feature for there to be a series of such buildings, for discussion's sake lets call them the meeting ground, courthouse, and city hall. The cheap meeting ground would allow two extra buildings (one seems pointless since the meeting ground presumably takes up a lot), if upgraded to a courthouse, three, if further upgraded to a city hall, four.

These buildings wuld be more useful if they also reduced the cost of city expansion, say by 10, 20, and 30 percent respectively. And it would be nice if they helped keep unrest in check.

Generally, only one such building would be allowed per city, but the national capital might be a special case, allowing both one of the common admin buildings and the capital building itself, which might also expand the building limit by a lot or two.

Rename the buildings appropriately for the game setting, of course. In a Roman game, the four buildings described above could be called Rostra, Basilica, Comita, and Regia.