Elhoim
Iron Tower Studio Dev
First of all, thanks to the devs for allowing me to participate in the OpenDev. It's been a very enjoyable experience, and I hope you are able to make a better game thanks to it. I've played 20 hours of the scenario, trying different things, and these two came across as the biggest, more revolutionary feature Humankind has.
Expansion
Expansion in HK takes form in a 3 layer system:
- Outpost.
- Attached to a city.
- City.
Outpost is the first step in controlling a territory. It costs a bit of gold to set-up, increasing for each you build. You can use them to extract resources, but they do not generate yields.
You can then either create a city from them, or attach to an existing one. Attaching to an existing one is cheaper, but comes with a stability hit, and costs more for each one you attach. If you build a city, it's more expensive, and if you don't attach an administrator, the city gives lower yields and can't produce units.
This creates a very interesting "counter-weights" system in which territory grabbing is encouraged, and development can take different paths. There's a balanced path in which you have cities up to the administrator count, and balance with stability the territories attached to them. You can try a One City Challenge, in which you assign all territories to a single, uber city with lots of yields, but need to focus a lot on stability and would only have one point of unit production. Or even have a city in each territory, ICS style, which will be extremely stable, but not very productive due to the lack of administrators and you need to build infrastructure in each of them. Or any path in between.
The beauty here is that each path has benefits and most importantly, costs. This, by design, is excellent as there's no single, benefits only paths.
Exploitation
At first I went placing districts right next to each other, trying to get synergies. And it was kinda lackluster, as without infrastructure (the non-district buildings) I was given a pittance. Until I realized that creating "hubs" outside your city, either by attaching outposts or building a quarter next to a castle/harbor/resource extractor gives you a lot more with the same investment and creates this extremely natural civilization development in which hubs are created around very profitable areas. Which you can later support with infrastructure, and once the easily profitable areas are exploited, then you turn to adding more quarters and synergy.
You can place castles wherever you want inside the territory, and then you can place a quarter next to it to take 5 tiles worth of a yield. It's kinda setting up a logging camp in a dense forest!
Here I could place it next to the coffee and get 15 from all the surrounding tiles.
A very nice harbor.
In the full game, you'll need to develop your city core with common quarters, which removes the tile yields and exploits none, but gives a lot of stability the more districts surround it. So you end up with a cosmopolitan city center surrounded by exploitation "towns". And then, once you have set up a good exploitation web, you turn to infrastructure.
This one means +1 industry in any exploited tiles that produces industry.
If you make it at the beginning, it takes a lot of turns (around 6) and would only give a few prod back from your the limited amount of tiles you are exploiting (maybe 5-6 production). If I do it after I expanded, attached territories and such, it would give A LOT.
Once the "low hanging fruit" has been taken and you have a good amount of food and production, you can start focusing on trying to maximize each "hub", adding more quarters, like makers quarters to take more of the surrounding forest, or adding trader quarters around your harbors. And then, all those separate hubs will start joining together.
In many 4Xs, you always felt you weren't managing an empire, but a collection of cities that were barely related to each other, only aggregating their yields. Here, the focus is on managing a smaller number of cities (in terms of selecting what to build), which work like administration centers, and build extraction hubs where the yields are stronger anywhere in huge expansions of land.
The design is simple, but manages to create an extremely natural and history inspired development of civilizations. Take control of an area, first focus on the most profitable yield/area, set up your "primary" economy of yield extraction, once that's up and running focus on infrastructure and more advanced yields like science and money.
As another poster said: "I'm creating these small villages and settlements in key areas to complement my big cities". That's something extremely unique in the 4X landscape, and a real beauty to see ingame.
Expansion
Expansion in HK takes form in a 3 layer system:
- Outpost.
- Attached to a city.
- City.
Outpost is the first step in controlling a territory. It costs a bit of gold to set-up, increasing for each you build. You can use them to extract resources, but they do not generate yields.
You can then either create a city from them, or attach to an existing one. Attaching to an existing one is cheaper, but comes with a stability hit, and costs more for each one you attach. If you build a city, it's more expensive, and if you don't attach an administrator, the city gives lower yields and can't produce units.
This creates a very interesting "counter-weights" system in which territory grabbing is encouraged, and development can take different paths. There's a balanced path in which you have cities up to the administrator count, and balance with stability the territories attached to them. You can try a One City Challenge, in which you assign all territories to a single, uber city with lots of yields, but need to focus a lot on stability and would only have one point of unit production. Or even have a city in each territory, ICS style, which will be extremely stable, but not very productive due to the lack of administrators and you need to build infrastructure in each of them. Or any path in between.
The beauty here is that each path has benefits and most importantly, costs. This, by design, is excellent as there's no single, benefits only paths.
Exploitation
At first I went placing districts right next to each other, trying to get synergies. And it was kinda lackluster, as without infrastructure (the non-district buildings) I was given a pittance. Until I realized that creating "hubs" outside your city, either by attaching outposts or building a quarter next to a castle/harbor/resource extractor gives you a lot more with the same investment and creates this extremely natural civilization development in which hubs are created around very profitable areas. Which you can later support with infrastructure, and once the easily profitable areas are exploited, then you turn to adding more quarters and synergy.
You can place castles wherever you want inside the territory, and then you can place a quarter next to it to take 5 tiles worth of a yield. It's kinda setting up a logging camp in a dense forest!
Here I could place it next to the coffee and get 15 from all the surrounding tiles.
A very nice harbor.
In the full game, you'll need to develop your city core with common quarters, which removes the tile yields and exploits none, but gives a lot of stability the more districts surround it. So you end up with a cosmopolitan city center surrounded by exploitation "towns". And then, once you have set up a good exploitation web, you turn to infrastructure.
This one means +1 industry in any exploited tiles that produces industry.
If you make it at the beginning, it takes a lot of turns (around 6) and would only give a few prod back from your the limited amount of tiles you are exploiting (maybe 5-6 production). If I do it after I expanded, attached territories and such, it would give A LOT.
Once the "low hanging fruit" has been taken and you have a good amount of food and production, you can start focusing on trying to maximize each "hub", adding more quarters, like makers quarters to take more of the surrounding forest, or adding trader quarters around your harbors. And then, all those separate hubs will start joining together.
In many 4Xs, you always felt you weren't managing an empire, but a collection of cities that were barely related to each other, only aggregating their yields. Here, the focus is on managing a smaller number of cities (in terms of selecting what to build), which work like administration centers, and build extraction hubs where the yields are stronger anywhere in huge expansions of land.
The design is simple, but manages to create an extremely natural and history inspired development of civilizations. Take control of an area, first focus on the most profitable yield/area, set up your "primary" economy of yield extraction, once that's up and running focus on infrastructure and more advanced yields like science and money.
As another poster said: "I'm creating these small villages and settlements in key areas to complement my big cities". That's something extremely unique in the 4X landscape, and a real beauty to see ingame.
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