I hope they change the cottage graphics to something like Civ 4's cottages (or better). Do you feel the same way about these nasty looking buggers?
CiV doesn't have "cottages", only trading posts.
The current Trading Post is not only immensely immersion breaking with its ugly graphics, but also doesn't make any sense what so ever.
What the hell is it exactly?! A house? A small village?
It looks like a trading post, because it is a trading post. Therefor its called trading post.
But what is a trading post in the context of our world? Is there any precedent for having a city in, say, the 20th century surrounded by "trading posts"? They're absolutely immersion breaking, to the point I actively avoid building them even if they would be strategically viable.
It looks like a trading post, because it is a trading post. Therefor its called trading post.
I dont know how anyone could get the impression that the scattered unorganized heap of legos that civ 5 calls a city is visually superior to the base city of civ 4. Civ 5 talked about having all sorts of natural city planning, instead we got a bunch of square buildings all at various terrible angles that made no sense, at least civ 4 with its lack luster graphics the city actually looked like it was planned by by someone with a degree in civic engineering rather than a kid with legos. I agree that the "villages" look horrendous, and actual trading posts did not look like this. Every graphic, except the holy site, looks better than trading posts, Every single one. There's no reason to have something this ugly, and it looks even worse if you factor in a civ that isn't European. I'm surprised out of everything no one has a mod for this yet.and they look like trading posts in the ancient world and they do evolve into something like a modern strip mall. Far better than those ugly high-rise "towns" of Civ4.
I wish the Civ4 fanatics that keep coming here take a good look at many of the really bad and ugly mechanics, elements and graphics of their game and realize they should have no place in the much improved Civ5.
I'd also like them to rework the trading post. I don't even care if it's still called a trading post and does the exact same thing, just change the graphics to make it look like a small town (that matches the culture you're playing and upgrades with the era).
I also think it would be cool to have a "suburb" tile improvement: Unlocks at Industrialization, and can only be built adjacent to a city. Each one (a maximum of six, if the city is built in the middle of the plains and has all six adjacent tiles open) would support a specialist without causing unhappiness in the city and would also boost the effectiveness of that specialist by 50%. The tradeoff, obviously, is that you'd be destroying the farms/mines in the immediate vicinity of the city, so it would only be a viable tile improvement for the largest, most developed cities that could afford to lose those tiles. This would be justified in the sense that only the largest, most developed cities in real life develop urban sprawl and "bedroom communities," usually by eating up land that used to be rural.
The added benefit aesthetically is that your city would look that much larger if it appeared to sprawl over seven tiles (which it already does, to some extent, but the suburb graphic would be much more detailed than the bits of city that currently spill over into adjacent tiles).
I wish the Civ4 fanatics that keep coming here take a good look at many of the really bad and ugly mechanics, elements and graphics of their game and realize they should have no place in the much improved Civ5.