I think most of us are familiar with the following syndrome:
Your productive core cities get each and every city improvement you can build. The only thinking applied is that completely useless improvements might not be built, although sometimes you build just everything thinking that with culture points more is better than less. Your useless corrupted frontier cities might get barracks but otherwise they are just kept small and used as a source of workers and gold income (=taxmen). Also, unless you are milking for points you usually don't bother with building hospitals because a population of 12 is generally enough to cover all workable tiles even in a moderately dense city build.
IMO it shouldn't be like this. Where's the difficulty of having to decide which improvements are really _needed_ in a particular city? The hard choices that would make me prioritize things because I couldn't build everything everywhere?
My suggestion is that the number of improvements a single city can support is tied to its size, i.e. there would be a number of city improvement slots and you simply couldn't build more until your city grew bigger giving you additional slots.
Before you cry out that you could fit thousands of cathedrals on a 100 x 100 mile civ tile, I agree, so you can. But that's completely beside the point. The slot system would be a game thing with the explicit purpose of giving you a hard time, not simulate any reality. And if you like you could always think of it as the number of facilities a city can _support_.
Ok, how many slots would be enough but not as many as you liked? This would require some play testing, of course, but it probably ought to be tied to the difficulty level. For example ranging from "city size + 8" in Chieftain to "city size + 1" in Sid. Or something else. The idea that counts is that you have _some_ maximum number of slots for city improvements.
Then the problem of cities with a decreasing population. I'd say that if a city had more improvements than slots because its population just grew smaller (building a worker or settler, starvation, etc.) then you would have a short "grace period", say 3 turns, during which to correct the problem either by selling less important buildings or by adding workers/settlers to it. If the city still had more improvements than slots available after the 3 turns a random improvement gets sold and the grace period starts again if things are still not balanced.
I think that a max number for improvements would enhance the stragtegical aspect of the game. You'd have to plan your cities more carefully which in turn would affect other things like where you should build military units, where to put your science improvements, etc. And of course, with city specialization would also come a more exposed vulnerability to enemy attacks...
Your productive core cities get each and every city improvement you can build. The only thinking applied is that completely useless improvements might not be built, although sometimes you build just everything thinking that with culture points more is better than less. Your useless corrupted frontier cities might get barracks but otherwise they are just kept small and used as a source of workers and gold income (=taxmen). Also, unless you are milking for points you usually don't bother with building hospitals because a population of 12 is generally enough to cover all workable tiles even in a moderately dense city build.
IMO it shouldn't be like this. Where's the difficulty of having to decide which improvements are really _needed_ in a particular city? The hard choices that would make me prioritize things because I couldn't build everything everywhere?
My suggestion is that the number of improvements a single city can support is tied to its size, i.e. there would be a number of city improvement slots and you simply couldn't build more until your city grew bigger giving you additional slots.
Before you cry out that you could fit thousands of cathedrals on a 100 x 100 mile civ tile, I agree, so you can. But that's completely beside the point. The slot system would be a game thing with the explicit purpose of giving you a hard time, not simulate any reality. And if you like you could always think of it as the number of facilities a city can _support_.
Ok, how many slots would be enough but not as many as you liked? This would require some play testing, of course, but it probably ought to be tied to the difficulty level. For example ranging from "city size + 8" in Chieftain to "city size + 1" in Sid. Or something else. The idea that counts is that you have _some_ maximum number of slots for city improvements.
Then the problem of cities with a decreasing population. I'd say that if a city had more improvements than slots because its population just grew smaller (building a worker or settler, starvation, etc.) then you would have a short "grace period", say 3 turns, during which to correct the problem either by selling less important buildings or by adding workers/settlers to it. If the city still had more improvements than slots available after the 3 turns a random improvement gets sold and the grace period starts again if things are still not balanced.
I think that a max number for improvements would enhance the stragtegical aspect of the game. You'd have to plan your cities more carefully which in turn would affect other things like where you should build military units, where to put your science improvements, etc. And of course, with city specialization would also come a more exposed vulnerability to enemy attacks...
As is the ai cant determine what units it needs, can you imagine its 'confusion' trying to build for a specific city? I can see it tearing down a building to free up a slot then immediately rebuilding it. Plus you'd have to make it editable for those of us that modded in a bunch of buildings.
