Revolutionizing the basic city principle.

[Hail]

as to your provinces: what you basically propose is to drop the city's BFC and allow any city to work any tile in the cultural borders, penalizing tile yield by the distance from the tile to the city?

P.S. in any pre-industrial age, it would still be more profitable to work the BFC, since it's closer to the city

 

[weekend_warrior]

as to your provinces: what you basically propose is to drop the city's BFC and allow any city to work any tile in the cultural borders, penalizing tile yield by the distance from the tile to the city?

P.S. in any pre-industrial age, it would still be more profitable to work the BFC, since it's closer to the city

Thats the idea. And yes, it would make sense for a player to work tiles close to the city. But you're not restricted to this area, if you come to find out theres a iron mine 1 tile out from your BFC, you can still work it. And if shields are a priority for the city, then you can build a road to the mine, or build a town on it for even more shields.

It's about giving the player more ability to empire the way they want. Instead of the game saying "heres your land", and then only having a very limited amount of winnable strategies.

 

[Hail]

[...] It's about giving the player more ability to empire the way they want. Instead of the game saying "here's your land", and then only having a very limited amount of winnable strategies.

how does dropping BFC create new winnable strategies?

 

[weekend_warrior]

how does dropping BFC create new winnable strategies?

In Civ 4 you found a city, and any good player knows immediately what that city is going to be good for- production, GP farm, commerce. If a city doesn't have hills, it'll never be a great production city, or if it doesn't have flatland and rivers it will always struggle to grow.

Without a BFC limiting what you can do, a lot more options open up. You can have a city naturally rich with food, and use roads, mines and new "towns" to increase production, or you can use the same methods to increases food generation even more, and ship that food to other citys to increase population. Citys wouldn't work independently of each other.

 

[rysmiel]

In Civ 4 you found a city, and any good player knows immediately what that city is going to be good for- production, GP farm, commerce. If a city doesn't have hills, it'll never be a great production city, or if it doesn't have flatland and rivers it will always struggle to grow.

This is undeniably a problem, but the solution is not, IMO, to abandon the BFC; it's to enable more powerful and a wider range of terrain improvements so you can darned well make that plains city productive.

 

[weekend_warrior]

This is undeniably a problem, but the solution is not, IMO, to abandon the BFC; it's to enable more powerful and a wider range of terrain improvements so you can darned well make that plains city productive.

Having more improvements is all good and well, but that could be a mod for Civ 4, I'd like to see Civ 5 evolve the core gameplay- to an extent. (It still has to be Civ.)

 

[rysmiel]

Having more improvements is all good and well, but that could be a mod for Civ 4, I'd like to see Civ 5 evolve the core gameplay- to an extent. (It still has to be Civ.)

It depends on what you count as core gameplay; there are a lot of places where I see the first step for Civ 5 is to fix all the things about core Civ gameplay that Civ 4 buggered up, but that's a rant we've seen before.

How would I like to evolve the core gameplay mechanisms of Civ in new directions ? Here are a couple of notions I have been kicking around:

- Corruption happens; it causes loss of trade. Waste happens; it causes loss of production. Poor health happens; it causes loss of food. Each of them can be addressed by a different set of improvements and/or other mechanisms - though possibly with some overlap.

- Rather than the Civ 4 broad range of terrain improvements, add depth to improvements, as Civ 2 started to with irrigation and farming. Make it so that if one can irrigate a square near the beginning, one can "irrigate" it again repeatedly as tech progresses to increase its output - with chemical fertilisers, say. And have the food output grow exponentially. Likewise with mining.

- I'd lobe to see a late game mechanism for expanding a city beyond a single square, and/or expanding the BFC by another square in all directions, but I've yet to see a proposal for that that feels to actually work. If nothing else, it would need a method to reabsorb smaller cities into large ones, which is much easier with settlers and workers that can be used to transfer population than with Civ 4-type settlers.

 

[weekend_warrior]

To me the core gameplay mechanic of Civ is the food/hammer/ shield output of tiles and the use of them in all areas of the game. This shouldn't change, I only propose to change how every city almost acts like its own nation. By being able to work every tile within national borders, and by allowing citys to exchange food/ shields and commerce with one other.

 

[Hail]

If a city doesn't have hills, it'll never be a great production city, or if it doesn't have flatland and rivers it will always struggle to grow.

this is not so. a workshop with all the bonuses on a plain will provide more hammers than a mine on a plain hill.

Without a BFC limiting what you can do, a lot more options open up. You can have a city naturally rich with food, and use roads, mines and new "towns" to increase production, or you can use the same methods to increases food generation even more, and ship that food to other citys to increase population.

BFC is imho not limiting you. it forces you to make decisions.

Corruption happens; it causes loss of trade. Waste happens; it causes loss of production. Poor health happens; it causes loss of food. Each of them can be addressed by a different set of improvements and/or other mechanisms - though possibly with some overlap.

agree about corruption, waste, and health.

- Rather than the Civ 4 broad range of terrain improvements, add depth to improvements, as Civ 2 started to with irrigation and farming. Make it so that if one can irrigate a square near the beginning, one can "irrigate" it again repeatedly as tech progresses to increase its output - with chemical fertilisers, say.

agree

I'd lobe to see a late game mechanism for expanding a city beyond a single square, and/or expanding the BFC by another square in all directions, but I've yet to see a proposal for that that feels to actually work. If nothing else, it would need a method to reabsorb smaller cities into large ones, which is much easier with settlers and workers that can be used to transfer population than with Civ 4-type settlers.

disagree