That station took my spot!

[mnf]

The worst about stations is when it lands itself 6 tiles away from your city.

I have started to put more emphasis on the Missile Rover in early games just so I can remove those irritating stations that land exactly two tiles from two of my planned city sites, effectively pushing both my future cities out of the way, which can be fatal when the only other good spot is a canyon or coast tile.

Maybe stations were designed this way to obstruct REX strategies. But they fail miserably at it due to how weak they are.

I'd rather that stations don't spawn randomly, but let colonists have the option of setting up stations in any plot that isn't claimed by a border, with at least 3 tiles to any city and station. These colonist stations give just the unimproved tile yield as its trade route yield plus the resource underneath, but has a chance to attract the next station spawn, giving it a new name and new set of trade route yields while still giving you the resource.

With this set-up, I can accept that stations max out at tier 3 and only trade with 1 city per faction.

Back to the current set-up, I'd like to see stations max out at the shortest distance to the nearest city. So if a station pops up with 6 tiles to the nearest city, it can grow to tier 6.

 

[Talcove]

The current station system REALLY makes me wish you could choose the tile the station spawns on. Yeah, you COULD spawn literally right next to the spot I want my next colony on, or you could spawn right by that other AI faction that spawned 10 tiles from my capital.

 

[GoodSarmatian]

Now that i've played some more, I don't get why people are so worked up over that one city spot stolen by a station. This game doesn't punish you as much for expansion as Civ 5 did, city population is usually somewhat lower so there's less reason to worry about overlap, and you have more tile improvements to make beter use of the terrain. It's not that important any more to find th "perfect" spot.
Now when I see a station where I wanted my citiy, I usually build two or three cities nearby to cover the same resources.

And the trade routes are awesome if you get Alternative Markets and manage to keep the stations alive.

 

[mnf]

I just like a perfect plan executed perfectly. You don't get that in the real world.

 

[Question]

It gets complicated when its a station that you want to trade with though.

 

[[to_xp]Gekko]

This annoyed me so much that this morning I modified the game files so that stations spawn at minimum of 8 tiles instead of 5. Working much better so far.

Thanks Seek! This simple change makes the game actually enjoyable instead of frustrating