Population as a resource evolves in v1.3

Published on May 24, 2011 By Draginol In Elemental Dev Journals

Most of the excitement in the Elemental universe has been about Fallen Enchantress. But War of Magic continues to move forward too, albeit in a different direction.

There’s a lot of changes in v1.3 to gameplay that I’ll talk about later but one change that I’m working on is the scaling of costs of things in terms of population.

As many people know, in “the real world” it’s one thing to find one specialist nearby for your company but it gets progressively more difficult to find more and more. This happens to work out as a nice game mechanic because in v1.3, the cost of a study, workshop, archivist, or anything else that has no duplicate limit will slowly get more expensive in terms of personnel cost.

Your first study will only cost 1 (instead of 5). Your second one will cost 2. Your third one a bit more and so on. This helps get the game moving early on but also makes it hard to get the crazy, out of control, late game scaling that has been typical. It also makes bigger cities more important because higher level settlements are the ones with the best resource multiplying improvements.

Comments (Page 3)

NorsemanViking

on May 31, 2011

I think the solution is to make the population of the single city to count when it comes to making new buildings. Not the pop. of the whole empire. Then small cities can't build an archery range or buildings improving recruitment time. I they still use the population for those things, the city will be highly specialized for unit training, but not much else. I think that is a good balance, and it's not laying limits on how huge a city can be, with good planning. I'd like this much more then bringing back those limitations on how many buildings a city can have. That should be limited by the population you manage to grow in that city and upkeep costs.

DsRaider

on May 31, 2011

Alstein

reply 29

Other ideas:

Building units in higher level cities is cheaper in terms of materials used (more efficiency) If you need that knight in the border hovel, you can get it, but it will be more expensive to get the stuff there. Experience levels could be capped by buildings that require city levels such as training grounds.

Another idea, higher level cities get more value out of the resources in their domain. Shards produce more mana,lost libraries more research, gold more gold, metal more metal, etc.

Building barracks/war colleges in cities does allow you to train units faster, and in real life most troops are trained in specialized training centers with barracks and stuff not large population centers. Higher level cities do get bonuses to resources in their domain. Every time you level a city you can choose a bonus and their are many resource boosting buildings that require high level cities.

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