Well, I just had a huge feedback post eaten, so rather than retype the whole thing I just spent my morning on, I'm going to pull out one thought and post it here.



I think that there's not enough differentiation between cities, and that this is the fault of every city needing to invest in food (if not Broken Lords) and industry, and of the weakness of the synergies between upgrades. The stockpile system largely fails to address this.



One change that I could see really helping here would be (in addition to increasing synergy) making upgrade costs dependent on how many have already been built, rather than fixed by upgrade. So, city upgrades would work the same way that technology and burough costs do.



In implementing such a change, I'd exempt outpost costs (like extractors and watch towers), and tweak burough costs so that they're industry-agnostic.

visage wrote:
Well, I just had a huge feedback post eaten, so rather than retype the whole thing I just spent my morning on, I'm going to pull out one thought and post it here.

And that is why I do longer posts in notepad/word before posting here.

Yeah, I've written plenty of posts in emacs first on other forums. ...and now I know I need to do that here, too.

So to paraphrase what I think you are getting at, my second dust dredger should cost more than the first, while the third costs more still. This is not a bad idea. Though I am not sure the effect would be to force specialization. It might instead simply slow growth.



In some ways, this idea is similar to how Civ V adjusts the cost of new policies depending both on how many policies you have already developed and on how many cities you have.

Dalwin wrote:
So to paraphrase what I think you are getting at, my second dust dredger should cost more than the first, while the third costs more still.

Actually, that's an interesting and different idea than what I was proposing.



I was suggesting that rather than paying 80 industry (or whatever) for a dust dredger, and 500 industry for the +30% to industry improvement, etc, the cost to build a city improvement is entirely dependent on the number of city improvements already built in *that* city. So for a particular city, you spend 80 industry for your first building, then 140 for the second, 245 for the third, and so on.



(I personally prefer a more radical divergence from the current approach in order to increase the differentiation between cities and reduce the tyranny of industry, but that's for another post.)

Interesting Idea Visage. And your proposal would REALLY force city specialization.



I'm just not sure that I want that much specialization. After all, it would also force players to expand more since you'd need a Science City, Industry City and a Dust City at a minimum. Possibly even a "Food City". And since you can not adjust those cities into another specialization quickly, as a player, you have to GUESS how much peace you can get away with and how much you'll need industry to build units.



I also see a concern about programming an AI to handle that. The Developers would have to weigh in on that.