Building Big Efficient Cities: Borough Streets & Leveling Districts

Leonssst

Enthusiast

27 900g2g pts

11 years ago

May 16, 2014, 11:45:16 PM

Very good post about leveling districts. I'm still learning how to play the game, and this tutorial helped me a lot.

DotBeta

Newcomer

DotBeta

Newcomer

2 200g2g pts

11 years ago

May 17, 2014, 3:21:45 PM

Awesome read and really explains a lot, I've never expanded a city past 1 borough so I'll give one of these methods a try next time

indigav

Old Sentient

Living the dream... That is until I wake up and realise I'm late for work.

indigav

Old Sentient

30 600g2g pts

11 years ago

May 19, 2014, 1:08:55 AM

@j.a.paisley

Thank you, Thank you. Thank you.

@marceror

Second the Sticky suggestion.

Think I'll head off now and look at the difference between the region game set up. Wonder if having small regions in a game would help reduce the 'phage bonus by cutting the possible city expansion size down?

Tanel88

Senior Officer

Tanel88

Senior Officer

24 900g2g pts

11 years ago

May 19, 2014, 1:46:30 PM

Well this is a big letdown. So there is only 2 ways to build cities efficiently? They should really look into the concept. There aren't any tile yields that would be really worth to break the optimal city build. For following these 2 optimal builds you get all the dust, science, influence and approval you'd ever need.

Of course I do agree that you shouldn't just spread them out whichever way you wan't but there should be some middle way.

BlueTemplar

Newcomer

BlueTemplar

Newcomer

4 000g2g pts

11 years ago

May 22, 2014, 4:26:58 PM

Yes, this is also worrying me. Maybe the leveling and bonuses should be more granular, with districts having "urbanization points" depending on the number (and rank) of districts surrounding them, then the bonus dust, science, morale and influence would non-linearly depend on those urbanization points?

Trithemius

Mage

Trithemius the Mage

Trithemius

Mage

32 700g2g pts

11 years ago

May 24, 2014, 5:15:08 AM

I find the stick city a bit sad to look at. Perhaps the rules could be altered so that triangles are better (at least they look a bit nicer I think!)

Tanel88

Senior Officer

Tanel88

Senior Officer

24 900g2g pts

10 years ago

May 25, 2014, 3:11:53 PM

Could change it so that each adjacent district gives a distric level wit a bonus of +1 science +1 gold +1 influence and +3 approval.

regiscastelo

Newcomer

regiscastelo

Newcomer

10 years ago

Jun 2, 2014, 3:08:13 PM

Trithemius wrote:
I find the stick city a bit sad to look at. Perhaps the rules could be altered so that triangles are better (at least they look a bit nicer I think!)

Yeah.. the current rule of "4 or more Level adjacent districts" to level up a district are a bit "harsh" .. perhaps change to only 3 adjacent will increase the options to types of city distribution / shapes of expansion.

Barabbas

Newcomer

Barabbas

Newcomer

6 100g2g pts

10 years ago

Jun 3, 2014, 12:51:23 AM

regiscastelo wrote:
Yeah.. the current rule of "4 or more Level adjacent districts" to level up a district are a bit "harsh" .. perhaps change to only 3 adjacent will increase the options to types of city distribution / shapes of expansion.

Unfortunately, due to the geometric limitations of the hex grid, efficient configurations are limited to three shapes: Triangle, Hexagon, and (as we've seen) "Line". This is true even if the rules are changed to allow a city to level up with only 3 adjacent districts. In the attachment (below), I've illustrated the progression to a lvl 4 city with the rules as they currently exist and with the change to a 3 adjacency system for comparison.

As you can see, with only 7 tiles, the player can build a lvl 4+ city that triggers a domino effect of perpetual leveling. I believe the developers realized this, which is why the rule calls for 4 adjacent districts instead of 3. In addition to making the achievement of lvl 4 status a much greater challenge, the progression follows a mathematically elegant rule: every time you want to "level up" it will require the number of tiles from the last level +1 (ie: 3+3=6, 6+4=10, 10+5=15, 15+6=21 ...)

AaronH

Newcomer

AaronH

Newcomer

10 years ago

Jun 21, 2014, 5:30:40 PM

j.a.paisley wrote:
massive effortpost

Has anyone tried diamond shapes? By diamond shape I mean like the diamond shape in a deck of cards: doubled up triangle with 4 corners each corner pointing in a cardinal direction and has both horizontal and vertical symmetry. A diamond might be interesting because they're both, in a matter of speaking, triangles and lines (very fat lines but still). A 3 X 3 diamond is the minimal number of hexes needed to reach a level 2 district. In my head, I can see the that 3 X 3 diamond is less efficient in terms of levels to hexes than a 4 sided triangle, but it is hard to say what happens when both scales up in size. It would be interesting to see the ratio of levels to hexes of the different shapes as they scaled up in size.

BlackSmokeDMax

Enthusiast

BlackSmokeDMax

Enthusiast

17 700g2g pts

10 years ago

Jun 24, 2014, 2:33:13 PM

Thanks so much for the guide. Great info!

Tripas

Chameleon

Make me think and analyze something and I'm happy :)

Tripas

Chameleon

36 900g2g pts

10 years ago

Jul 4, 2014, 8:28:53 PM

Great post, thanks for the all the info.

Although seriously, the game ITSELF really needs to explain itself better about this mechanic, because the way it is right now is just confusing.

Kruos

Old Craver

Kruos

Old Craver

26 600g2g pts

10 years ago

Jul 8, 2014, 2:36:48 PM

Lot of useful information here!

Concerning the shape of efficients cities, am I alone to think that they look not very nice? I know it is very subjective, but honestly I would prefer built beautiful compact cities than a stick or a triangle one... I still need to play more to have an overall vision of the whole picture, but the cities I see on some pictures looks also awfully big to me. It remembers me of Elemental, in a bad way..

j.a.paisley

Newcomer

j.a.paisley

Newcomer

10 years ago

Jul 8, 2014, 7:18:04 PM

Kruos wrote:
Lot of useful information here!

Concerning the shape of efficients cities, am I alone to think that they look not very nice? (

(I'm returning to this thread, and EL, after a long hiatus while waiting for the update...)

I agree in part... Triangular cities look pretty nifty and fairly compact - and yet, in the long run, linear (stick/strip-mall/runway/two-lane-highway) cities are the most efficient... and they just look "wrong". This is what I believe happened, and I'd be happy if the devs can chime in and confirm or deny this: Amplitude simply didn't realize that their 4-adjacent-districts game mechanic led to this outcome. I can hardly imagine that they'd create this beautifully presented world, then lead us to populate it with these counter-intuitive and rather silly looking cities.

Another issue that others have reported and I can confirm: Unlike leveling other districts, when you level up the city center you do not gain any city approval. Again, this is either a bug or an unfathomable bit of game design. Until this is addressed, you're much better off placing your city "center" at the apex of your planned triangle or the end of your planned two-lane-highway... unless you need to level your city center for a quest or some such.

I'll try to update the guide fairly soon, but for now suffice it to say that as of 5.11 everything is still pretty much unchanged. One notable exception: Since you now gain +15 rather than +10 approval per district level, you will start to increase your net approval as soon as you start leveling districts.

oh and p.s. - if they build their cities this way, the Necrophage are quite OP.

Kruos

Old Craver

Kruos

Old Craver

26 600g2g pts

10 years ago

Jul 9, 2014, 9:44:03 AM

Thank you for your guide and analysis Paisley.

Maybe you already suggested some changes or tuning about the borrow/district mechanism, from my side I was thinking to some slight change like a scalable bonus to district level depending of the number of adjacent tiles, like for example :

- 4 adjacent tiles -> +1lvl

- 5 adjacent tiles -> +2lvl

- 6 adjacent tiles -> +3lvl

Maybe it could lead to nicer cities..(tbc)

j.a.paisley

Newcomer

j.a.paisley

Newcomer

10 years ago

Jul 9, 2014, 7:59:17 PM

Kruos wrote:
...scalable bonus to district level depending of the number of adjacent tiles, like for example :

- 4 adjacent tiles -> +1lvl

- 5 adjacent tiles -> +2lvl

- 6 adjacent tiles -> +3lvl

I don't think that would quite work, but I think you're on the right track. I've been kicking around an alternate district-leveling mechanic, once I've fleshed it out I'll present it in the games2gether suggestion forum. The net effect would be - linear cities would no longer be desirable over a certain size, and hexagonal cities would get a big boost.

Mallikanth

Newcomer

Mallikanth

Newcomer

10 years ago

Jul 10, 2014, 6:00:03 AM

This has thread helped me a great deal but there appears to be no indication in-game of what level a district is or am I missing something?

qlhs

Aurigan

qlhs

Aurigan

17 000g2g pts

10 years ago

Jul 10, 2014, 8:36:07 AM

Mallikanth wrote:
This has thread helped me a great deal but there appears to be no indication in-game of what level a district is or am I missing something?

You're correct that there's no text based indication that a district has leveled however the districts that are giving influence on the tile in multiples of 3 are the ones that have leveled. So if you have your most basic triangular layout you'll have the 3 corners with normal output and the 3 internal districts each giving 3 influence. In addition to the influence the district visually changes to show it levels up though that doesn't appear to continue past a certain level.

Also I did a bit of analysis on the two most efficient layouts and their advantage over one another. The only time Triangular based is more efficient in any category than the 2 tile wide straight layout is at the 5th district (beating stick by 1 district level, which evens out at the 6th) and at the 6th district (triangular has 1 additional tile worth of reach for this district). So unless you are keeping your city at 5 or 6 districts in complexity stick is either equal to or better than triangular at all other sizes.

In Summary. Stick is identical to Triangular layout for both number of district lvls and tile reach for districts # 0 - 4

Triangular has 1 additional district LvL at 5 Districts but equal reach to Stick.

Triangular has equal district LvLs at 6 Districts but 1 additional tile reach to stick.

At 7 districts and greater Stick is either equivalent or Greater than Triangular Layout.

Mallikanth

Newcomer

Mallikanth

Newcomer

10 years ago

Jul 10, 2014, 11:10:56 AM

qlhs wrote:
You're correct that there's no text based indication that a district has leveled ...

Thanks for that. I feel it needs to be clearly displayed in some way by final release.

Kruos

Old Craver

Kruos

Old Craver

26 600g2g pts

10 years ago

Jul 10, 2014, 5:31:23 PM

qlhs wrote:
In Summary. Stick is identical to Triangular layout for both number of district lvls and tile reach for districts # 0 - 4

Triangular has 1 additional district LvL at 5 Districts but equal reach to Stick.

Triangular has equal district LvLs at 6 Districts but 1 additional tile reach to stick.

At 7 districts and greater Stick is either equivalent or Greater than Triangular Layout.

Arf.. Do you know if the dev are considering the actual distric mechanism as "WIP" or if its actual state is a "WAI" thing? I ask the question because they seems to start balancing things and considering how important this mechanism is for the overall balance of the economy, it is quite strange that they do not to start by fine tuning / modifying this.

In its actual state when you see 'stick cities' or 'triangle cities' it feels quite wrong to me.