TravlingCanuck wrote:

For me, the region system will shine if it's paired with indigenous people / minor nations occuping those regions.

One of the major weakness of the Civ series (a series I love) right since the beginning with Civ 1 is the idea of an empty map and you can just wander in and place a city wherever you want.  In the real world, empires expanded by moving into territories occupied by other people and either absorbing them or displacing them.  It wasn't just major empires battling over border lines, it was major empires dealing with (in various ways) a host of other people on their frontiers.  

I don't know how Amplitude will handle this, but I'm hoping for a more elegant and interesting system than Civ's hodge podge of barbarian camps, tribal villages, and city states.  If the world is empty but already divided into regions, that would seem odd.  If you expand your empire by extending influence into the lands of the X, then the region system will feel much more natural.

Well, the devs have revealed that the game has no settlers; instead we send an army into the region and they'll set up an outpost, which can either be used to found a new city, or annex the region for an adjacent city. Local populations might be said to be integrated at the outpost, explaining how a new city could arise from an army plopping down a fort that somehow becomes its own city.

TravlingCanuck wrote:

ImperatorTempus42 wrote:

Well, the devs have revealed that the game has no settlers; instead we send an army into the region and they'll set up an outpost, which can either be used to found a new city, or annex the region for an adjacent city. Local populations might be said to be integrated at the outpost, explaining how a new city could arise from an army plopping down a fort that somehow becomes its own city.

I hadn't read that.   I knew (a) that you can establish outposts in regions, and (b) that you can't establish a city in a region with an outpost from another player, but I hadn't heard anything about how you establish new cities.  Having them evolve from outposts makes sense.  Do you remember what article you saw the "no settlers" comment in?  Doesn't matter if you don't.  No doubt we'll be hearing more soon anyway.

Yes, the "outposts become cities" mechanic would lend itself well to integrating local peoples.

I believe the devs said it in one of their Gamescom streams. So it's similar to Age of Wonders: Planetfall's system, but cuts out the settler entirely and lets you start a new city adjacent to another one.

Building outposts was mentioned specifically as an alternative way to claim land, not the only possible way as ImperatorTempus42 suggests.

The only thing we know is that ways to claim it will not include settlers like with civilization series.

I wonder if there are ways to accurately show the difference between, let's say,  a China with lots of people but a medium income versus a United States with medium people (for its size) and lots of income. Or if it's possible to differentiate between France's centralized government versus Germany's decentralized cities.

Wobzter wrote:

I wonder if there are ways to accurately show the difference between, let's say,  a China with lots of people but a medium income versus a United States with medium people (for its size) and lots of income. Or if it's possible to differentiate between France's centralized government versus Germany's decentralized cities.

That level of complexity is unlikely, although we do have ideologies.

Yes that sort of in depth demographics I think would be very difficult to simulate. Playing Total War Three Kingdoms recently and one thing to note was the western provinces of China were much larger thus having fewer settlements as opposed to the eastern coastal parts with smaller provinces making it much more dense which I think does a fairly good job of simulating how those eastern areas were where the majority of the population was located while also making those areas more desirable as having lots of packed togeather settlements is easier to defend.

You could simulate that in this game by having desert/steppe/tundra or any other terrain that is not ideal for human development have larger regions to represent that you cant heavily colonise those areas. 

MasterofMobius wrote:

You could simulate that in this game by having desert/steppe/tundra or any other terrain that is not ideal for human development have larger regions to represent that you cant heavily colonise those areas. 

Perhaps, although that affects every other region on the continent in question. We could have a "desolate wastes" or "barren" sort of tiles that are incapable of food production or much else, but are a good place to put a military district (Assyria's Citadel districts).

Frogsquadron wrote:

You'll find out soon enough when we show more about cities!

Did this reveal ever happen? Everything in this thread sounds pretty neat - a logical step forward from the region system in EL (which I liked a lot)

No, we haven't yet gone into more detail on cities, but we will as part of the new Dev Diaries.

MTGian wrote:

This is just a long way of saying that it absolutely makes sense to have regions.  A region is a city and its hinterland.  Should regions be different sizes based upon productivity of the hinterland?  That is a great question that was brought up earlier in the thread.  I think that is how it did work.  The Netherlands developed early as an urban region, because the land was very productive, but the cities themselves were not enormous.  There were just many of them.  Whether simulating that is important, I know not.  You could have just normal sized regions with enormous cities where land is especially productive and it would be a reasonable approximation.  

I think the fact that regions can be merged could help simulate this. You could have several individual cities each in their own region or you could combine them creating a large city with a large hinterland region.