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For my part, city spamm is very unwelcome.

This screenshot Illustrate the problem.

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Having to manage 40 or more city is annoying, not fun.

That screenshot just makes me want this game even more. :) I hate mechanics that limit cities. I'm not opposed to it being a option though. To me managing cites is fun, the more the merrier. :)
 
I think one of the problems with simply not playing large maps is that often people (myself included) want to play a full game - get close to the ends of the building/unit/tech trees as the game comes to an end. Often playing a small map doesn't allow you to accomplish that - games usually end midway through those trees. I haven't played Warlock enough to judge it on that, but I don't necessarily want to have to manage 40 cities to experience a "full" game.
 
From the look of the tech tree in the demo a small map at non rush pace should see most of atleast one races tree for you but on the other hand i dont think this game is for you. Now what i mean by that is in Warlock it is all about how you want to play and you dont seem to want that freedom married to this type of game and to that i say you always have Civilization and all the mods made for it thus far.

I would love for you to enjoy this alongside me and the many others that will love and cherish Walock but i must stress i dont want this to become "Warlock: The Civilization Mod" if you want a structured and forced route game of this type you have Civ let us freedom and chaos loving other people enjoy our game with as few rules as possible please. You can always monitor yourself as you play and force rules upon yourself and hell that would be a awesome display of personnel willpower and discretion on your part and i would admire you for that.

Asking the Devs to confrom the game to this forced playstyle where every move has to be planned and thought out makes me wonder why you dont have the ability to just go and find a game better suited to your own taste rather than trying to conform this game to your taste. Please just let us have just one actually fun and random game in this style without forcing bureaucratic nonsense down our throats.

I shall say this again Go back to civ 4/5(whatever floats your boat) and dont taint this game with systems it doesnt need.
I have the sinking feeling that im going to be repeating that line a lot in the future i wish it was just stuck on the loading screen of the game itself and when you started it the Advisor quoted it word for word to the player.
 
I prefer when the number of cities is limited (I'm working on a Civ5 mod, and it will be heavily limited there due to much more unhappiness per city than in normal Civ5, but less per population), due to the following reasons:

1. Managing a large number of cities becomes tedious.
2. It encourages you to think which city spots are the best for you, instead of mindlessly founding them in all possible places.
3. It's good when there are wilderness areas later in the game, where monsters can spawn.
4. It makes the game more balanced - when all players can have a similar number of cities, they have similar strength in late game, instead of one of them getting an advantage early.

But I still think Warlock is a fun game, even with no limits on number of cities.
 
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From the look of the tech tree in the demo a small map at non rush pace should see most of atleast one races tree for you but on the other hand i dont think this game is for you. Now what i mean by that is in Warlock it is all about how you want to play and you dont seem to want that freedom married to this type of game and to that i say you always have Civilization and all the mods made for it thus far.

I would love for you to enjoy this alongside me and the many others that will love and cherish Walock but i must stress i dont want this to become "Warlock: The Civilization Mod" if you want a structured and forced route game of this type you have Civ let us freedom and chaos loving other people enjoy our game with as few rules as possible please. You can always monitor yourself as you play and force rules upon yourself and hell that would be a awesome display of personnel willpower and discretion on your part and i would admire you for that.

Asking the Devs to confrom the game to this forced playstyle where every move has to be planned and thought out makes me wonder why you dont have the ability to just go and find a game better suited to your own taste rather than trying to conform this game to your taste. Please just let us have just one actually fun and random game in this style without forcing bureaucratic nonsense down our throats.

I shall say this again Go back to civ 4/5(whatever floats your boat) and dont taint this game with systems it doesnt need.
I have the sinking feeling that im going to be repeating that line a lot in the future i wish it was just stuck on the loading screen of the game itself and when you started it the Advisor quoted it word for word to the player.

Whoa dude, relax. I don't even play Civ 5 - I'm into this game because I've bought a ton of Paradox games, including the original Majesty (which I guess was not Paradox at the time), and I liked Fantasy Wars and Elven Legacy. It seems like a nice fun turn based game, esp. for the price. I was just mentioning one problem I have with games like these, which by the by includes Civ. I just find it dull to have to deal with 40 cities, especially when that often means you've already won the game, just to experience the full game. I think it would be nice if the developers included some kind of option to limit the number of cities each ruler can build - I always constrain myself to a reasonable number, for my own sake, but I can't very well force the AI to do that, now can I? The reality is pretty much every turn based strategy of this type I can think of off the top of my head has some kind of expansion limiting mechanic built in, and the AI, not the player, is the principal reason. I'm not averse to trying a game without such, but I also would love a toggle-able start-up option like I described.
 
I find it that managing a big number of cities is actually quite is easy in this game ...
I do not mind for change. Having more than 30 cities implies that you have to make like 3-4 decision concerning cities per turn, and if you specialize them as i do a quick look at what is city doing allows you to make quick decisions ... (this is so, b/c you cannot build war-buildings in every city) At the end it takes me like 30s so it is not bad.
 
I find it that managing a big number of cities is actually quite is easy in this game ...
I do not mind for change. Having more than 30 cities implies that you have to make like 3-4 decision concerning cities per turn, and if you specialize them as i do a quick look at what is city doing allows you to make quick decisions ... (this is so, b/c you cannot build war-buildings in every city) At the end it takes me like 30s so it is not bad.

Thats pretty much it there. Choosing buildings & units, checking resources & population. Thats pretty much it.
Dont forget that you have alerts to help you cycle through everything you need to be aware of. Mostly! ;)
 
Yeah, the simpler-city approach seems like it minimizes the micro-managing nicely, so I'm not all that worried about it. We'll see on the 8th! Speaking of which, anyone know what time that will unlock on Steam?
 
Alright Lol no long winded late night tirade this time that kinda thing can happen when you let a sleep muddled head spew its thoughts on the page guess the love i already built for this game gives me a zealous bite towards change.

I am suprised at the fact no one is worried about army sizes ive been watching atleast one or more warlock video a day to hold me over till it releases and there will not be small numbers in AI armies. The best example of this i have found is in this guys http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0D37508319F19E22&feature=plcp playthrough as a human. I know at times i screamed inside my head like a jabbering fool when i thought he should do things differant but heh we all play in our own way. That set of vids is a bit long but the highlights of huge armies are in the last two when he begins to surround pink you it gives a good view of the fight those of us who prefer to conquer are going to run into long before we get over 20 cities hopefully. I think theres also good view of how even with one city the AI is no slouch in terms of army/navy around the halfway point when hes fighting the green moster race.
 
ICS has the inherant limiter of being a colossal time investment in late stages

Here is the issue. AI's don't care about time investment or micro, they aren't "limited" by such concepts. That being the case a good AI in a game without city restrictions is always going to spam cities perfectly from the start to the end growing bigger and bigger, forcing the player to do the same or be crushed by an overwhelming force. Or the AI can be tweaked to not spam that many cities and then what happens is players realize they build a few more cities than the AI and just roll over them without any difficulty. There's no middle ground. You can not balance a game with AI opponents around features limited by player tedium.

I haven't played the demo so I'm not going to judge the implementation yet. It sounds like some of you are saying controlling a large number of cities isn't tedious, but keep in mind you are playing on a small map with like 2 planes IIRC, imagine the largest map with the max number of planes. Managing 50 cities might not be trying, but what about 500?
 
That 500 comment is making me salivate just thinking of the possibilities!

City management doesnt seem like it will be much of an issue in this they have a alert(reminder) when a city is ready to have a new building in it same thing for units with unused movement. Maybe situational awareness and the ability to recognize the area around the city it moves you to when you click the alert may take a bit master though. Dont want to click through your alert building stuff and suddenly realize 4-5 cities back you actually wanted to build a fort/tower or production ability cause its on or near the frontline of your wars against the computer.

Another thing here is the random quests they will probably help keep things in check a little because ive seen things like death paladins and greater enemies get spawned right next to the capital cities.

But only time will tell if that is enough to balance everything out for players but from what i have seen so far the AI actually expands at a reasonable pace even on impossible. Check the some of the human playthrough vids in the link i posted before hes on turn 90+ and the ai has expanded to fit its needs although its armies are legion for a small empire.
 
I definitely think there should be a 'soft' limit on city spamming. Not a hard limit like '10 cities', but something more organic. Say, a city's population needs to be maintained. This maintenance comes from the hexes around it. The larger the city gets (in population), the more hexes it requires. Population always goes up, but the # of hexes remains the same, so if your city doesn't have enough hexes to maintain the population growth, everything produced in the city starts getting penalties. Something like that should be enough.
 
Maybe they could integrate the sewer mechanic from Majesty 1, or at least the flavor somehow? Not sure how it would work for non-human factions, but for humans, you could have an increased number of cities lead to more "sewers" which spawn city-attacking monsters? This wouldn't be a city-limiting mechanic for people who want to expand, but it might force more reasonable/cautious expansion? Just throwing it out there!
 
ICS can be a bit of a pain, but at least in this game cities seem to tend to themselves more than in Civ. However, my thoughts turn to how do we limit the number of cities? Off of what would you base the number of cities each Great Mage can have? Do you think the game should reduce a city's population by 1 for each settler built? Do you think a system of diminished income from cities further and further from the Capital should go in? Wolfing's suggestion of a radius of maintenance based on the cities size? Perhaps a pure inability to settle a new city with less than 4 hexes between them, in effect granting each city a guaranteed radius of two hexes in all directions?

I like the last one; you simply cannot settle a city within 4 hexes of any other city. Thus, every city can grow to Medium and have 18 empty hexes around it, reserved for it. If it grows to large, it cannot build in another city's 18-hex zone; if to cities grow out another ring, then sharing within that third ring can begin (so if you still honeycomb your cities with 4 hexes between each, when they finally hit large, you won't have a lot of room to build). On top of this, when building a settler, your city stops growing; it's population growth goes to 0 for the two turns the unit is being built. ICS might still be a problem, but I think both of those will slow it down to something manageable.
 
Guys, I get what you say, but really arent you forgetting one thing... you dont have to build any more cities than you want. You can disband any cities you capture, that you dont want to manage. Or let them fester by reducing the buildings within to dust, keeping enough food to keep the city size to a level you want.

Or choose a small(er) map to play one. Or one with more ocean (islands). The choice is down to you!

Maybe Im missing something.
 
you dont have to build any more cities than you want.

You don't have to build more cities than you want in the same way that you don't have to play to win. You can choose to use poor strategy and lose every game if you want to. Not building enough cities will usually mean opponents will build more than you and become exponentially stronger than you by having X times more resources, income, and unit production power. I've seen some of the screenshots from beta and every square inch of a map is covered with cities by the end, you simply can not compete against an AI faction with 50 cities while you only have 5, I'm guessing, though it would be interesting if it was balanced to be possible.
 
Sometimes i have a feeling that there are different play-styles in question.
I cannot expect devs to create a game where each nation has no more then two troops at the time, b/c i do not like big armies ... If you want to play with few cities then you play small-medium map, huge maps are for huge games. In our human world continent will always have more cities than a province. Huge map should be for those who do not mind a huge maintenance. And do not tell me you need huge map to see everything game has it, b/c on playing demo on huge map i conquered just 2 out of 8 opponents and i basically had it all, including possible spells and units. I am sure you can have it on medium map as well.
 
I think this all comes down to changing this whole discussion to someone creating a mod instead of ruining the vanilla game with stuff it doesnt really need for most of us to enjoy it. By all means continue to put this point forward continue to ignore the fact you want to limit ability for each person to play as they desire.

-Mod it in to the game
-Argue for it to be optional not forced and accept the fact that it will be a basterdized mechanic because the game got through beta just fine without the stupid thing
-You could always go back to civ and create a mod of this game on there engine

Those seem like the simplest three options please choose number 1 or 2 because there are a lot of us the like the game fine the way it is and if this type of mechanic is going to be forced on me i wont buy game because i would not enjoy it.
 
I have some ideas:
1. Building a settler would decrease the city building it with for example 2 in population.
2. Make the settler unit take longer to build.
3. Limit the constrution of settler to for example +size 5 cities or the city requires a special building.
4. New cities cost money and food for perhaps 10-20 turns before they have constructed buildings to support themselves. This way you have to be careful not to run a deficit.

I for one prefer a slower game where I dont have to spam 20 cities in order to win. I prefer slower expansion where I can choose nicer spots for my cities without having to worry about not constructing 1 settler / turn.
 
-You could always go back to civ and create a mod of this game on there engine

That is a very nonconstructive suggestion. Urging someone to go and play another game just because he is making some suggestions to it is not very helpful. I could do the same thing; Why dont you go and play Warcraft III instead?