Too many cities !!

I agree, you can churn out cities so fast that they are not as important as they should be, lose one, bang, few turns to replace.
I think a better option would be to either increase the time it takes to build settlers, or take a portion of the population from the city building them.

I never have much work with city management, since each turn a maximum of 2-4 need new buildings. However, a building queue would be a nice improvement.

I rather need much time for unit management, especially when they not in sleep mode.

ColdAshen said:

... you can churn out cities so fast...

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Thats it, you can, not you must!

I like it as it is, city building atm will be limited from space, that include space occupied by the other lords.

And the managing time for the cities is not nealry as long as HozyM posted, maybe he goes and drink a coffee in the turn time.

Cities only need to be managed if they produce something or can build something.
Building something will get slower when the city grows, and producing is limited from upkeep cost, so when you cant affort it you cant produce it.

When you dont want "so many" cities, simply dont build it, the game dont force you to settle.

I find managing cities very easy considering half the time I just ignore them. No need to add some city limit. Maybe when multiplayer comes out this might be an issue against human players, but it certainly is not against the AI.

15-20 minutes per turn? What? What exactly are you doing with your time? Cities only grow quickly at the start. Afterwards they grow slowly, so the amount of city management is extremely small. In turn 300+ my turns take less than 2 minutes, and most of that is managing units with attacks/defense and casting spells.

I bet he doesn't know how to speed up unit and casting animation by left or right clicking.

I definitely agree this will be a major issue for MP. With massive cities, gigantic piles of gold and mana as result, combat can be stretched soooo long...

Better fix it soon and allow people to adjust in SP.
My 2 cents.

Due to the lack of difficulty I have been playing with a house rule of no buying settlers at all. I can only get cities by taking them over. It makes the game harder,...it isnt enough, but it helps.

Would be better if we can put a governor into new and conquered cities and give it "focus on gold", "focus on food", and "focus on knowledge" detective.

Sorry to sound jaded :happy: but we get a lot of players new to the game that suggest we have too many cities to manage. We have had several threads all saying the same thing, it seems to be a hang over from impressions built up in other games. But it's just not true, as most experienced players will tell you. You need all those cities to speed up movement and to provide the resources (gold, food, mana and research) for the late game armies of Elite and Temple units. A temple unit can cost 700 gold to recruit and then another 1000 gold to fully perk up and 20 resources / turn in maintenance. It takes a lot of mature cities to fund that level of expenditure. It takes a lot of cities to also do the research in a short enough time to avoid the AI casting the Unity spell

The important thing to realise is that less cities or slower growing spread out cities means a slower game which means we need more turns to complete it anyway, so little is gained. For instance, using 2 sets of made-up numbers to illustrate my point; is a long game lasting 200 turns managing a maximum of 25 cities any better than a faster paced game with much bigger army that lasted say 130 turns where cities maxed out at 45? I don't think it is and there is probably just as much city management in the longer game spread out over more turns.

Besides that as you get more familiar with how the economy in warlock works you'll realise that city management (and road building) is actually very clever and elegant, much better than most strategy games. There are basically only 5 types of city, and most cities should just specialise in producing either gold, food or mana + research, a few cities need to produce units and then a few more grab special resources like a temple or a node to give the enchanted weapons buff. Probably half your cities should specialise in gold production. After a few games you realise how to combine and mix and match these city types. If it helps you can re-name your cities to remind you of what they are supposed to be doing. I just check what they are already producing and add to that, a craftsmen district in a gold city and a farm in a food one once the multiplier chain is built. It takes 10 seconds per city, maximum.

In general I find that managing my cities takes maybe 5% of the total turn time, moving my large armies takes the vast majority of the time. If you want speed the game up that is where design effort should be concentrated and please don't suggest a smaller army that is not an acceptable solution.
JJ

UncleJJ is spot on correct. New players tend to offer solutions to non-existing problems because they are not yet familiar with how the game works. Even with 40+ cities, it should never take more than a minute to complete a turn.

Concur with UncleJJ. City growth really slows down after Pop size 6 or 7, so even if you have 40+ cities it is rare to actually DO anything in the vast majority of them. In most XL games I have two or three combat-unit producing cities tops- the rest are resource production or special tile exploitation (Temples or Perk Buildings). The non-combat cities produce settlers as needed.

Its a big change from the Civ model, but once you get experience with it city micro is very smooth. I enjoy the improvements appearing on tiles-as-roads aspect.

Gaston369 said:

UncleJJ is spot on correct. New players tend to offer solutions to non-existing problems because they are not yet familiar with how the game works. Even with 40+ cities, it should never take more than a minute to complete a turn.

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You mean the city management portion, correct? Because the combat and unit movement portion take closer to 10 min a turn for me lategame on XL maps. I don't see how you could do it ALL in under a minute if you are fighting one of the AI's.

I'm always happy when I can build more buildings

Regardless of my happiness, you will need a lot of cities to build the fancy units and perks late game. It is fun to have a massively buffed Golden Dragon, but quite an investment. Good luck getting there with only a handful of cities. Cost/income is quite balanced now, reducing the number of cities will require a lot of new balancing. Time the devs could spent on making multiplayer work and make other new features.

Sure I am new... but I definitely don't think the city limit should be imposed because it takes too long. But, well, because it's a bit silly, makes individual cities not that valuable and gives an overload of resources.

Does updating them fully and mass-producing temple units take a lot of resources. Sure. Is it actually intended that you create a large number of super-units? Doesn't seem so.

...when a turn comes around & you have 25 units to move around plus cities to build for, plus battles it just take ME more than a miniute....

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Sorry but moving units around and battle is the game, why you will get fewer units to play faster?

This is not Civilization 5, the game is a combat game, so moving units around and make some battles should take the game time.
Here is no really diplomatic or tech advance or something else, only producing units and fight with them.

Also you need the extra cities to pay the recruitment cost and upkeep for your units so fewer cities is not as good as you think.
And why should there be fewer cities? Only because it will be handled so in other games???

HozyM said:

But my point is that by having alot of cities you can also produce alot of units. Combine with managing everything else, city improvments, perks, unit movement, it can a long time to complete a turn, as for you guys who can complete these turns in 1 & 2 miniutes, OK you got me !! i'm just not as talented as you are but when a turn comes around & you have 25 units to move around plus cities to build for, plus battles it just take ME more than a miniute....sorry. On the other hand the game is out & fixing this may throw off a varierty of things, I understand that.

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Well moving units around is just part of the game. You get to pick perks only when they level up or when you build new units and buy their upgrades, all of which takes mere seconds. As for cities, 90% of your cities will be designed to generate money, food, mana, or a combination of the three. You should only have a handful of cities, usually no more than three (I stick with just the capital) designated to building units.

Actual most of the complaints from new players comes because of the poor UI I feel. For example when you don't know the build order for stuff you spend a lot of time looking over the unclear build order trying to figure out what order you need to unlock stuff. Next there is the problem of no Empire management screen to see an overview of all your cities so it's easy to loose track of which cities have which special buildings. If you don't rename your cities for some "tip" as to what you planned to specialize it having to take a quick look around and figure it out again. Once you learn the mechanics well enough it is easy to quickly go through all the cities to select the next building in the line.

I do still feel city sprawl is a bit of a problem though. Only because there is no other option and thus no strategic variety. It is like in civilizations you can choose to expand out or build up (high pop cities). Each has it's own strengths and weaknesses but either is a viable strategy as a tall empire can often hold it's own against a wide one. But because cities grow at a fixed rate in Warlock there is no choice to build tall given that someone building wide will out pace you in no time since all their cities are growing at the same rate as yours.

All this comes back to choice on strategies though more then intentionally trying to reduce the number of cities. Also most of the common suggestions don't actually solve the problem. The more space required, right now it's 3 tiles, would just make it so cities were slightly further apart. Even with a minimum of 3 I tend to build 4 tiles apart because it's more efficient spacing and any larger space requirement then that would start to be a hassle for place due to resource and terrain locations. them but people would still squeeze as many as they could down. Then there is increase cost of Settlers which only slightly slows down how fast you can pop them out but doesn't stop city spam. And a few others which also only really change the pacing and don't stop the spam.

Maybe change the food or gold vs population system, more population in your city will deplete your income much faster. Currently pop=-1 resource. And made a higher population city have bonus on armies trained at it or even give unique perks based on each unit.

Actual most of the complaints from new players comes because of the poor UI I feel. For example when you don't know the build order for stuff you spend a lot of time looking over the unclear build order trying to figure out what order you need to unlock stuff. Next there is the problem of no Empire management screen to see an overview of all your cities so it's easy to loose track of which cities have which special buildings. If you don't rename your cities for some "tip" as to what you planned to specialize it having to take a quick look around and figure it out again. Once you learn the mechanics well enough it is easy to quickly go through all the cities to select the next building in the line.

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City ledger will solve this. Or in the current state of the game, you can just view how many coin/orb/meat icon your city has when you browse that city interface, coin means it is specialized in money, orb=mana, meat=food. 2 pointed arrow=perk building, a shield icon = unit producing building.