Who would like to build their own city?

[PrinceofPersia]

What would you guys think of the idea of being able to build your own city?

Maybe a bit like Sim city, but you have the controls on what building to place where..and what places to leave open strategically? put towers and cannons where you want. I personally think this would be a great touch to the game....as apparently siege battles are supposed to be more drawn out and it would not be too difficult to implement. Even something like in AOE, where you had to build houses to grow population.

Just a thought...what do you guys think?

[Dictator Of The Roman Republic]

No, the total war franchise are if some what historical turn-based strategy games and I want it to stay that way.

[Captain Grimes]

I think it would be a great idea! Certainly make sieges more interesting, especially if ive designed the walls and layout of it, it would also mean more when your city is taken and the AI starts to build over what you've done

Or CA could just make the cities look historically accurate, which is what they seem to be doing in regards to Carthage - have no idea about Rome

In fact when I first played RTW 10 years ago now I was suprised that Rome didnt look like Rome, I couldnt understand why there was no Tiber running through it...

[B. W.]

I'm just hoping they don't take the cookie cutter approach when it comes to the major cities. The only thing I didn't like about the look-in feature in RTW was that they all seemed to look the same.

[complete noob:(]

Please explain to me how AI pathfinding will work in custom cities? It won't.

[Argon Viper]

If CA could buy the Caesar game series and bundle those features into Rome 2, that'd be awesome. Short of that, I'm not sure I want them taking the time and effort away from combat that it would take to allow us to build cities. I think for city building I'll stick to other games for the time being.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caesar_%28video_game%29

[Ngazi]

Custom cities? Like tower defense where one archer destroys an entire legion. Sure.

[|Sith|Duke_Spartacus]

What would you guys think of the idea of being able to build your own city?

Maybe a bit like Sim city, but you have the controls on what building to place where..and what places to leave open strategically? put towers and cannons where you want. I personally think this would be a great touch to the game....as apparently siege battles are supposed to be more drawn out and it would not be too difficult to implement. Even something like in AOE, where you had to build houses to grow population.

Just a thought...what do you guys think?

Im not wasting my time making a list of reasons how utterly bad this idea is. houses to build? grow population? sim city, AOE?

it would not be too difficult to implement

Nope, inserting a completely different game concept, piece of cake....

[panzerschreck]

In custom battle, that could be cool to be able to do your own battlefield before battle, ingame, and eventually be able to save it and to share it if it's good.

[Dictator Of The Roman Republic]

What would you guys think of the idea of being able to build your own city?

Maybe a bit like Sim city, but you have the controls on what building to place where..and what places to leave open strategically? put towers and cannons where you want. I personally think this would be a great touch to the game....as apparently siege battles are supposed to be more drawn out and it would not be too difficult to implement. Even something like in AOE, where you had to build houses to grow population.

Just a thought...what do you guys think?

They in a sense have this already for RTW and shogun 2, battle editor and TED

[Adreno]

They in a sense have this already for RTW and shogun 2, battle editor and TED

this, with a little bit of help with getting custom maps inserted into the campaign you might be able to redesign every city.. hope they think about that in advance so it doesnt end up as limited as shogun2..

iam going to have a shitton of fun building stuff, already had in shogun but this is gonna be 10 times better

[CanOmer]

City building features for Total War is my dream. I had opened similar thread, here is some images:

I love historical city building games such as Caesar III-IV, Anno series, Pharaoh, Zeus..etc

My dream game is Totalwar with city-building features. Employment, feeding the population (especially in the large capital), producing weapons/armors, placing buildings, drawing walls, roads (not every streets but main roads which armies can use)..etc Of course it should not be as detailed as common city-building games but some features would be awesome. What do you think about it?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

[Lord Baal]

My wall of doom people, already posted a long time, read it

This would be awesome (barring the house building) and optional. Imagine you zoom-in to the city and manage things personally or just order their construction from the strategic menu (like now we do) and the buildings are auto-placed. That way everybody would be happy, people that don't want this won't be forced to use it and people that want it would. In the end everyone would end up trying to tweak the defenses and other stuff.

I said leave things like house building out because that would be more like a civilian duty, not a strictly government one. The buildings you would be building and placing are things like barracks, baths and such others. The private housing, commercial and industrial buildings should develop on their own.

If CA could buy the Caesar game series and bundle those features into Rome 2...

They don't need to buy anything. They can implement any mechanics they want in Rome 2. Those game mechanics are not patented or anything.

Custom cities? Like tower defense where one archer destroys an entire legion. Sure.

Now, that's a bit of a stretch don't you think?

Im not wasting my time making a list of reasons how utterly bad this idea is. houses to build? grow population? sim city, AOE?

For this to work it couldn't be like AOE. Population grow used to be something important back then in Rome 1 you know...

No, the total war franchise are if some what historical turn-based strategy games and I want it to stay that way.

Who said this feature would change that?

Please explain to me how AI pathfinding will work in custom cities? It won't.

You know, the AI pathfinding could be done right so it can work regardless of how the map is laid out like, in you know, thousands of other games....

Of course they could implement this or simply make cities different, not going cheapo and employing the same darn city over 30 times for different provinces. Either that or open the possibility to insert custom maps in the campaign map and let the modders do the work for them.

[Patrick Sharpe]

Not to be rude Lord Baal, but regarding path finding, it has always sucked in TW. In the past, TW has shown that path finding is very difficult to programme. In STW and MTW there were no cities to attack on the battle map. In RTW and MTW2 as you say they employed 'cheapo' tactics of copying the same layout. ETW and NTW and STW2 CA returned to very basic forts which the player could attack ala STW and MTW and path fining was still terrible in those forts.

Genuinely expecting RTW2 to have custom cities out of the box is simply fantasy. If it couldn't be implemented in a decade of total war why will it now? What's more, the cities in RTW2 will have multiple capture points how do you think the AI wil handle that? More basic problems like TW generals committing suicide has been apparent since STW and its massively damaging to gameplay and CA have been unable to fix it. I think CAI and BAI have improved greatly through STW2 and FOTS yet it is nowhere near perfect.

If any of these features could be implemented they would be so stripped down they would be irrelevant to the game play. You could argue that custom cities have been implemented in MTW2 in the third age mod successfully, yet this is only because some of the most talented modders in the TWC are working on it and they require hours of play testing.

It would be cool I admit, but I find it extremely hard to believe it could ever become a part of total war.

[Lord Baal]

Don't worry, we are not talking about me after all. We are talking about pathfinding and that the fact that it sucks in total war doesn't mean it's sooo hard to program. Literally hundreds of other games had it right you know? So cutting them a slack on that area is like rooting for mediocrity. They should come up with a better pathfinding long time ago.

As for cities yes, they should make everyone different, either that or allow for custom maps to be inserted on the campaign map. By custom maps we don't have to go as far as the Mines of Moria, since we are talking about roman and assorted barbarians towns it would be far more simple than that.

[SteamPunk]

Im not keen on this.the idea of having to manually design and micro-manage every city in my empire would be time consuming and tedious.there are games out there that let you manage cities,but i want total WAR, not total sim city

[krisslanza]

Don't worry, we are not talking about me after all. We are talking about pathfinding and that the fact that it sucks in total war doesn't mean it's sooo hard to program. Literally hundreds of other games had it right you know? So cutting them a slack on that area is like rooting for mediocrity. They should come up with a better pathfinding long time ago.

As for cities yes, they should make everyone different, either that or allow for custom maps to be inserted on the campaign map. By custom maps we don't have to go as far as the Mines of Moria, since we are talking about roman and assorted barbarians towns it would be far more simple than that.

No, no I'm pretty sure that proves pathfinding is pretty hard to program. There's a reason RTS games tend to not have random obstacles cluttered everywhere that can block things, or that units can use walk through them or something.

Also most RTS games a unit is one single guy, which can easily path past something. In Total War, a single unit could be well over 200 individual units, and if one of them gets stuck...

[Captain Grimes]

Maybe make path finding better instead of saying it can't be done?

[krisslanza]

Maybe make path finding better instead of saying it can't be done?

If you know any coding and have an idea of how to do this, I'm sure CA would love to hear it.

[Lord Baal]

Ummm have you ever played company of heros or down of war two?

Also I don't know but in my real time strategy/tactics (most of them are actually just tactics and are wrongly called strategy) games there's always things in the middle, I hardly remember playing on grassy rolling plains ever. Lots of them have even heavy urban environments, even some designed by me and yet the pathfinding worked pretty well.

Among those I can count all command and conquer games, stracraft 1 and 2, all age of empire games, blitzkrieg I (never got the chance to play II), XIII Century: Death or Glory, Grand Ages: Rome - The Reign of Augustus, and many, many more I don't remember now, many of them with multi unit units doing pathfinding in a rather good way. I guess I go back and tell those guys that they divided by 0 and should be ashame of what they did...