'building up' a city

[jerby]

In rtw i've always found it weird that a 300 year old city like athens, corinth, name it didnt have a port until you get control.
the way you play teh game in vannilla is that for teh first 10 turns you can barely build a 'varied' army.
your telling me those factions/tribes/whatever ( of wich most already existed for hundreds of years) could recruit skirmishers with the players help? :S

I know its too late, or probably mentioned/implemented. but why dont we use buildings for chronoligic purpuses in stead of building 40 turns to finnally get to build Thureophoroi (rtr) wich already were used for 50 years (at least)

any EB respons? any comforting EB response? any fan opinions? how about an EB update about the new building system?

[khelvan]

We have a great amount of information compiled as to the relative size and advancement of the various regions/settlements on the map. A final decision has yet to be made as to how exactly we will be scaling this. For historicity's sake we would make large, advanced cities large and advanced, but this removes some of the fun from the game system in which we must develop the mod.

There will be some advanced units available to everyone. The question we still have yet to answer is how far do we take it? Do we make every single unit available at the outset, or do we reserve some for the player to achieve as play progresses?

[tk-421]

I think that you should make the cities as developed as they were in 270 BC. From what I have seen you have made the factions as large or as small as they were in 270 BC. Why not do the same for cities? If a city was large and well developed in 270 BC then make it large and well-developed. If a city was a tiny little town in the middle of the desert then make it a tiny little town. At the very least you should make so that all of the nonbarbarian cities have a wall, a market, a port if it is by the sea, a religious building, roads, and military buildings that are capable of retraining all of the units that start out in that territory. For barbarian factions you should have all things listed above except maybe roads and docks. I really hated how at the beginning of the game you would start out with military units that you were incapable of retraining. Lack of roads, walls, and ports also disturbed me.

[Ranika]

I do believe we'll have settlements appropriately developed for the start period, at least, reasonably so. Our whole modicum is history first, but some places would be hard to determine just how developed they were at the time.

[Oaty]

Just my 2 cents but, I've hated all 3 series when it came to teched up units. Basically the game was already decided before you could train them.

Well teching up is part of the fun but all one needs is 1 high tech city or maybe making each city have a specialty high tech unit they can train.

So either each nations capital has a bunch of high tech buildings or 1 city specializes in each category.

If the A.I. was competent on wich cities were important, I'd say put them all in the capital.

Really because of overpowering cavalry, I'm fine with noone having stables from the start minus factions that historically relied or had them in high numbers.

[pezhetairoi]

Yes. It would reflect the fact that every faction had its own elite units. Maybe to prevent overpowering (though I am aware it is probably too late to suggest this) there could be a cap on how many units of elite level one could build--after all, Alexander did not have an army made up completely of hypaspistoi and hetairoi, and neither did Cyrus have an army completely made up of Immortals. So maybe there would be a cap on units, and these units could be retrained only in cities capable of building them as is the standard practice, but you could not build more than, say, one unit to every factioner, or something like that--a peg to prevent overpowering by, say, the Kart-hadashtim with the developed cities and unit capability, compared to the backward (I might be wrong, I don't know...) barbarian factions and their initial low-level unit capability.