Whoa.
Ok, I sleep for like 8 hours, get up, and you guys have exploded half the game again.
Though, I'm getting used to that by now :p
Now, lemme see. My (initial) thoughts on this are....
Chapmen, I dont think are a bad idea at all by themselves.... trying to keep everything related to them efficient was decently challenging, at least. As UNITS though they were somewhat ignored, you'd place them.... didn't really matter which city you put them in, as they MIGHT stay in that city, or they might not.... and then you could ignore them. The idea of having to constrain everything into the cities themselves is a decent one..... but what's to keep the player from just spamming cities? And in some cases, they might HAVE to. I'm thinking of my current game, where the Greek just never seem to have enough rice or wheat; heck, I'd set up a seperate little area.... cut off from the main island.... that had a town building, 10 or so of both wheat and rice fields, and a few dedicated Chapmen just to get those moved. Alot of the time, you need *alot* of resources. I dont think that should be changed, actually..... but restricting them to cities ONLY suddenly alters the balance, if you need to build a town hall EVERY time you need a new group of things.
There's also the idea of building destroying/capturing to worry about. Like, ok. Currently, resource buildings are decent targets for the enemy to attack, particularly as you CANNOT keep all of them super close to cities (the easiest to defend areas). This means that resource destroying/stealing will actually HAPPEN, and is something the player must watch for and think of.... I think this is a good thing, and further adds strategy to the idea of WHERE you're placing these things. This change will alter all of that. Building stealing/destruction will become much more rare, as these things are now going to be both super compact, never in small groups on their own, and will have the tendancy to be near places that can fart out constant units. This is the part of the change that I DONT like about this. Cities seem very hard for units to grab as it is, and damage to them often seems kinda vague and easily dealt with, as you pretty much HAVE to have a massive invading force to knock one down. I think this might actually hit siege units pretty hard; these guys wont be able to do a blasted thing MOST of the time, at least not based on what I've seen so far. Currently, they CAN do stuff even on their own, because resources often end up placed out in seperate areas. But they do near nothing to cities without a huge force backing them up (and are really not very good at fighting troops most of the time). Every other unit type in the game can DO stuff on their own (which is exactly how it should be).
Not to mention, this means that as buildings go, there will literally be only one in the entire game where it actually MATTERS where you place it, in a strategic sense, which is the town hall. No other current building.... NONE of them.... will have any strategy whatsoever, in terms of where. You'll have strategy in terms of WHICH city you put them in..... but that's it. I kinda liked that I often had to think about where I was putting each resource building, often seperate from the main city areas. Which was different from the various city structures like military buildings or schools or whatever; you only choose a city with those, beyond that it dont matter where IN the city you put them.
So, all in all, I'm thinking there's some good stuff in this idea.... but there's definitely a few problems that might crop up as a result. Particularly since various parts of the game were designed with the idea of this somewhat-core concept always being there.
