Developers requesting feedback: Late game distances between towns.

[madcow]

If portals were done. I would likely prefer them as faction specific (maybe even a village building), or come as pairs.  As opposed to every portal being linked to each other.

Sounds like it might not be needed to begin with though.

[Logorouge]

Never was a problem for me so far. Even if it was, as Winge said, you can always use the world serpent token.

[Enzyme]

I agree with comments that the strict town building placement leads to very similar town layouts every game. You often only have 1 reasonable spot to put a new town (sure I could put a blue town right next to that red town with 5 seige workshops, but why would I do that...) and that just leads to very boring town placement.

The distance does become an issue, especially if you use the god power to clear the board. Late game, you get probably 10-15 moves before any units even get near each other once the closer towns are destroyed. Especially for melee units, and more so for Trojan Horses.

I'm sure this is something that is not an issue for some people, but it is an issue for others, depending on play style.

[Misery]

I agree with comments that the strict town building placement leads to very similar town layouts every game. You often only have 1 reasonable spot to put a new town (sure I could put a blue town right next to that red town with 5 seige workshops, but why would I do that...) and that just leads to very boring town placement.

The distance does become an issue, especially if you use the god power to clear the board. Late game, you get probably 10-15 moves before any units even get near each other once the closer towns are destroyed. Especially for melee units, and more so for Trojan Horses.

I'm sure this is something that is not an issue for some people, but it is an issue for others, depending on play style.

Actually, there's typically ALOT of places you can put it.... but the game often wont show them to you, because it only displays the 3 or so spaces off the edge of any tile.   Often, placing a new town is best done by building a land-bridge outward, towards wherever you'd like it to go.  You can use the Undo button as well to sorta "check" this, by placing a few land tiles, pulling out the TC, and then you can look at what is displayed around that land bridge;  if it's still not giving you a spot (which actually seems rare, in my experience) you can just undo it (or if you're just not ready to actually PLACE them.

As a rule, I can usually get towns in pretty much the places I want them, by doing this.   

[Mick]

  You can use the Undo button as well to sorta "check" this, by placing a few land tiles, pulling out the TC, and then you can look at what is displayed around that land bridge

I do this sometimes too. I think it's actually an indication that the town indicator doesn't go far enough out by default. I can see many players seeing all red and thinking that a town can't be placed in that direction.

[Misery]

  You can use the Undo button as well to sorta "check" this, by placing a few land tiles, pulling out the TC, and then you can look at what is displayed around that land bridge

I do this sometimes too. I think it's actually an indication that the town indicator doesn't go far enough out by default. I can see many players seeing all red and thinking that a town can't be placed in that direction.

That's quite true.  The indicator should go out twice as far, I'm thinking.  I dunno about you but I've never needed to check any further out than that.


Also I rather like the idea of portals like in Valley 2 though I think they'd need to be difficult to use (and more difficult or outright impossible to CLOSE once placed!  For proper chaos, of course!). Could be a useful but risky way to funnel human troops into specific areas if needed. There could then also be a woe with those that just sprays a few randomly around the map.   


As for the whole map shape thing, I think some of it is just different playstyles.   I can see how parallel strings of towns could form.   My own maps tend to look alot like this:



Huge landblobs with towns in seemingly random spots that were decided on based on whatever was going on at the time.    Generally though I have no trouble getting the towns where I want them to be.