This has got to be my favourite Game Design Conundrum! How to create the most immersive fantasy settlements in a TBS!

Why? Because on the level most TBS games work, settlements are central to communicating the culture of the fictive world to the audience. Therefore they become the primary inspiration of the audience to start imagining the details, fill in the gaps in the story framework that the game provides. Done well, descriptions of the places where people decide to live their lives, can make or break a game.

From a TBS game design perspective, I think the primary challenges are as follows:

1.   You can’t show it all, you have to tell as well.

in a TBS you usually can't create the whole city visually, with enough detail that it will actually feel autonomous, and if you do, it will usually lack personality, besides what it gets from its location. Therefore you will have to rely on text, pictures and abstractions (points/titles/categories) to create the personality of the city. In my experience what works best is to not use points to describe, simply because word, sounds and images are more evocative and help your imagination along. It’s more difficult/expensive obviously, although it can be done on multiple levels. The more emergent the text is however, the more it feeds your imagination and makes you feel that there is more to the city than a simply point based system camouflaged with a few words.

basic Example: So, the first step is instead of describing a city's size with integers 1 through 5, describe them as a list of texts

(1=[hamlet, collection of huts], 2=[village, small town], 3=[town, market town, county hub], 4=[city], 5=[capital])

Same for all other attributes you feel could help describe the city:

My dream has always been to go even further and script an emergent system to generate flavored descriptions based on game data, and these texts could then constantly reflect the city’s history and current status. This is something that was already done in a basic but powerful way on Commodore 64 (land of midnight).

"The [Small Hamlet] of [Touring] is situated on [the river smafok] near [the black forest]. It has been here [forever]. The population are [mainly Fishermen], with a [few Merchants] and [some Tradesmen]. etc. etc.

2.   Camouflage the systemic description. Support the players own story telling

If you want to create immersion, you need the formal system you use to describe they city, its attributes, classes, tables, rules, algorithms, to be hidden, yet reflected in your descriptions, but in text and images that add flavor and still lets the player understand what he is dealing with, and not numbers and stats. Using numbers and stats breaks immersion and asks the player to start crunching numbers instead of spending his time “role playing” the city. The gamers will start min-maxing and discussing stats instead of telling stories. Doing it right takes a whole new layer on top of the basic stats layer, which is probably why most games leave it out. Unfortunately, this is exactly where you should not save on resources, unless immersion, story and role playing is secondary to your design.

3.   Player attention and Communicating in ways that are easy to remember

In TBS games the player usually have many cities, or points of interest, you want him to spend time on. Therefore his attention is divided, and when presenting the location to him the first time, the description needs to be short and brimming with data that lets him tell it apart from other locations, as well as wet his appetite for learning more about the place. Therefore a short description that points out the special attributes and notable personalities or groups of people is a good start point. It should be possible to generate a short description like below, based on game data:

Example:

“Hadrum’s Point, is a bustling and dangerous harbor town, on the shores of the sea of shards. Towering over the town is a beautiful Lighthouse known far and wide. Hadrum’s Point is infamous as the home of the Powerful Cerulean Assassins guild. The ruler of the city is the Adventurous Count Smakodak, a famous rogue.”

This is IMO a pretty nice intro to a city. It is short and brimming with info generated based on game data, so it actually also tells the player something about the city’s opportunities (trade here, build a town guard, send the count on a quest, hire assassins, create boats here that sail further, etc. etc.). Coupled with a nice picture a la what we have seen in the journals, maybe with an “assassins guild” icon, and a picture of the ruler, it should be enough to give the player incentive to read the more detailed descriptions/stats on the town and start doing stuff to the town to see how it changes.

When it comes to creating a memorable city with more detail than just the introduction, think about what people in general are best at remembering. Personality comes from being able to differentiate, and from remembering history.  images, colors, faces, memorable texts, sounds, and names that evoke images and fit into a context, are all easy to remember. Numbers, Names that mean nothing in particular, generic text, generic graphics, are all difficult for most people to remember and do not evoke history in any way, because you forget them. Easiest of all to remember is stuff that reminds you of real life!

Also finding something rare and valuable is of course also very important:

So let’s focus on the easy ones and come up with ideas to use those:

Images: Obviously if the graphics of the settlements are customizable enough, and differ enough based on location, culture, race, etc, then a picture of the settlement can be great. Especially if specific landmarks, buildings, etc. can be used.

Colors: Color palette is a general tool to strengthen recognition and thereby personality

Faces: This is a whole chapter by itself. People are made to recognize faces, because other people matter a whole lot in an evolutionary sense. Therefore adding important personalities with individual faces, is a very very good way of giving flavor and personality to a location. This also opens up a whole new area of location description, in the sense that it asks the question: what is really most interesting about a city, is it the buildings or the people that live in them, their culture, who they are and what they do? I would always say the latter, hence when describing a settlement, describe the most interesting people there, the organizations, and their personalities, goals etc. This I see as the most important way of giving a settlement personality. In the end a settlement is all about the people that live there.

Text: again, text is much more evocative than numbers, inspiration and interpretation is more important in text than in numbers. Instead of having a city with a defense of 2, I would rather see that my city “is surrounded by a rugged 10 foot wooden barricade, with guard towers at strategically important locations”. Why? Simply because it evokes a picture in my minds eye. And I now remember that I build the wooden barricade around the city called blabu. Going from   Defense 1 to Defense 2 does not evoke anything in regards to story, it just adds to my stats.

Sounds & Music: Specific music, sounds that reflect the settlements size, location, culture, religion, again stimulates the most basic parts of the human brain in ways that numbers and text cannot. This is the reason why the best games have awesome sound. Inspiration: Heroes of might and magic series has awesome sound effects, esp. II and III. There are sound effects tied to every little location on screen, and depending on your view as a player, the overall audio experience is a mashup of all these. It works really well! Music: morrowind, oblivion, age of empires, neverwinter nights, guild wars (Jeremy soule!) is amazingly evocative music for creating moods.

Names: If you can make sure that names of locations fit the game context in some way, then you have come far. Instead of choosing random names from a list, let the names reflect the location, the area, the culture, as most actual city names actually do, although we tend to forget. It is of course more difficult in a game, since the player probably won’t know very much about this things, but it should be possible to create a library of city names or a name generator that uses game data to generate context dependant names.

Rare and valuable: Special abilities, and attributes are always cool: “oh this is the city with the assassins guild!” see the cool assassins guild badge it has!. Or, “wow, this one has the gold mine!” etc. etc. easy as pie, works a treat.

Real Life references: This is why borrowing from Real life cultures is a staple in fantasy and sci-fi. By e.g. introducing an oriental culture into a fantasy game, you automatically allow the player to use all his knowledge of the middle east, aswell as other oriental inspired stories, movies, games he has experienced, to interpret and build on the story seed you gave him. Using Cultural references allows you to say a lot without saying very much. Its free content!

 The one thing that is central to all of these descriptors however, is the elusive context: To help the story telling of the player the descriptions need to be in context. They need to be consistent and reflect the true game world. Since Elementals focus is creating a very detailed game world, I think you are the exact game that might be able to pull this off for real.

Reading over these posts I've been trying to think of any memorable cities in 4x games.  The only one that really sticks out to me is Orion, from Moo2.  When you found that planet, It became a major goal to build up enough fire power to take it out.  The thing that made it memorable, was that it was similar from one game to the next. 

So I think the first key, is name recognition.   To aquire that you need a good number of filler cities first. Cities that don't stand out.  Your typical 4x planets, towns, etc.

In order to make a city stand out, they could be consistent (like Orion).  The city of "varsis" for example could always be near a forest, and have access to a special type of wood for arrows.  Whenever you see varsis, you know it has an extra value.  The city of Kameel might always offer a major production bonus.  When you see this city you will remember previous games you've played where you were able to build up armies very quickly.  The city of "qualan" might have a massive library from a long forgotten era that grants you a large bonus to technology research.  The city of appleleaf might have an ancient wizards guild,  that grants you a major benefit to research of some sort.  The city of tigalville might give you the hero Tigal who will offer to join your cause.

The more powerful the bonus the city offers, the more powerful the defenders should be.  If they are not too numerous,  you will be able to remember them.  The bonus feature of the city should have a very large building displayed on the world map.  A good cut scene featuring said building  that looks sufficiently like the large building visible on the world map, and it's history for each one. These things would help to immerse you into the world, and make for memorable games with one or two of these powerful places as a focal point in your campaign.  While also increasing replay-ability.

Lastly, lets say you are playing a game and get a particularly high score.  One city has a stupidly high rating in some form or another (lets say it is a production hub). (enough to make it memorable to you).  When you win the game, that city could be added to the "special cities" list, the terrain type it was on saved, and given an appropriate building.  Lets say you won the game by conquering all of your enemies.  A tower of war could be erected to glorify your achievement in the cut scene at the end of your game.   When you find that city in another game, the same portion of the cut scene could be  played.  Showing your actual city, and the tower could give a bonus to your military morale empire wide if you control the city. The city layout could be the same, and it would be defended appropriately.

 Have a list of special buildings that can be enabled based on what special achievements you made during your play through.  Win in 100 turns or lest?  The city the game figures most critical to that success gets saved and a blitzkrieg monument is erected in it, allowing for a special unit to be researched that is suitable to a blitzkrieg style.  When you find it in a new game, a cut scene is played, telling the story of the great channeler Frogboy who united the plane in one crashing victory after the next without so much as a pause.  And how this monument was built in his honor.  This thriving city and monument are all that remains of his once great empire. Historical text in the town tell of the troops used after his victory to maintain the peace.  The rabid militia.  This unit now becomes available to build, but only in this town.

This way you get to have both some pre established special cities, and some that are more personally memorable to the player themselves as they play through the game again and again.

The ground-up diversity of Morrowinds landscape was amazing and gave an impression of genuine distance, I think the key to capturing this vibe is to make land-types impress themselves upon the architecture.

Athkatla on the the other hand, had an ambience unrivalled for my RPG experience...the way the sound and visuals combined to create the feeling of being initially lost and overwhelmed was incredible. Then to have this ambience pan out into the endless nooks and crannies of the storyline alongside the players growing familiarity was equally so. The key for me here was mostly the sound effects, but the sheer amount of unexplored (and self-contained) stories certainly helped.

Hope that helped.

I think this is a very important piece to making cities remarkable, memorable and awe-inspiring.  If all cities can grow into major cities, then there is nothing memorable about them, since they're all the same. As I see it, there should be three tiers of cities, minor (90% of the cities on the map), major (9% of the cities on the map), megalopolis (1% of the cities on the map).  Specific conditions should need to be met to create major cities, and so they'll be few and special, and a megalopolis takes special attention and care to build up, and are virtually a unique achievement of the kingdom its in.

Their rarity alone would make major cities and megalopolis's memorable, whats lies within the individual cities would add to their greatness.  These conditions would preferably be interchangable allowing a variety of strategies and ways to build big cities.

As far as specific things in a city goes:

The Great Memorial/Monument

Every great city has a rich history to support it.  And what better way to remember that history then to erect a large monument.  In major fantasy cities, this could be a statue of a great hero (like in baldur's gate 2, Tradesmeet), maybe its a simple stone wall with names scrawled on it (the monolith in Planescape: Torment), or a special tree (the white tree in Minas Tirith).  Whatever it may be it holds special significance to the citizens of the city, and is often something that inspires awe, wonder, or even fear into those who see it.

Maybe after a major event, or something important occurs, you could gain the ability to build some sort of landmark to celebrate or simply remember the occurance?

Morrowind's cities and Alkathla in Baldur's Gate 2 stand out for me as well.

I think it's about exploration, starting from how the city is revealed.

In Baldur's Gate 2, you spend a lot of time mucking about in the first dungeon, which is fairly dark and linear and frankly a bit of a grind. When you get out of there and into the city there's a real contrast: everything is bright and colourful and there are a hundred places to explore, the game just opens up and it's exciting.

In Morrowind you take a longish trip through a really interesting world, and then you see Vivec just looming out of the fog, and it's a really great design for a city. But even better is Ald'ruhn, House Redoran's main city. Ald'ruhn is built from giant shells, and has a sort of Sydney Opera House vibe. Again, the reveal is cool: for me I stumbled in during an Ash storm, and suddenly there are just these shapes. Again, in these cities there is all sorts of cool stuff to explore.

So the question is, can you capture the excitement of discovering and exploring a city with unique and interesting architecture and story content in Elemental? It seems tough. The trouble is, the only time I'm discovering a city is when it belongs to another player, in which case there isn't actually anything for me to do. My suggestion would be to have neutral cities (or minor faction cities?) where there are things for players to do than conquer them - marketplaces and auctions are an obvious one, attaching quests seems so as well.

Something that should be easier to do is to make cities unique, both by giving a faction a unique architecture style and by making cities grow differently - perhaps some sort of specialization system or a way to choose a building to be a prominent landmark? Or Wonders of the World? Or magical structures of some kind?

Wow, so many fond memories in this thread. I've been playing computer RPGs for quite some time, but I have to say that the ones from Elderscrolls 3: Oblivion stand out the most. Every settlement was unique, be it that it was fashioned from giant crabshells or huge mushrooms, or the metropolis Vivec itself.

Gothic 1 & 2 had also rather memorable settlements. Everyone went about their business during the day, to the pub in the evening and to bed at night. After a while some of those locales seemed like home because you knew them so well. "There's the smithy, over there's the fish vendor", etc. Everyone had a story and the whole place always seemed so alive.

In strategy games I liked (though memories are hazy) the cities in Rings of Medusa:

Cities were not just places to buy troops, but the game also relied on trade, gambling, ...

In a similar vein: does anyone remember Iron Lord and its mini games?

It's worth noting Civ IV has come the closest to this, with its unique improvements and resource system. It's still not great, but it's closer. I really hope you can work out how to do this; one way may be to take the idea of cities being characters, as if in an RPG, very seriously.

And why not ? What should you need ? I mean in a P&P RPG. What make characters remarkable are their stories, weaknesses. What make something unique ?

What would make a city unique ? Wonders are a good start, but in civ4 you can get 3 or 4 or 5 wonders in the same city. And they lose their uniqueness. Why not getting "free" special building thanks to what is alrady being built, thanks to whatever quests are being completed ? Think at it like the research. You don't choose the exact tech you need. You follow a global path.

Why not adding a choice in the game : after a certain point in a city growth you can make a choice. Do you want a "spécial" city (we need to find a word that would fit well in the lore of Elemental) ? If yes then you that city starts gaining some "uniqueness" points (yeah, I know I really need better words). After some kind of "breakthrough" you can choose something special about your city. The choices would depend on what is already built. A lot of inns ? then you can choose "Mother of allnights" and your city will attract more people, more gold, but you also get a lot more vice. You have a lot more quests with bad effects if you don't do them in time.

When you choose the path of uniqueness (or enligthnement - how do you spell that word ? - or darknessment - does that word exists ?) your city will always earn some "perks" that have always good and bad effects. Always.

All the cities we have fond memories of have their dark side.

That system would be cool IF there is enough choices to do. Think at it like that :

You start a game, and start building farms like crazy, researching the best farms you can get, and you don't have any houses, only hovels. Then your capital get to the 'town" rank. And you can choose a "path" :

• Military : your farmers can defend the town. But you earn less money because you have a higher upkeep.
• Diplomacy : that town becomes well know for its brilliant culinary art. You get a "Divine grain" to trade for in the diplomacy panel. Enemies also don't want to attack that town : you attacker needs to have at least 15% more diplomacy points to attack that particuliar city. But as they learn more and more about culinary facts, they lose their will to fight. You get a malus on all battles conducted in that town .. because beasts, magical beings and "pirates" don't bother eating well.
• Magic : you start learning some magic from the soil your working on. You get one more earth point for every 50 farming point in that town. But sometimes things happens. You get magical earth beings attacking the town.
• Exploring : Heroes hired in that town know how to survive with less food. they can last longer without supplies (in any system like that is ever used). But greedy rogues know that this town attracts a lot of heroes. And their gold.
• Civilization : the hovels you're living in are really well made. (think of the hobbit's home) a lot more people can live in : 50 from 10. But as those who live there don't want other places to live, you can't never build anything else there (and never built houses that would affect prestige or have other use)

If you have chosen the military path, then you will have to follow it (at least for some times. For instance you can change the path every 3 or 4 ranks, but the most powerful "city perks" would only be available at higer ranks).

to get the right to make a choice you would need o have a city with something "special". If you have the usual "4 hovels, a farm, two barracks a school, etc." then you won't have a chance to choose a path. The palace would let you choose whatever path you want, even if you don't have the rigth buildings to make a choice. then you would always have at least one city that could become ... special.

That would be cool

OK, I chimed in from 'there are no computer RPGs' crowd earlier. But I've been reading this thread with great interest so far, and I finally have a question for the folks who know lots of computer RPGs:

You've all named a bunch of cities, and sometimes more than one city per game. What was the largest number of cities you remember from a particular game?

I'm asking a sort of 'blind push poll' question here because I expect to learn that in most computer RPGs, cities are not numerous. That's true of every single fantasy novel or series I've read that includes maps in the books. But every epic-scale TBS map I've played has been prone to wall-to-wall cities, even if the map has the visual space provided by a sci-fi game like GC2. The problem almost seems analagous to finding the ideal size for a round-the-table RPG group. Playing through a serious epic is hard with just a handful of folks, but also gets hard when you start wondering how to seat 8 at your six-seat table, and adding players turns impossibly hard (or boring) right around there.

Well, in computer RPGs few cities is also a question of assets: it's expensive to build lots of cities. But in fantasy novels, you can check Dragonlance or Forgotten Realms, those worlds have maps with cities, towns, castles, temples, ruins,... everywhere.

Maybe it's not the 'bestest' city (in RPGs I played), but I will never forget the moment when I walked out of the tavern (with my party) in Easthaven (Icewind Dale) and heard this music. Nothing can beat these sounds (ok, maybe the song from elven city in BGII) and the overwhelming snow all around you.

New Reno!!!! Fallout 2. I feel sorry for all those that never experienced being an unwitting fluffer before. Good times.. i think.. or something. *cough*

My first post! More goodness to come.

quote: "OK, I chimed in from 'there are no computer RPGs' crowd earlier. But I've been reading this thread with great interest so far, and I finally have a question for the folks who know lots of computer RPGs:

You've all named a bunch of cities, and sometimes more than one city per game. What was the largest number of cities you remember from a particular game?

I'm asking a sort of 'blind push poll' question here because I expect to learn that in most computer RPGs, cities are not numerous. That's true of every single fantasy novel or series I've read that includes maps in the books. But every epic-scale TBS map I've played has been prone to wall-to-wall cities, even if the map has the visual space provided by a sci-fi game like GC2. The problem almost seems analagous to finding the ideal size for a round-the-table RPG group. Playing through a serious epic is hard with just a handful of folks, but also gets hard when you start wondering how to seat 8 at your six-seat table, and adding players turns impossibly hard (or boring) right around there."

I think the reason, as I stated in my post above, is that noone has really spent time on figuring out how to make cities seem special, in a TBS before. The problem is manyfold, but i think the primary problem is, that as a player you don't spend as much time with your individual cities, as you would with a character/hero, because the game usually isn't tailored towards that sort of gameplay. 

consequence: if you want to spend resources creating special cities, It should be damn fun playing around with them, you should have tons of options, and even more importantly, the city should feel alive, and autonomous, constantly giving you things to do, like an RPG character who has skills, inventory, stats, achievements etc. If you make the cities completely controllable like e.g. planets in GalCiv2, they become boring, as they lost personality and become robots. Take your inspiration from the classic CRPG player characters and see how they are brought alive.

Furthermore, as written above, its really a question of communication. If you present the city as a group of statpoints, it loses all magic, because its just numbers, and it puts the whole algorithmic background on display. Solution: Camouflage the rules with cool textual descriptions, pictures and characters. more examples in my post above, but here are a few more i thought of.

examples:

Use characters as representatives of different areas of the town. Make these characters alive and dynamic, not just talking heads.

A dirty habor city could have a pirate as the harbormaster, whom you interact with to control ship and trade buildings. Maybe he requires some blackmailing in order to do stuff you want

The small hamlet maybe has the miller/mayor as the spokesman of the whole village. 

The head of the assassins guild in the capital city may be a strong ally, but could possibly also take contracts on other of your city characters as part of her job, giving having an assassins guild a backside. 

In some old games I played - and forgot the name - you were a company that needed to do money thanks to trade. But you also had political things happening in Venice. You could try to become the doge. It would be a good idea to get some things to do in cities other than just building things. there were also a game that played in the ancient Rome. you had to deal with a TBS and a political simulation of the Senat.

And I like the idea of being able to graphically design my city.

Anyway, what do you think of my idea ? :

vieuxchat,  i think you are talking about the game machiavelli. that was great