Arbitrary settleable spots

The big reason has to do with people bitching and moaning about "city spam".  So now we are stuck only being able to build cities in certain spot, and also get a an unrest penalty to building more cities.  I never understood why in an empire building game people bitched about being able to make large empires.  

I don't know about duct tape, but it's been that way forever.  One thing to consider is that the yield displayed on the tile is not specifically for that one tile.  It's a total of that tile and the 8 surrounding tiles.  Basically this game does the math for you that Civ didn't and you can see the difference between locations at a glance.

The problem for players coming from Civ (aka, everyone) is that the way FE/LH represents tile yields hits that uncanny valley.  Even though this representation is actually clearer, because it looks like Civ, it's confusing.  But you just need to get used to it.

As to why most of the map isn't settleable, that's a long-standing design decision.

... that I really appreciate.

perhaps the rivers in Elemental are diseased and polluted due to the cataclysm so cities can only be built where there are natural wells (I realize there is a Well improvement you can build in Towns; I think of that as a more advanced municipal aqueduct system that utilizes the existing aquifer).

made me think of this article I read today.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/quora/2013/05/21/medieval_europe_why_was_water_the_most_popular_drink.html

In the files on the terrain, there are bonuses to certain facets to the tile. fertile land gives bonus to grain, forest material.... everything. As sweatyboatman says the game does the math for you. If the sum of the tile yield exceeds a minimal threshold (6 I believe) it will display on the map as a settable location and mark what that single location tile will provide as a whole for ALL the tiles surrounding it. Civ used the system to say this tile gives this, and this tile gives this and so forth.

But in FE: LH each square is the sum total of all 9 tiles, the tile and the 8 surrounding it, as the location value.

The world is not settable everywhere because of a huge cataclysm that destroyed most the land and these spots of fertility are the only viable plcaes to build a large city as it were. The minimal distance between cities is a design decision and which nullifies settability too close together.

Remember though, it has been a hundred years.  Rivers for the most part should be reasonably clean with the exception of ones coming from areas open to deeper rocks and carrying dangerous mineral contents.  So chasms and areas like Abeix lair should not have good food from rivers but others should.  I think Heavenfall did something like this, polluted rivers in his Stormworld mod.

but it was a really bad cataclysm, and a magical one at that.

You know a lot about LH parrottmath, are you able to tell me if there is still a hard limit on how good a tile can be so that tile yield practically never exceeds 9?

I actually wish there were fewer, smaller settleable areas. The idea that people would want to be able to build cities anywhere is overwhelming.

yes, but you can change that hardcap within the elementaldefs.

<MaxTotalTileYield>9.0</MaxTotalTileYield>

Once again - I don't mind the existence of discrete settlement spots, I mind the way the game presents them and they disconnection from the actual map features (plains, hills, rivers, etc.).

There are no disconnection. If  you look at the terrain files, the river terrain provides a certain amount of essence as well as grain. Each plain tile provides a certain amount of grain , essence and material. The forest terrain provides a certain amount of material. The sum totals of the 9 tiles around each spot provides the data you see. I fail to see how there is a disconneciton between the numbers seen and the features presented.

**The numbers are calculated from the features.**

If they are not calculated from the actual map features, then there is a bug in their system. But as far as I've seen and experimented (tweaking the values of each of the terrain types), the grain and materials only show up from these features themselves. So the complaint really is you don't like their numbers, which can be edited in the terrain files.

I think it's an issue of presentation. The player only sees that you can settle certain parts of the map and not others, and fairly often those parts you can settle look much like those parts which cannot be settled. If the green (or blue) forests, hills, and plains only appeared in the inhabitable areas, and the uninhabitable areas always had the brown hills and plains, the dead forests, and the deserts, then there would be an immediate and obvious distinction between those areas in the player's mind. However, I have often seen inhabitable dead woods and brown hills or plains, and uninhabitable green forests, hills, and plains.

Right next to the inhabitable patches are vast tracts of space that are uninhabitable but which look much the same as the inhabitable spaces, and so the player is left to wonder why they can settle in some areas of the giant dead forest and not in others.

As a result, there is no obvious distinction that the player can see between inhabitable and uninhabitable, and so the impression is that the fertility of the land is arbitrary.

Plus, it's also not particularly obvious why individual tiles have the values they get unless you're aware of the fact that the tile values are based on what's around them. If you're used to Civilization-style games, then you expect that the value on the tile is the value for that tile, rather than the sum of all the stuff around it, and so the distribution of the numbers looks rather arbitrary.

error when editing

I also had the same concern as the OP, and your post made it a bit more clear, and therefore fun for me to find settle locations.

I would still prefer to see each tiles value, but what you say makes sense. 

There is still an issue. If I increase my borders, I should be able to get more tiles values, don't I? Not saying cities are underpowered, it's just that it would be more fun the other way. (yes, I come from civ like somebody said everybody does here :P)

Thanks. I think the hard cap is "anti-fun" and am puzzled why Stardock did it, but at least I can fix it myself (though the correct solution would probably be a scaling semi-hard cap which I am guessing would require coding).

Actually do I just change the Data\English\Elementaldefs.xml file directly or do I have to do something else? I changed it to 13.0 but it doesn't seem to have worked because to test it I created multiple new maps but never saw any tiles in the starting area with total yield > 9 (either that or they are sufficiently rare that they didn't need to implement the hard cap anyway!)

Mmmm, restarted at least 30 times and no joy. Plenty of 9 yields but nothing above. I've either done it wrong (not sure how, I just changed the 9.0 to a 13.0) or it doesn't work.

The odds of getting a higher valued tile is pretty rare, but if you edited the file and left it alone and started a new game it should show up. Unless I missed something else that is preventing it from increasing.

If you know the values of each tile, it should be easier to check if it's working or not. Just check the values of the city radius tiles and see if they exceed 9 or if they are indeed 9.

I have no idea about the values of each tile tho

One difficulty here is that there are actually 3 different "plains" tiles. You have rough terrain (shows up as plains), you have land (shows up as plains), and you have fertile land (shows up as plains). If you are going to exceed 0, you are going to need to find a shard next to a wheat field. This will gaurantee a tile sum over 9. For the most part, some of the difficulty is that they have minimum tile yields as well for particular things, like material, has a minimum yield of 3.

In general it is difficult to have a tile that exceeds 9 grain, material, essence yield.

The game I ended up playing does indeed have a shard next to a wheat field, the square has 3/3/3.

I rebuilt the map well over 50 times in the end before giving up (crashing the game twice in the process). There were some maps which had half a dozen tiles grouped together with 9 total yield, but never any with more then 9 yield. As I said I'm pretty confident that either I've changed the file wrong or it doesn't work (or I was just incredibly unlucky!).

Not long ago I played a game and conquered a wild land. I was thinking- boy, now I'll be able to get a really awesome city in there because it should have high values for each of the areas. Wrong! Just the 9 tile max. I was pretty disappointed. Seems like if you clear out the wildlands you should be able to settle a city there that has an above average yield of tiles. Now, it is nice they have access to some special tiles and all 5/6 shard types, but higher yields would seem appropriate (if possible).

The whole yield cap seems totally unnecessary for me. It removes one of my remaining reasons for enjoying exploring, and coming on top of also removing the heroes from the map, has really affected my enjoyment of the game (I understand why they removed heroes but the fact remains it did impact the exploring aspect). And for what? I struggle to see what problem Stardock think they were solving by implementing a hard cap - were people having too much fun building really strong cities? Oh, the horror!

If there is some serious reason why Stardock thought they really must have a cap then at least make it a scaling one so that 10 is possible but rare, 11 is very rare, 12 might be a once in a few games discovery (or from a wildland), etc.

Alright I changed the value of the resource yield from 9.0 to 12.0 and I found this

There are a few 5 3 2 spots as well as a 6 3 1 spot. Mind you I had to SEARCH around the entire medium map to find these spots and they are were not easily found, they are few and far between, in fact MOST tile yeilds are 9 and there are VERY rare tile yeilds that actually go above 9. So there is really little reason for the tile yield cap, except to tell the players quite pressing ctrl + N, because the chance of your finding higher than 9 is very VERY small anyway.

Other than this area, I found 2 other areas with higher than 9 and it was only 1 tile in each of those areas that have it -- MEDIUM sized map -- 

I created a mod to address some of the issues brought up in this tread, feel free to check it out.

https://forums.elementalgame.com/444847/page/1/#3362647