Wonderful! That game was a gem, in my opinion.
Perhaps it might be similar to the āHome Cityā idea in Age of Empires III? The first settlement youād build would be the ācapitolā of your new civilization, and then your future builds would be the other cities, which might either be officially recognized in the game by a definition or basic criteria or you simply call them cities via signs/chat/etc. Your capitol would be more susceptible to special eventsābarbarians and raiders, huge celebrations, titan attacksāspecial events that only the TRUE heart of your empire could face.
This system is a bit problematic though, I realizeā¦what if the main city is lost or you want to move the definition to a newer city? You might get stuck with a capitol that falls behind its āsmallerā counterparts if you begin in a resource-dry area and later on it has to get force-fed even basic resources or babysat by troops created and deployed from far away regions.
I have to admit, supply caravans would be very interesting to see and very useful if this was the situation, but it might be quite time consumingā¦
am i right in thinking that i heard them issue this question already? i seem to remember them saying its going to be one settlement total. i guess if you are playing multiplayer you would see two of them
hereās a fairly recent comment from one of the live streams:
Will there be colonization aspects to the game, where form your main city you have satellite settlements?
āThat sounds like a great feature for an expansion. We want to make
sure we nail one city management, thatās not to say you can have only
one city. If you chose to send some guys off and make two cities weāre
not going to stop you, but thatās not what we are going to optimize
for.ā
i assume this means that the management tools will not be able to distinguish between the two towns.
I guess there is going to be nothing to stop you from expanding out a settlement in the middle of nowhere but your interface is not going to understand that site ābā should follow āxā rules and site āaā should read āyā rules. if that makes sense???
I guess the significance of this is they are tying to stear away from heavy micro management. so if you were to click the button selecting all of the carpenters for instance then move them to a location then all from site āAā and site āBā would move thereā¦ O.o
you kinda lost me thereā¦
but (and this is just spitballing here) perhaps you can have another settlement clear across the map, and potentially ālockā units to that area via the sleep system? if i have carpenters, workers and other units, all with beds at location B, they would be pretty much confined to that area (it would seem)ā¦ while my original units in location A would have their beds located there, and in turn be locked to that locationā¦
Hmā¦ why do people want to manage more than one city?
I see the need for some āoutpostsā, may they be military or civic. But this should be possible with the way Stonehearth is planned to be designed already, no?
Letās take a remote place where you have found some rare ore:
- You can build there a small hut with some beds and assign a couple of workers there (so they do not have to run back to your citiy to sleep).
- You can create an area to collect the ore, just next to this building, so your workers can focus on mining and do not have to transport the ore back to the city.
- You can order some additional workers to bring the resources from the spot where they are mined, to your city, i.e. more or less relocating the storage.
- The same transport could bring food to your outpost, so they are well fed and do not starve.
- Half the way, where the mean Goblins are, you can erect a tower with some soldiers assignedā¦ who are protecting the trade-route.
Now just replace ore with food, wood, etc. and you can apply the same approach. Sounds for me quite interesting as you have to protect your outpost and organize the exchange of goods to support your major city.
Creating a second city on the other handā¦ that might be another game, or more a multi-player option, no?
For sure the ideas mentioned, like moving your city to a new place, etc. would make senseā¦ but that would not require the ability to create a second city, I guess.
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well thinking back to the old RTSās you would use a macro button system to tie certain units to tasks. I guess it wouldnt be to hard.
also you could use a border defining tool to select and area and designate it to a city etcā¦ this would tie in great for the the varying layers of aggression. it the larger the city border the more or harder the enemies.
This way you would assign toons to beds and these beds would be in a city which would make them a citizen.
i love the idea of expanding out into the world and setting up settlements. would make for some interesting trade opportunities. you could even declare a city as independent and have a new faction to trade and engage with.
I can already see a problem. You could simply assign multiple areas that merge into one contiguous area, and that would both keep down the attacks and allow you to build a megacity of over 150!
with two areas you would have two sets of attacks so the level of threat would still be the same. Say for every square foot of territory you would have 1 enemy attack per day etcā¦ when and where they attack is another matter.
If you were to declare them āfreeā then the aggression would be divided up depending on the percentage. say you delair the 2nd part of the of your empire free in order to open up trade with an independent nation and that territory amounted to 40% of your total āempireā. The total aggression towards you would be dropped by 40% and the newly delaired nation would receive the extra 40%. That way the climate could shift and they could potentially be taken out if they are not self sufficient. Leaving you incentive to have militia in each city and not just rely on the capital to save you.
Yes, I think this is exactly right; thereās nothing to stop you from putting buildings all over the map, but thereās zero built-in support to manage to two separate settlements. Thatās how I interpret what Radiant has said, at any rate.
-Will
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perhaps a profile mod is in order then.
to be honest i reckon most people will be content with their single city empire with border patrols etc but for those who want more then some creativity might be in order. The guys at radiant have lots on their plate already but i would love to get my hands on the game to get modding! 
I wonder, would the buildings have a āsafe zoneā around them in which enemies would not spawn? If so, you could pretty much make a massive area that is āsafeā simply by spacing out the buildings a little more.
Right, most of these ideas defining outposts is pretty much what I figuredāvery nicely put. Mostly, I figured a ātownāārather than an outpost or your main ācityāāmight be useful for sustainability and defensive purposes when faced with far distances or awkward traveling, like a mountain range between your two groups of people. Think of it as a satellite fortress to fall back to in the case of attacks.
But really intrigues me is whether this smaller ātownā would have the means to produce more settlers; I figure most outposts, simply a few beds, some workshops, and a general building or two, might not be able to support this function.
Or maybe the main city is the ONLY entity with this ability? If thatās the case, then the importance of your ācityā far overshadows that of a town, where the latter may just be a larger settlement to house more villagers compared to your regular outpost. This would also make it significantly harder to create far-away establishments, encouraging the player to appreciate the value of your local surroundings. I feel that the ability to create more workers has always seemed to define whatās a ācityā in earlier strategy games like the Warcraft and Age of Empires series. Without a Town Center to simply resupply your workers, you need to treasure every unit youāve got.
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This is a similar problem in minecraft, and the solution was to have a main base, with smaller outposts around points of interest (mines, farms, trees, processing, etc) the easiest way to move between them was powered minecarts, and you just hop on the correct track, while still storing all your stuff at main base, it works quite well for me, since I tend to build my house where I spawn
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Hereās another consideration I just realized. Regarding the dimensional planes (a long way from now, I know!), Iād assume youāll be inclined to build some sort of home city-equivalent in these other realmsāpending whether or not theyāll be safe enough to inhabit them like the origin world. We donāt really have much information on the topic now, but Iād guess the player will be ultimately faced with similar challenges to the origin world, such as bandits and opposing factions, wild creatures, even titans indigenous to the new realms.
If we do have these alternate citiesāor at least basic outposts to defend your point of access into the plane-- would this mean the player could get faced with three or four different attacks at once across the planes? Or would these worlds pause when there arenāt players present, like the Nether from Minecraft? Maybe itās some sort of space-time issueā¦
Then again, who said extra-dimensional city management would be easy?
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again, im sure thereās a t-shirt quote in there somewhereā¦ 
i really like the idea of a base of operations on an alternate planeā¦ but you raise a good question about āwhat happens back at home baseā while you are awayā¦ i would assume that the units autonomy would be intelligent enough to carry out whatever orders you had set forth at base, while you are focusing your attention elsewhereā¦
but as you pointed out, we are just too far out at this point to know for sureā¦ an interesting discussion thoughā¦ 
the idea of creating a time-lapse (aka freezing time when you arenāt around) has come up in streams. This might be difficult to implement when youāre going multiplayer though.
If the time-lapse wouldnāt be in place there should be something to prevent titan attacks etc. from happening seeing as its quite difficult to respond at a time when you have an extra dimensional base to defend and the original city. Iām quite looking forward to the solution for this. (This is partially a battle-system problem aswell).
thats an interesting point/delimaā¦ perhaps (at its simplest) your military units can be set in a defensive posture, and will attempt to ward off enemy attacksā¦
the moment they engage a threat, perhaps an alert can be triggered, and your units will have bought you enough time to notice the alert, and return your focus to the plane under attackā¦
Gameplay progression would also play a role in this though, i can imagine that more difficult attacks come for your city as youāve invested more time in the game (aka made more enemies). And when you focus up on making a few characters that just completely stomp over anything in their way i can easily see that your forces are too significantly divided to actually stand a chance. Note that iām for this degree of difficulty though, you should only venture out when you are more than 100% safe from enemy attacks except huge raids and titan attacks which would have to be scouted first. Scouting is key in any game where you control numbers of enemies (also in some single players though).