Creating cities and metropolis at the push of a button isn't a bad feature in Rome Imperator because it fit with the area. The greek and Roman created many cities.
But in a modern area game settings it feels out of place. You can have a huge amount of pops in a location and it won't grow into a town or a city if a god-player don't push a button to create a cities. This is not what happened in real life. Cities grow organically over time or get depopulated trough disasters and wars.
A better alternative in my opinion would be a urbanization system. In modern demographic statistics we divide people into rural and urban population.
In this system a location would have an urbanization level. A 0 would be an empty location, a 100 would be an entirely urban location. A middle age rural location would be around 20 or 30. The higher it is the more you get urban pops bonus and the less you get rural pops bonus (like food).
Urbanization would slowly grow with pops numbers, techs, player investment in infrastructures etc. and would decay trough wars, disasters and depopulation.
As for buildings, instead of being status related you would need a set amount of urbanization to build city-related buildings. Rural-related buildings would slowly get automatically destroyed if the urbanization level get too high.
What do you think ?
(I want to preface this by saying that it's been a year and now that we have finally seen the system in action, I think it's worth going over the subject again.)
I much prefer this idea of a dynamic system of urbanization; I think whatever number is made the threshold for a tier upgrade should have a buffer below that, so as to limit a ping-pong effect of Locations changing tiers back and forth.
Also, I think a number of rural buildings should be converted to urban ones when a settlements goes from Village to a Town, but not all of them need this.
I agree with you. Cities should not be created "using mana" but instead giving the location, and it's inhabitants the rights of town privileges,
as was common in Europe at that time. In my country i.e. it's very usual that many cities had its own town charter granted by the king at a certain date, and since then it's considered a town. For example, my town charter dates from 1095.
I really, really like the idea of handing out charters, it's flavourful and it doesn't reduce the action to a mere "building" as it is now.
Assuming it's balanced well, and there's no exploit around having solely rural settlements/towns/cities and neither of the other two, then I think the mechanic is conceptually fine. It gives the player more ability to control over their food use, and you don't get stuck in a loop of promoting to city, which reduces food output so it then depromotes back to town because of automatic mechanics.
This is why I'm digging into this subject - currently the meta is to build Towns/Cities in circles around your capitol, or wherever you manage to get as close as you can to the 100 Control maximum, for the maximum monetary gain.
Is it an exploit? Maybe, maybe not - it's what is most efficient. My issue is that it's not organic, at most you have two cities develop and eventually merge, like Buda and Pest into Budapest, but typically we don't see Warhammer 40K Hive-cities emerge.
It's been explained by the people who got access to the game that the malus to food output isn't a large enough problem, so perhaps a City should also penalize surrounding Locations, thus resulting in rather rough penalties if you stack cities? I think the meta would simply be to move cities into areas not necessary for food production, which wouldn't solve the city-stacking in the end.
I think granting city rights should be a State action, but towns should arise on their own if the conditions are favourable.
I think it makes sense to have a limit of a single city per Location, assuming a single tag owns it all. If several tags own different Locations, then it makes sense that they all can have one city each there (but perhaps there should be a penalty, or only a penalty if a tag were to own more than one of these cities in the Province.
I think granting City rights is a good mechanic as long as it doesn't magically will a bunch of people and buildings into existence (which doesn't seem to be the case).
It's founded in history and it seems like an interesting decision.
But I agree that it would be cool to have a dynamic event where the estates found their own cities, when the circumstances are right (high population and estate power in a good location) and you get to decide how to react to that.
I like the idea of charters, and I think that estates requesting charters (if granted, they get more Power in the Location for X amount of time, and you get a "free" Town/City) or demanding them if they are too powerful is a great idea! You could also bribe them during Parliament by giving them a charter.
All it does, is that it will allow you and your estates to do other things with that location, than what can be done with a rural location.
As I said above, I think that the Estates could be much more involved in these larger settlements, as they are seats of power.
If anything, the button should be even stronger than it is. Judging from the diary, right now you can only make a town if you have the required population in the state to do that, while historicaly, some cities were founded literary in the middle of nowhere. I think there should be some expensive "local policy" that will force people to move into the province where you wish to make a city. I think Imperator has something like that, though i'm not sure.
Perhaps a migration attraction bonus to the Town/City from surrounding Locations or the rest of the Province? I'm not sure how to make specific Locations have a migration attraction to a specific (different) Location, but I think it makes sense as cities pulled in population from their surroundings.
