Quoting Ashnal, reply 22because those are all totals of 9 tiles.
really 9 tiles and the majority of spots are 2 3 or 4, How many 5 6 7 and 8s have you seen.. I have a hard time believing its 9 tiles and not 5..
Quoting Ashnal, reply 22I think you're just misunderstanding the numbers here. We are NOT adding up the displayed numbers. We are adding up a hidden resource value for the nine tiles a city would draw resources from if placed in that spot. So each displayed number is a sum of the hidden resource values around it NOT THE OTHER SUMS.
This is one of my issues.. hidden mechanics are almost as bad as random ones... both of which are abundant in FE. But I digress.
I just went XML digging. After finding the ACTUAL tile yields I would agree with the 5 tile cross shape. Most land yields 1.5 Grain. Fertile Plains yields 1.5 Grain and 0.15 Essence. Forests yield 1.5 Materials. Rivers yield 1.5 Food and 1.5 Materials. Ogre camps yield 1 essence. Shards yield 3.5 essence according to the XML.
Hmmm. I'm not quite sure now how it all adds them up. I know for a fact a city between a Crystal Crag and Shrine ends up with 3 Essence. Tiles around only one of those get 1 Essence.
Even with all of this detail I'm digging into I wouldn't say the city placing mechanic is unintuitive simply because the player doesn't actually need to know the value of every tile and how it adds up. The player only really needs to know where he can place his city best to serve his needs. The totals inform the player of what a city will get if he places a city there. Compare this to Civ5 where I have to count up every tile when I'm placing cities.
Arguably the only real difference between FE and Civ5 in this respect is that Civ5 allows the player to make mistakes easier by requiring them to add up tile yields and allowing them to place cities in bad spots, which FE doesn't allow since you can't see tiles with less than 2 Grain.
Anyone interested in the XML can find the values in TerrainTypes.xml, CoreShards.xml, and CoreWorldResources.xml
EDIT: Hmmm, Crystal Crags give a value of 5 according to the XML. I'm really curious how the game calculates total yields with these values.
