City Specialization. How?

In all of my games of Fallen Enchantress, I've yet to figure out exactly how to specialize my settlements. A good strategy game encourages and makes it fairly obvious just HOW to specialize, but I've had a hard time determining the way to do this in FE.

I understand the main 3 divisions: food (population), materials (production), and essence (magic). The first problem I find is that these 3 areas do not have much variance at the settlement locations. I often see spreads like this: 2/3, 3/2, 3/4/1, 4/3, 3/2, etc. The possibility of a larger spread should possible, something like this: 7/2, 8/1, 2/6, 3/1/7. Because the variance is so low, specialization is kind of hard to achieve. What you end up is a slew of jack-of-all trade cities.

The second problem is building construction. Sure, you can specialize a settlement to be a Fortress, City or Conclave, but there's still nothing stopping me from constructing buildings that deviates from my specialization. When I have a fortress settlement and there is nothing left to build, but gardens, farms, and inns, that fortress either becomes a jack of all trade or sits idle.

What the game needs is the ability to upgrade or repeat-build existing buildings AND limit you on slots. This way, I can build 7 barracks in my fortress and get my troops uber-trained and uber-specialized. When I have 1 barracks to my 1 garden, it means the city is not specialized, it's the same as the one down the road.

An underrated, little-played strategy game that I really love is Star Wars Rebellion. This game had specialization down to a science. I could specify a giant material-laden planet to build 20 construction yards to pump out giant starships and work on the death star. I could specify another planet with 20 barracks to pump out my ground troops.

Maybe I'm missing something, but I think FE would benefit from a greater variance for specialization in both settlement placement and building construction than it currently has. Am I wrong? Can someone provide some pointers on how to specialize my kingdom better?

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You are seemingly forgetting that each specialization has it own buildings. Maybe half of the buildings are generic, like that garden you mentioned. These are generally meant to each add some small boost to certain things, like a small research or manna productions, or food, which every type of city needs in order to grow. No food buildings like Gardens, no level 3 cities.

The other half of those buildings, however, are totally different. Fortresses get buildings that let them church out tons of bonus laden troops very quickly. No other city type can manage this as well. Conclaves get buildings that stack on the research and mana productions, including mutlipliers to research, something no other city type can do. Towns have global food bonus buildings and other buildings that really bring in the dough, something no other city type gets access to. See the pattern here?

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your improvement options vary a LOT based on your city specialization, it can just be hard to tell sometimes... if there were a nice tree you could see of city progression options I think it would be a lot more clear........ if only something like that were coming in an update

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Quoting Kestral2040,

reply 2

Wait, so we would get something like the tech tree in our build menu, or just something to reference? That would be fantastic, I find it's hard to plan and specialize cities without seeing the big picture.

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Sure, you can specialize a settlement to be a Fortress, City or Conclave, but there's still nothing stopping me from constructing buildings that deviates from my specialization. When I have a fortress settlement and there is nothing left to build, but gardens, farms, and inns, that fortress either becomes a jack of all trade or sits idle.

I think you are missing something here. The garden, the farm, etc... help the city grow, and a workshop for example is needed for constructing buildings locally. Everyone gets these.

But the grocer->bakery->etc... help the whole faction grow, and those are not available to non-towns. The well->inn->festival helps a town grow, the merchant->tax office line brings money in, and some of the level upgrades give Empire wide bonuses to health.

A single fortress (I never build more) produces troops for the whole Empire.

A conclave has incredible bonuses to research that easily surpass the research output of 3-4 towns, let alone fortresses.

The other buildings you mentioned, you need them no matter what the city: for example, an alchemy lab requires construction, so you want to develop the workshop->mason->mill line in your conclave. That's not part of specialization, that's part of building a working city.

That said, in late game I stop developing construction infrastructure in conclaves, because my many towns bring gold in, and I mostly rush.

As for fortresses, it's the same late game. You just rush units in the best developed fortress you have built or conquered.

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This way, I can build 7 barracks in my fortress and get my troops uber-trained and uber-specialized.

Don't forget that you unlock new improvement with research.

You can't build 7 barracks but you can build the barrack then the command post then another one which names elude me.

Then you have the other line of buildings that adds + defence to your troops.

So no seven barracks but at least 6 (if not 8 I'm not sure) specialized building to improve your units.

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