The lack of cities in the game

[LiuBeiwasGreat]

As it has been pointed out before the newest RTK game has a large amount of open space between cities showing spectacularly how few cities these games really have. We know that there are far more locations then the games allow us to go to however there are some barriers to using them in the game.

In my opinion the first and primary reason why we have access to so few locations pertains to the amount of officers in the game. Considering how many officers it takes to preform tasks it would be very difficult for factions that aren't led by Cao Cao, Liu Bei, or Sun Quan to garrison the territories if we doubled the amount of cities in the game. I mean sure we can add a couple more cities to the Qing province but how will Kong Rong run them with his average of 3-4 officers (including himself) Sure Kong Zhu can run another city with the one other guy in his force right?

Another barrier is late game difficulty. Let's face it, if we add a large amount of cities to the game in the end Cao Pi/Rui is going to be in charge of the majority of them. and if you are playing as him the game will be freakishly easy while if you are poor Gongsun Kang you are just screwed. Even Liu Chan, or Sun Quan would be hard pressed to face a Wei who has a dozen more cities pumping out armies, even if they had a few more of their own.

Game length is another issue, games would take far longer and Koei would need to keep things interesting enough to justify the increased length.

There are ways to bypass how empty things feel without increasing the amount of cities to a large degree. I personally felt that the map in RTK 10 felt pretty full even though it only had a few more cities then in 11. The inclusion of places where you could build camps,forts, made the game seem less empty without creating new locations to garrison troops or officers. in 9 You could put armies in gates and Forts allowing them to be actual real bases that simply didn't have the extra advantages of cities.

As for solutions, the obvious answer would be to put in more officers, but the question would be from where? Well SGZ has quite a few characters that only get named once or twice and never appear in the game. I remember reading recently Dong Zhou's bio and it listed a ton of civil officials who Dong Zhou executed that just aren't in the game. I believe Zhuge Liang's bio mentions several officers who were executed alongside Ma Su who don't appear in the games. I am sure that there are quite a few other characters who could be given sub par stats and tossed in to help fill new cities. However there is a flaw to this plan. The only groups that will benefit from this will be larger factions that have these throw away characters. Yan Baihu, or Kong Zhu aren't going to get any of these officers more then likely, so it will mainly be larger factions that don't really need more people that will get these officers.

Koei could make up new people to give to smaller factions,perhaps have an option to include some "made up daughters" that each faction leader can have join their force. This could help balance the games but it might upset fans who want a more "pure" experience that would get ruined with made up officers being sprinkled around. After all, we we really want to buff up smaller groups we can create and assign officers ourselves. However we cannot make more cities ourselves.

I really want opinions as to how we could include more cities while still keeping the game fun. Nobunaga's Amition has far far more cities and castles while having far far far far less landmass, I admit that late game Sphere of Influence can be a drag, trying to conquer so many locations when you are already the undisputed winner of the game can be very annoying. However i love looking at how many locations there are in comparison to RTK 11.
Let me know what you all think, are there solutions to this or is this something we just have to accept from a setting that is relying on records from 1800 years ago.

[Lord_Cao_Cao]

RoTK XIII has 60 cities, 8 gates and 147 villages of which many are hidden at game start (due to free cities). The map looks less open once you unlock all of them.

http://i.imgur.com/V6mFnfW.jpg

Probably not as full as NA (never played it, so I've no idea), but still.
The map in 10 was also smaller and the city models bigger. At least it seemed so to me.

The problem is, you could always add more officers, but it gets pointless when you don't add functionality so that you could utilize all of them properly. I like to think of Rise of Heroes in XI here, where the 3 main rulers have all like 40-50 officers each in one city and 2/3 of them can't be used at all due to AP constraints.
In XII, you could only assign one officer per city facility. In XIII, you have a max of 8 mission slots (sometimes 9 if someone suggests a mission himself) you can distribute among your officers (of course, assigning prefects or governors gives each of them another 5-8 slots to give officers some work).

But I do think that with regard to smaller forces, adding new officers should work. Guys like Min Chun and Geng Wu for Han Fu, guys like Sun Shao, Shi Yi, Zong Bao and Zheng Yi for Kong Rong... you wouldn't even need to make up officers for most of them. And for later scenarios, there's still a ton of officers that are not in the game and if they're not enough, you could add some kids of established officers that historically only inherited some rank.

[Gray Riders]

There's one method I've thought of before to allow huge city numbers to work; the ability to recruit "new" randomized officers. Add a new command that let you choose an officer type (politician, strategist, commander, and so on. If the game has a research system you could have some new types added).

You then select an existing officer who'll spend some time training a new officer who'll pop with a random name and random portrait after however many turns. Their stats and skills would be based off the type you hired but slightly randomized and with a bonus (nothing too huge) based off the abilities of the officer who trained them. They'd be generally competant but not exceptional--say high 60s in their main stats and 40s or so for others. If you send a very good officer for the initial training and have luck you could get someone kind of good but not Ling Tong tier or anything like that.

Someone like Gongsun Kang can spend some turns getting a competent force together to run his city/cities, the late-era will run more smoothly, and it won't require as much work to implement as adding hundreds of new officers who need portraits and to be assigned to each scenario.

Probably not as full as NA (never played it, so I've no idea), but still.

It's hard to give an exact number for how many cities Sphere of Influence has because some cities aren't in certain scenarios but I'd say in the 200-300 range.
Koei was kind enough to let you declare victory with "only" about a third of them though. Of course the Warring States didn't end with someone conquering everything, but in ROTK it'd feel weird to win without controlling pretty much the entire country.

[Zyzyfer]

I was sort of going to comment on implementing a system basically like what Gray Riders mentioned, but Gray covered all the bases with that. Random officer generation would go a long way toward resolving the traditional issues associated with having a low number of officers.

As for number of cities, I don't mind what's there, I just wish Koei would stop adding crap and then taking it away again. Just put the stuff in there and move on. But the company has always taken this "two steps forward, one step back" approach with new ROTK releases, so in a way, it's to be expected.

I say keep the number of cities about the same (put all the existing ones over the years in). I mainly kind of wish they would just implement more thoughtful city siege and field battle systems, one issue I had with XI was that taking a city was simply attack, siege, win, rebuild all of the things. There was no way to experience city growth, cities are all basically the same outside of contending with their particular geography in battle. If I take Xuchang from Cao Cao after 20 years, it's the same as taking it in the first year, oh well.

That said, I haven't seen much of XIII, who knows, it might be just what the doctor ordered for me for all I know.

[Sun_Kai]

I was sort of going to comment on implementing a system basically like what Gray Riders mentioned, but Gray covered all the bases with that. Random officer generation would go a long way toward resolving the traditional issues associated with having a low number of officers.

As for number of cities, I don't mind what's there, I just wish Koei would stop adding crap and then taking it away again. Just put the stuff in there and move on. But the company has always taken this "two steps forward, one step back" approach with new ROTK releases, so in a way, it's to be expected.

I say keep the number of cities about the same (put all the existing ones over the years in). I mainly kind of wish they would just implement more thoughtful city siege and field battle systems, one issue I had with XI was that taking a city was simply attack, siege, win, rebuild all of the things. There was no way to experience city growth, cities are all basically the same outside of contending with their particular geography in battle. If I take Xuchang from Cao Cao after 20 years, it's the same as taking it in the first year, oh well.

That said, I haven't seen much of XIII, who knows, it might be just what the doctor ordered for me for all I know.

From a live stream I found about the PUK from a steam post was a regular soldier commanding a unit in ROTK XIII, could this be KOEI's attempt at balancing factions with lower officer count? I'll find the post again (there was at least a hundred pages and it wasn't in the first or last few. somewhere in the middle.)

[DragonAtma]

Keep in mind that some (if not most!) of those "villages" were cities or even major cities. For example, that "village" between Xiapi and Xiaopei, called Pengcheng? Not only was it a city, but it was a major city (and Tao Qian's capital) up until 193, when Cao Cao avenged his father's murder by massacring the people there.