Urban Upgrades

These upgrades are applied to a whole city district, they do not take up space in the district nor do they add to your population. You must apply them separately to each district, if you want the effects to cover your whole city. While they don’t add to the economic wealth of your city, they enable businesses.

(*) These upgrades have prerequisites that must be met before they can be purchased.

These upgrades apply to a whole town or city, they do not take up space nor do they add to your population.

⁽⁺⁾ These values change depending on the size of your settlement.

District Walls - District walls means that you can control the flow of people around your town. While some burglars might climb the walls, casual ne'er-do-wells and ruffians are kept out as the gates are closed and controlled overnight.

Paved Streets – Prerequisite = District Walls. Initially streets in towns and cities are packed earth which turns muddy during the winter and can get severely rutted. If you lay down a thin layer of dressed stone or rock you make movement around the district much easier and it becomes a nicer place to live.

Drains - Prerequisite = Paved Streets. Open sewers and drains that channel waste water away from the residential and business areas. Not a full sewer system, and you still need earth closets to dispose of bodily waste, but a big improvement. Note Proper underground sewers are something else and very much more expensive. You need to dig them out first, add drains to channel the waste away and finally install a magical fountain to drive the system. You could just install waste eating monsters, such as jellies or Otyugh – but that doesn’t fill the residents with confidence.

Magical Fountain - Prerequisite = Drains. A Decanter of Endless Water built into the structure of a ‘building’ with drains to remove the excess water. A monument or a park would be a good location for a Civic Fountain.

Magical Street Lights – Ever burning torches on each street corner :} Makes it easier to spot ne’er-do-wells, and makes it easier to get about at night.

Town Wall (Small) - A simple wall, with a basic wall walk, that surrounds your town and provides basic defence. The costs a given earlier are for a town with one or two districts. It costs an extra 1bp for every extra district, although you also gain one extra defence point per district – the loyalty and stability values never change. Each Defence Point represents a Watch Tower incorporated into the wall, you can have as many gates as you like, but it is conventional to site them next to a watch tower.

City Wall (Great) – A great wall circles your entire city – it is higher, wider and more solid than a town wall and has more watch towers. However you need one for each district. If you don't have enough Great Walls the bonuses don't count as the attackers can pour around the outside. The costs a given earlier are for a town with one or two districts. It costs an extra 2bp for every extra district, although you also gain Two extra defence points per district – the loyalty and stability values never change. Each Defence Point represents a Watch Tower incorporated into the wall, you can have as many gates as you like, but it is conventional to site them next to a watch tower. Large, important gates, are often flanked by a pair of watchtowers – and look much more impressive. You may upgrade a Town Wall to a City Wall for the difference in the listed prices - however, you must include any extra district costs and you should upgrade the whole wall.

Some thoughts on walls.

• Once a wall is built, it is difficult to change. Adding extra districts in after an enclosing wall has been built is difficult and will costs 3BP per extra district to account for changes to the old wall.
• Don’t get too hung up on surrounding all of your settlement with walls – you can continue to build districts outside your city wall. Even if you don’t do it deliberately, small settlements are liable to spring up outside each town gate to provide cheaper accommodation and cater for those who arrive after the gate is closed for the night. Historically most cities were like this.
• Plan ahead – if you know you want two (or more) Inner City districts – you could clear the space and put a wall around them BEFORE you start to build developments on them.
• Concentric walls are cool, and it is OK to build an outer wall - it is expensive but bonuses stack.
• Technically you could add extra outer walls, but that start to get really expensive, and you need a massive city ….