City and District Leveling Guide

Leveling up your city center and districts is vital to making your citizens happy and expanding your empire without suffering serious penalties. Here's an explanation of how the system works.

Why Is My City/Empire So Unhappy?

In Endless Legend, cities grow when you use the borough improvement to add a new district to it. It increased the physical size of the city and allows you to gain the benefits of additional tiles around your city.

But it also makes your citizens unhappy. Every new district decreases city approval by 10. And every new city you start (or conquer) also reduces your city approval by 10. When your cities are unhappy, your science and dust generation is penalized. So you need to get everybody happy again and get dust and science bonuses again.

City centers and districts can also be upgraded in power in a mechanic that isn’t really explained well in the game, despite it being extremely important to your city's growth. You may have received a quest telling you to level your city center or a district to level 2 and wondered, "What does that mean?" This system of leveling up your city is an important method of making your citizens happy again. Technologies like the sewer system and spamming bundles of luxury resources are not your only options.

Simple Instructions on Leveling Up Your City Center

Your city center starts at Level 1. In addition to whatever the tile generates when you founded the city, the city center also adds 1 science, 1 dust, and 1 influence (and takes away 1 food).

Whenever you build a new district, that district does pretty much the same. In addition to the basic tile yield displayed on the map, it adds 1 science, 1 dust, and 1 influence. But it also penalizes the approval level of the city by 10.



But the city center changes if you build four districts on the tiles that directly touch it. The city will then raise up to level 2. This will increase the science, dust and influence it produces. More importantly it now adds +15 to the city's approval. Voila! Your citizens are happier! There's even a graphics change to the city center. You can see that it's taller and more prominent than it was before.

The picture above was a level 1 city center. Here's level 2. Notice the central pillar of the Cultists is taller and more prominent.



But that +15 doesn't counteract the -40 you've gotten from building those four districts. That's okay. The districts level up as well.

Simple Instructions for Leveling Up Your Districts

A district jumps up to level 2 when it is adjacent to four other districts, or three other districts and the city center. Just as with the city center it will generate more dust, science and influence when it levels up. More importantly, the -10 approval penalty disappears and is instead replaced by a +5 approval bonus. Again, there's also a graphics change to the district making it look bigger and busier than the level 1 districts.

Take note in the changes to the district just to the left of the city center between these two images.





Ultimately what this means is that in order to build a happy city (especially a large one), it should tend to radiate out in a pattern like a circle or triangle rather than snake around to reach certain tiles. The city center doesn't have to be in the middle of the growth, but do keep in mind if you want a city to be large, you need to make sure it's not too bottlenecked by water, cliffs that can't be built on, ruins or minor faction villages, or the boundary to another region. Building by an anomaly may be a boon for a starting city, but beware that its location on the map could actually make it harder for your city to grow after a certain point.

The Cultists and Level 3

To account for fact that the Cultists can only build one city, they are given the bonus ability to level their city center and districts up to level 3. Everybody else is limited to 2. To reach level 3 in the city center, level up four districts touching your city center to level 2. They get another boost in science, dust, influence and approval at level 3. To reach level 3 in a district, it must touch four other districts that have reached level 2 (the city center counts as a district here). This makes it all the more important for Cultist players to be careful when selecting the starting spot for their only city. You need room to expand in more than one direction.






Also: If you build in such a way that a luxury or strategic resource is within your city limits, you don't have to build an extractor on it. Instead, if you build a borough on top of it, you will automatically begin extracting the resource, as long as you have the right technology to extract it learned. In these cultist images for the guide, you can see buroughs built on titanium and emerald resources. I never bothered with the extractor for either, but I am collecting both after learning the right technology.

[Dot]

Thank you!

[Thornstromb]

Concluded :

The golem camp, uniquely, can be placed anywhere in the region and has NO adjacency benefits of its own (it doesnt level up). This means you can either A: place the camp in a military or economic hardpoint that is difficult to reach from your city, exploiting the full 7 tiles (itself and the 6 around it). OR B: place it adjacent to another district. this reduces its military and economic benefits, but allows it to act as a 4th district without "exposing" a leveled district.

[Thornstromb]

Continued:

Cultists generally dont worry too much about optimizing their build pattern due to the fact that any solid cultist build will eventually cover thier entire starting region. Just watch your approval levels.

Expansionist factions generally ignore approval late-game, due to the implausability of managing empire-wide approval levels once your city count reaches the upper teens.

Note that all terrain buildables except for extractors and watchtowers count as districts. this includes the legendaries, the Altar of Auriga, Docks, and the Golem Camp. Note that the overwhelming majority of these have level-based bonuses, read them carefully.

[Thornstromb]

previous poster is only part right.

the "end target" is that fro ANY city shape, the "edges" are going to be weaker. the 2-wide "Stick" is popular because it has a minimal 4 "weak" districts, and can be expanded until you run out of space. No matter what faction you play is, if you run out of "stick" space then unless you built really dumbly, you should be large enough that it doesnt matter how else you build.

However, this is not the end of the matter. "Triangle" shapes, when fully built, have only 3 "weak" districts. the issu is that they lose performance as soon as you start adding more nodes. Also note that a Stick accesses the maximum *number* of exploited tiles compared to any other city shape.

Even so, remember that the main issue with weak districts is the approval penalty. This can be offset or negated depending on luxury levels, approval buildings you have researched, faction choice, and most importantly anomaly access.

[Avallac]

this is terrible advice as you should always build 2 tile wide lines of districts and not triangles or especially "circles". The only exception is some very specific population levels and cultists which can outperform lines with triangles but its very circumstantial.

[SuShiWaRRioR]

Are there formations of city/districts which balances between exploiting the land while maintaining a decent approval? Accounting that some district tiles (i.e. ones gained from auriga temple) does not reduce approval, and with technology (i.e. Sewers) that boost approval, there could be enough leeway to stray away from the suggested builds of a triangular city and perhaps obtain more land for exploitation?

[TheStorm]

Anyone know what happens if you customize your faction to include high seat of the queen (+1 max district level) and Great builders (also +1 District level cap? Would that make it so that if you have a city tile completely surrounded by districts it becomes level 4?

[Zim B7]

damn, now I have to start my empire from the scratch, thanks for such clarification

[ledeir]

Thank you for this clear description on city level!

[madgamer2]

I am abit of a mentally slow thinking person. Now it might be because I am at easy level (trying to understand thethe game systems) but eacg city srarts with the ciry center and 6 surounding tiles. If I should be next to 3 or 4 exsiting tiles to expand without taking a dive in my populaerity.