@Vesiger
It's entirely decided by your era at the moment of the shuffle. It's why wise players time their advancement to the next era to immediately after a neighborhood shuffle. Apart from bringing them to the top part of the ranking, giving access to superior troops for defence and offense, it will also leave them to dominate the higher level Tower Tournament. Additionally, by the time of the next shuffle, they'll have had two weeks to establish their city according to their new era.
These players are among those who freak out some other players in the neighborhood, who will then complain that Inno puts higher era "bullies" into their neighborhoods. While Inno does do that in some few neighborhoods, it's extremely rare. The fact is, if the complainants make the same, wise, strategic choice, they'll be in that group themselves, at some point. Until then, they can do well enough without being #1.
@Lugh Longarm
That's a good point, actually. My response will be that it really goes more to esthetics and the logic of fixed history, than to the concept and needs of the game.
Modern looking buildings will look out of place in an LMA city; that's esthetics. They could, and maybe should, have some of the GBs change their appearance as the player advances. However, that's a lot of work to implement. Also, there will be some need of suspension of disbelief, no matter what, which is a
lot cheaper. So, in those cases, they leave us to look at the stats, rather than the design, and accept the artistic license of the graphic designers. The buildings have to look like something, and, whatever they look like, it'll be inappropriate for some era or other. After all, building the a "tower to reach the heavens" (Tower of Babel) in the Modern Era, should result in a completely different design, not to mention a much taller building. Yet, in the game, players do build it in later eras, and it comes out looking like a Bronze Age building.
The exact location of buildings can't be entirely realistic; the disaster of having a Saturn 5 lifting off in NYC would be even greater, LoA would never be built inland, ToB, LoA and CoA in the same city is literally a contradiction of terms, etc. To make the placement of all buildings logical, would require an entirely different game, with each player building multiple cities in multiple locations, and with a much different area grid, to accommodate the need for isolated locations.
The fixed, real world history can't be completely integrated in strategy games with a long historic timeline, as they severely restrict the strategic choices, in the extreme eliminating them entirely. Games like FoE fall into the
Alternate History genre, a sub-genre of
Sci-Fi., based on "what if" questions, such as: What if da Vinci had received unlimited funds to realize his inventions? What if the Chinese, experimenting with manned rocket flight in the middle ages, had succeeded? What if the Romans had been crushed early, leaving the scientifically far more productive Greek civilization to dominate? What if the Mongols had conquered Europe, becoming a bridge between Chinese and European culture and science? What if the Thera Eruption hadn't occurred, and the Minoan civilization, hundreds of years ahead of others, had survived? Of course, you're left to imagine the "what ifs" on your own.
Not only might the speed of technological advancement have been greatly different with such "what ifs", but the order of advancement might, as well. Perhaps not quite as extreme as "a Saturn 5 lifting off from a middle ages city", of course, but it's fiction, after all.
Inno has found a balance between all these concerns, and changing it won't happen fast, even if they decide to. In fact, it may be easier and faster to make an entirely new game.
