I’d recommend installing a caching plugin for Wordpress, one that generates and serves static files. Something like… http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cache/

I haven’t tried that one, but it’s the tactic I often employ these days after writing a horribly inefficient PHP script (yes, that’s right, they’re trusting ME to write code these days).

Yoink.

Right that’s it stolen

So I’d maybe borrow a leaf from Stranger Things, an unreleased variant of Trollbabe. In it, players use location tokens to slowly build up a map of their city. Similarly, you could make development of a City’s suburbs into a minigame.

Ideas still bubbling here, it’s how they generally seem to work in my head. I may check out Dragonmech if I have the time. Side note the ships are there for a few reasons, firstly as a potential Threat catalyst, a ship arrives and the City tries to plunder it. But also to allow for aliens and people who’s ancestors came from the ships.

I shall continue to ponder.

I was about to suggest it’d be cool to follow the history of a City from foundation to eventual destruction, with characters secondary to that narrative… and then read the whole post. =)

A surprisingly good source for material on this sort of thing is Dragonmech, which has a few mecha-cities, each with their own flavor, populace and ecology.