Citybuilding, and placement

[Misery]

Quick post detailing the one problem I still have with the current city-building system, which is, that the placement still really doesnt matter much.

Now I know there are bonuses for certain region types, depending on the actual building.  Lumbermancy buildings go in the forests, for example.   The problem is..... that's all there is to it.  There's no real strategy/planning/thinking involved.  If I've got a building that goes in the desert, well, dont matter where the desert is or how much of it there is or which tile I choose; just walk over, slap one down randomly, and bam, full building bonus.

This means that I could, say, have my settlement on one side of the continent, right, and maybe a few buildings near it..... but if I were to walk aaaaaaaalllllllll the way across the continent.... maybe even to a seperate island.... and slap a building there, it'd be still "part of the city", despite making absolutely no sense whatsoever.   It'd look like the sort of building only a crazed hermit would live in and wouldnt connect at all to the settlement, and sure as heck wouldnt look like part of a city..... but it'd still WORK.

Pretty much the ONLY restriction with this is the wind shelters and the area they open up..... and that's about it.   Within those boundaries..... and it's not that hard to unlock huge tracts of land with those..... you can just plop buildings anywhere and you have a "city".


My thoughts for this were something along these lines:   Have a rule that any new building needs to be within 2 or 3 tiles of another building, in order to A: work at all, or B: get the full effect.   Whichever seems to work out the best.   If B:, you could say, have the building's effectiveness reduced by half or something, if it's not close enough to other buildings.    This would all mean that placement..... AND planning/strategy/whatever would both matter, for this system.   Yet at the same time on lower difficulties, for those that dont want to deal with it really, you could still mostly ignore this part.

This is basically what I was kinda hoping to see with the citybuilding system right from the start, as it makes the shape of the continent and placement of individual area types and regions really matter, from a strategic point-of-view.   As it is currently, it's still pretty mindless.



Mantis thingy here:   http://www.arcengames.com/mantisbt/view.php?id=8877

[BenMiff]

Here's an alternative thought on building placement: use the wind shelter tunnels.

This would need to add "sea tunnels" that travel underwater as necessary (connecting to ocean buoys and using that path if possible) to make the wind shelter tunnel network a single connected network rather than the current disconnected sections. (It'd also be good if wind shelters always connected to the nearest one when placed, or multiple nearest ones if there's a tie, so that the tunnel path is more predictable, and favour north/south over east/west while staying on land for the same reasons). Once there's a single network, half the effectiveness of any building not built on the tunnel or adjacent to an ocean buoy (since you can't build on an ocean buoy), since those are the buildings that survivors can get to without perilous overland journeys, and since then you have to expend resources to go into particular regions if you want their bonus instead of having to just get near them. (Roughly speaking, this would mean that with the most "efficient" wind shelter layout you'd only be able to build efficiently on 36% of the land, which seems like a reasonable limit given the continent sizes.)

[Misery]

Here's an alternative thought on building placement: use the wind shelter tunnels.

This would need to add "sea tunnels" that travel underwater as necessary (connecting to ocean buoys and using that path if possible) to make the wind shelter tunnel network a single connected network rather than the current disconnected sections. (It'd also be good if wind shelters always connected to the nearest one when placed, or multiple nearest ones if there's a tie, so that the tunnel path is more predictable, and favour north/south over east/west while staying on land for the same reasons). Once there's a single network, half the effectiveness of any building not built on the tunnel or adjacent to an ocean buoy (since you can't build on an ocean buoy), since those are the buildings that survivors can get to without perilous overland journeys, and since then you have to expend resources to go into particular regions if you want their bonus instead of having to just get near them. (Roughly speaking, this would mean that with the most "efficient" wind shelter layout you'd only be able to build efficiently on 36% of the land, which seems like a reasonable limit given the continent sizes.)

Aye, this one is a pretty good idea as well.

There'd have to be a small change to the..... er..... UI, I guess, for placing shelters, to have like a "preview" line to show exactly where the tunnels are going to appear once a shelter is placed, as it'd be pretty annoying to place one, and then find out that the tunnels went nowhere near where you wanted them to go.


If I might add one other thing, this might be a good point for the blasted Ice Pirates to, you know, DO something.   Have it so the player simply cannot build in any region that the Ice Pirates can reach;  after all, these are the bad guys, and building near them would be futile as they could just blow up the building from afar! The shelters themselves though would be unaffected, so no change to how those can be placed.  This might finally give a reason for the player to actually DO something about them, as currently there's no reason to do so.    These guys might actually be a bit of a problem, for once, instead of just being amazingly ineffective.

[NyQuil]

The alternative I kind of want to try, is to cover all available land with structures of some sort and see if I can prevent missions from spawning.

[keith.lamothe]

The alternative I kind of want to try, is to cover all available land with structures of some sort and see if I can prevent missions from spawning.

Like the guy who gets frustrated at the carnival whackamole game and nails a plywood sheet to the top of the thing?

[Jerebaldo1]

The alternative I kind of want to try, is to cover all available land with structures of some sort and see if I can prevent missions from spawning.

Like the guy who gets frustrated at the carnival whackamole game and nails a plywood sheet to the top of the thing?

Lol, I was thinking it'd be the work of a troll-kid curious as to how the machine would break. But actually that sort of use case issue where buildings cover every tile seem possible in future. One remedy would be to allow multiple buildings to stack per tile (after all that's how towns work); graphically it wouldn't look as nice, and the building displayed would probably be the one that's either most plentiful or most effecting the world. Then only one of each tile needs to be prevented from spawning missions. Or a simpler solution would be to spawn missions on building tiles anyway!

[BobTheJanitor]

I agree that being able to throw them down anywhere in the world doesn't make much sense. At the very least, they shouldn't work if you have a windstorm between the settlement and the building. How are the rest of the survivors supposed to use that building at all? I thought if a non-glyph bearer were to stick their little toe out into a windstorm they turn into dust or jello or mocha frappe or something. It seems like you should have to connect it to the settlement via roads like the wind shelters get, and those roads should only be able to pass through non-stormy tiles.

On the flip side, since the buildings get bonuses for certain tile types, this could result in a pretty harsh RNG-screw if you end up with the wrong arrangement of tiles on a given continent. But possibly it would also allow room for more gameplay expansion with some sort of strategic game challenge involved in getting the road network set up, instead of it just appearing like it does currently.

I also think there should be room for more gameplay in the actual building process. I mean when we need a wind shelter we have to actually run the gauntlet to get in and activate it. But when we need a building we just wish upon a star and it pops into being. It might be more interesting to make them more like wind shelters and have the building power spawn a mission of some sort. Although I don't know if any of the current types would fit exactly, so something new might be needed there. Maybe something involving actually going into the building in question and clearing it of monsters in some way? Or escorting the proper NPC type into the building so they can 'activate' it in some way? Don't know if that sounds fun or annoying to people, but there's room for playing around with that idea, I would think.

Edit: By the way, you can also place buildings in non-turbulent water tiles. Intended?

[Misery]

On the flip side, since the buildings get bonuses for certain tile types, this could result in a pretty harsh RNG-screw if you end up with the wrong arrangement of tiles on a given continent. But possibly it would also allow room for more gameplay expansion with some sort of strategic game challenge involved in getting the road network set up, instead of it just appearing like it does currently.

Aye, this is pretty much exactly what I was thinking when bringing up this topic.   It'd mean that the layout of each continent that the RNG makes would be important;  the player would have to survey it, and try to decide on just what the best course of action would be...... just like how other parts of the game work.   

With the current ideas being thrown around (look at the Mantis page to see these), it'd probably work out well if setting buildings down in proper areas gives the bonus;  setting them down in OTHER places, it wouldnt STOP them from working, they'd just be pretty reduced.  A building in the right spot might be twice as effective compared to ones that are not in that spot;  obviously these numbers would be tweaked, but that's just an example.


I also wouldnt mind the idea of some sort of mission for placing the buildings;  the one problem with that is that these are things you actually place pretty darn often, when you're really working with the citybuilding stuff.

[Hyfrydle]

A mission to clear the first chunk of the area of any enemies should be required at the very least before the building can be built.

[Mánagarmr]

A mission to clear the first chunk of the area of any enemies should be required at the very least before the building can be built.

As much as this makes sense, wouldn't this be really tedious?

[Misery]

A mission to clear the first chunk of the area of any enemies should be required at the very least before the building can be built.

As much as this makes sense, wouldn't this be really tedious?

Not to mention terribly dangerous, depending on the area *cough* Evergreen Forest *cough*.

But yeah, I think you need to place way too many of these buildings for them to have a mission associated with them.

[Dizzard]

A mission to clear the first chunk of the area of any enemies should be required at the very least before the building can be built.

As much as this makes sense, wouldn't this be really tedious?

Maybe it could be something you send an npc to do on a dispatch mission?

[JBSpook]

What about terraforming?

Make it so buildings have to be built around your settlement, or each other.

The buildings would stay as they are now (bonus requirements and all).

You place a building on a tile, if the bonus doesn't match the tile type, you can
create a terraforming mission on that tile.

Could be a guardian power scroll that you acquire in stash rooms or something.

A terraform mission would be a cave delve down through a few bosses or so, till you
hit an earth core that has to be blown.

After you succeed, the tile is changed to the correct bonus type.

Sorry if this typed strange, I'm on my phone

[LayZboy]

My thoughts for this were something along these lines:   Have a rule that any new building needs to be within 2 or 3 tiles of another building, in order to A: work at all,

The idea of just Daisy chaining buildings to get what you need is not really strategic to me.

[zebramatt]

My thoughts for this were something along these lines:   Have a rule that any new building needs to be within 2 or 3 tiles of another building, in order to A: work at all,

The idea of just Daisy chaining buildings to get what you need is not really strategic to me.

You could overcome that with just a modicum more complexity, mind you. Make buildings of type A dependent for bonuses on buildings of type B, B on C, C on B, D on A, E on C, etc. Stop them from functioning if they're too far from the settlement. Drop their effectiveness if they're not close to wind shelters. That sort of thing.