Boring-looking Cities - and two possible fixes

from Elemental Forums

Right now, cities tend to look extremely boring. You have a few unique-looking buildings, and then you have 20 buildings of one sort and 15 of another. Cities SHOULD look awesome, but they don't. And the designs are there, and the engine can clearly handle it, so why isn't it happening?

 

1) Rotate Buildings by default. I KNOW you've got a function in the game to rotate tiles, because it gets applied to world resources. I'm not saying it will be a quick fix, but this thing would do a great job at improving how the city looks.

 

2) Allow each improvement to have multiple possible designs. The truth of the matter is, there are only a handful of buildings that get repeated for a player. I don't think it would be a waste of an effort to create more tile-designs for these few buildings, and change the engine to allow it to choose between them.

 

Ideally, both these options together would make for truly unique-looking cities.

 

I would also recommend that you put options in the gameplay windows for players who don't want these features used for their own cities.

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Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Agree - makes sense to me.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

#1 sounds like a quick fix that will have a pretty decent pay off.

#2 sounds like a bit more work depending on the # and depth of variants. Punching a few different holes in shanty and calling it a new tile is one thing. A whole new set of shanties, huts, ect... is way more work when there will probably be call for a lot of new tile work elsewhere. You also have to ask if there's really a pay off. I know I rarely take the time to look at my cities on the rendered map. I spend most of my time on the cloth map (because finding stuff on the rendered map is a pain in the ass.)

I think my issue with cities is that they don't look organic. There's no sprawl at all. They're all either nice neat cubes, oblong shapes, or irregular blocks. There's no easy fix for this. But I think having more visible space within the cities (actually roads, more spacious plots for important structures) would make cities look more organic.

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Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Nenjin, reply 2
... I think my issue with cities is that they don't look organic. There's no sprawl at all. They're all either nice neat cubes, oblong shapes, or irregular blocks. There's no easy fix for this. But I think having more visible space within the cities (actually roads, more spacious plots for important structures) would make cities look more organic.

Definitely. When the placement of a given improvement has no specific tactical or strategic value, it needs to at least look good. Mixing this idea of "more visible space" with a varied art set for each improvement type seems well worth considering. Without some changes along these lines, city building will mainly be boring click overhead and not a fun part of the game.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

In my opinion the design simply needs to be better to make it look organic. I personally believe that a city of Elves from the Elves community project looks more organic than the elemental vanilla sets. We dared go closer to the tile edge with our buildings, and thus we ended up with a coherent design instead of the little plots that you see in vanilla.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

I would vote for getting rid of the grid style building. Or at least make it look more organic and less of a chess board.. somehow. Just rotating the tiles would not help eliminating the blocky look.

Then.. instead of building several buildings that do the same thing and stack up, build only one and then upgrade it. Arcane Study becomes a Wizard school. Wizard school becomes an Arcane University. Building becomes taller, bigger and more impressive each time you upgrade and is instantly recognized by looking at the city.

Different races should have unique style as well. There could be viking style, mayan style pyramids, byzantene style, far-eastern.. anything. Each race should come with their own distinct style or not at all.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

Both of these ideas are good. Rotating will get a lot of additional mileage out of existing resources. The potential for multiple possible tiles for a given improvement opens up the possibility for this to improve gradually, as new models are added. I know personally, another two Shanty model or two would go a long way to making my cities far more varied.

Organic design is different, and can have too real meanings. The first is what Heavenfall's talking about, with tile design. Placing buildings off-center in their tiles will help here, in addition to the things people have already said. Putting roads on the tiles is not really a great idea, because getting them to link up is unlikely to work well without a whole hell of a lot of work.

The other aspect of an organic look is building placement. This could be affected by making city design effect the actual city, and not merely the shape of the environment around the city. If buildings next to each other increase benefits (for example, a fungal storehouse next to an imperial farm might yield an additional .5 food) then you encourage the player to make intelligent decisions in city zoning. That would really add a lot in terms of city-building gameplay too. Though ideally the benefits would remain small so that people could easily not worry about that sort of thing when playing easier difficulties.
A more thorough alteration of how city planning works could be good too, and would make an excellent expansion. I'm thinking something along the lines of Black & White 2 cities, as probably the maximum potential for this sort of thing mattering.

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

I don't know about the city, but this topic remind me on of KOEI game that I played recently.

The idea is to put defensive structures in strategic location, like archery tower, etc. And these structures will fire at the enemy before they come to the town centre. To avoid terrible lost, the enemy should destroy the tower first, and the defender can manned the tower with their soldiers to protect it.