[City Building] Ability to have more than one design per building type

A lot of people have been saying how the settlements and cities all end up looking the same, and boring cities in a game like this is not a good thing! I think one way to get past this would be to implement the ability to have more than one building design per building type.

For instance, let's say a modder creates three new designs for the building type "Hut/House/Villa". That modder should also be able to add a function to his or her maps that allow whoever plays those maps or adds that mod to cycle through each one of those designs when placing either a hut, house or villa. Even a random selection of different designs for building types would be okay. Just something to mix up the visuals of a city.

Going into the extreme, there could even be different styles for different functions that a city specializes in. Bear with me, this is an "in the clouds" suggestion to go along with my more reasonable initial suggestion. In my mind, a city that pumps out Arcane is going to have a more "alchemical" quality where as a settlement pumping out materials would have a more "blue collar" feel to it, and a city specializing in tech or economy would have different styles as well. This would help distinguish cities in different ways, while giving players an instant recognition of what each city is specializing in or producing at just a glance. I know that the numbers do that as well, but let's be honest, numbers don't make for an engaging visual.

This second suggestion isn't necessarily a usable one, but the idea that players should be able to distinguish what each city is specializing in at a glance is, I think, valid. It would add functionality and personality to a game that could use a little of both.

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I would like to see a modder make these moddels. Stardock mentioned that good mods/addons become standard, or something along that te same line. The main problem with this is, IMHO, there need to be made different models for every zooming range. When you zoom in, building get more details. Making just one, very detailed model makes the game difficult to render. Making the building low detailed would make it stand out between the official buildings because of it blandnes.

But cheers for the one that makes these moddels in there spare time! I realy like that in the later Anno games, there at least three different kinds of models for eacht tier of housing.

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Hmm... it's just a hunch, but I may have a solution.

Try creating a mod file and pull the internal names of all the housing structures in. Inside, define the custom tile to be used.

Why do I think that this might work? When trying to mod the shards, I found that the game would load both the modded tile design and the core tile design and then select at random which one to use when placing them. In a lot of ways, shards are treated differently than other things in the game, but you may have success doing this with other improvements, too. Granted, I haven't tried this myself, and really don't have time to, but it's a starting point, at least?

Good luck!

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Perhaps this issue could be partially solved by implementing a slight randomness to the scale factors on town structures? As in, lets say the Arcane Lab has a default scale factor of 1, make this instead be a random number between .9 and 1.1 (though if this were to get stored with the save game rather than being regenerated on loading, I would expect the save files to grow a lot).

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