[SUGGESTION] Tiles vs. Squares and City Planning

from Elemental Forums

I think that someone else has also talked about this, but I'd like to start a new thread re: a change to the city building mechanics.

One of the things that was very unintuitive for me planning my city was the difference between a tile and a square: a tile, defined as a 1-space building, must be placed in a square formation made up of 2x2 tiles. When I didn't understand this in the beginning, I thought that I could only place two inns when starting a town, which confused me when I could go up to eight, before I realized what was going on.

Is there any reason why available spaces can't be measured in tiles rather than in 2x2 squares? So at the beginning of the game, you would see that you have "8 tiles" available.

One more suggestion, and it may be a game balance issue: I'm wondering if it's necessary to limit building to 2x2 blocks. For instance, it might be nice to be able to build a nice line of buildings along a river or something. . . maybe it's to prevent players from hogging tiles by building things in weird checkerboard patterns, don't know.

4,904 views 3 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

There are some buildings that take up an entire plot (tile), so that's probably why the mechanics work as they do currently.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Annatar11, reply 1
There are some buildings that take up an entire plot (tile), so that's probably why the mechanics work as they do currently.
End of Annatar11's quote

I think even those would be more intuitive as listed as "4 tiles" instead of "1 square," but that's just me. Possibly, if the whole square vs. tile thing were more explicit when placing your first building, it might not even be an issue.

Siege of Centauri
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting themocaw, reply 2
I think even those would be more intuitive as listed as "4 tiles" instead of "1 square," but that's just me. Possibly, if the whole square vs. tile thing were more explicit when placing your first building, it might not even be an issue.
End of themocaw's quote

Agreed that there's no real benefit to using different names for the different sizes and it'd be better to just say that something takes up X spaces of whatever the smallest unit is.  Can see that leading to confusion amongst newbies to the genre.