[Bug/Gameplay-UI] 0.264 Cannot build huts on a diagonal line of tiles

I wouldn't say it's a bug - it's more a design feature. Basically, new buildings have to be placed near the old ones, and diagonal placement doesn't guarantee that.

Yeah, that is a new design choice. You have to be adjacent to another improvement to build the city in a given direction.

But why can't we build "in advance" ? It would be good to be able to plan things like that :

CHHH

(C = city, H =hut) instead of being forced to wait for the first hut to be built to be able to place the next one.

That sounds like I have some non-coder's delusion of what "adjacent" means. On my NUM pad, 1, 3, 7, and 9 are all plain-language adjacent to 5, just at different angles than 2, 4, 6, and 8. Is that maybe about how 3D art will work? I can't think of a 'logical' reason to exclude the diagonals.

A gameplay reason? To avoid

X

  X

    X

      X

        X

etc.

How is that different from XXXX or its vertical analog?

Distances. With only orthogonal placement, you have to be close to special locations. I think they want to avoid squid-like cities.

The problem is, my experiance with cities (@ least modern ones) is that they actually develop in a rather squid-like manner: people move out to a special spot in the contryside to get ahold of whatever's there, stuff gets constructed along the road, and evetually it gets built up (can someone with actual credentials in urban planning or something correct/corraborate me on this?). Now, this may not be a good game mechanic to have, but going against nature even for a good cause often results in "gamey" things like this.

Beg pardon, but how is a cross-shaped expansion pattern (Scott's apparent notion of "adjacent" tiles) substantially different from an asterisk-shaped one?

If anything, it's a worse aesthetic and gameplay offense because it is the worst of both worlds: a rule determined by the geometry of basic map grid elements (squares vs. hexes, etc.) combined with arbitrary simplification of the relationship between those basic map units.

Even though I've sort of picked on the snaking thing in other threads, I really do have sympathy for, if not academic expertise, in the question Scoutdog raises in reply 8. I just want a 'solution' that's both fun for most players and pretty (logical) for us extremely picky types.

The best solution would be a hex based game I would love playing such a game. But it seems Elemental won't go that way.

Anyway, I also think that diagonal tiles should be available.

Me too. I was rather fond of squid cities.

It's very typical that diagonals aren't adjacent to a given position in a squared based grid as they are artificially "better" than horizontal and vertical. If you allow for diagonal building it's nearly always better to build that way as you get more new tiles to expand (5 instead of 3).

Same with unit movement, although there you can just use the solution of "first diagonal movement costs 1, second diagonal movement costs 2" and it's more or less solved.

I vaguely remember the old hex vs square tactical map talk, but I don't see why getting more accessible tiles with a diagonal is a problem for city building; the size of the keep is a fundamental limit on town size, so having no diagonals just seems like an unnatural limitation, especially given that idea that Elemental population centers should be more 'organic' than TBS cities have been so far.

Diagonal building makes building in horizontal and vertical useless most times. I have no idea if that's a problem or not to the devs. And about the organic thing, I can't see why cities that build in diagonal are more organic really (building in diagonal makes very easy to build cities with holes, which looks very very weird for a city).

Not for me in the betas so far; it all depends on whether that tile I'm interested in is on a 2, 4, 6, 8 path or a 1, 3, 7, 9 path, and that seems sufficiently randomized so far.

I put the shudder quotes on 'organic' for a mushy stack of reasons, mostly related to how the game will motivate players to behave and not about how a mature city might look either on the cloth map or in 3D view. The "cities with holes" thing makes me want to digress into 'realism' talk, which isn't very important to how I feel about the pop site UI so far (real cities grow around and acquire 'holes' for all manner of reasons). The whole bother just deepens my desire for a garrison/work-camp option in addition to current town-founding.

It doesn't matter that the direction the object you are interested is on 2, 4, 6 or 8 path at all. For example, to go to something in the 8 path it is "more efficient" to make a diagonal towards 7 or 9 till the middle point and then go towards 8: that way you have more possible tiles for expansion and it takes the same number of buildings to reach the destination.

Really, there's nearly no reason to build in horizontal and vertical if you can build in diagonal (except that we tend to do that naturally because it looks better, so I suppose that's why diagonal building got axed).

Gah. I don't want a rational explanation for my preference, supporting or opposing it. It's just plain weird-feeling to see those diagonally-adjacent tiles and not be able to use them. Probably yet another instance where I'm a 'bad' player because my RPG head tends to trump my zero-sum-gamer head...

One could also predict that givens the need for roads, even inside the Cities proper (though unseen at this point),the  building of all diagonal structures would require twice the squares to avoid said roads from "morphing through" structures as it traverses the city map.

Or face always going around the outside of any closed diagonal groups with Hor/Vert road segements roads to prevent said "Morphing."

 

 

Diagonals also cause interesting problems for city walls, which are currently rather odd.  Medieval era cities were typically much less squid/snakey than modern ones just because of the need for walls.  It takes a lot less wall to enclose a square than it does a squid.  It's also better for transportation and infrastructure reasons.  If "across town" means a days walk then some services will be hard to get to.

Elemental's approach to cities is pretty interesting, but it raises several interesting questions that we might need to address.  Just when is a unit really "in" the city?  Can enemy units destroy buildings without invading the town square (or whatever we call that initial city square) or are garrisoned troops considered to be everywhere in the city?  Does the Sov or other units really need to be in the town square to rest/heal?  Does anything special happen when cities interlock or otherwise become just a giant urban sprawl?

I suppose I should just make a new thread for this actually.

That seems like a good idea to me. John Hughes' remark about roads made me realize there are probably a host of things I'm not considering when I wonder why diagonals are not kosher at the moment.