Incorporate Player Designed Buildings Into The Custom Faction Designer

A Better Custom Faction

Doing a true custom faction in Elemental wasn't as easy as it should have been. It involved a lot of scripting and effort to put in a player designed city so your created faction could have it's own truly unique look. In Gal Civ 2, creating your own fleets with custom designed looks was easy as the ship designer was incorporated directly into the game as a choice. When designing a ship you could go with the stock default design, OR, you could design a custom ship from the ground up designing how it looks.

For FE I would LOVE to see the building designer incorporated into city building as a CHOICE if the player wanted, to design how a building looks using the building/tile creation tools from Elemental. Honestly, I haven't followed FE enough to know how it will work in FE or if it's the same from Elemental, but, during building placement or city design it would be nice to have a button in the interface that could be pressed and take you to the building/tile editor to let the player design the building on the spot. This way every created faction can have it's own unique look to it without the need for all the scripting and effort by us modders to make a faction use a city that is unique unto its-self.

This of course is a players choice. Designing a building for your faction won't change how the building works in game-play terms, only how it looks. If the player chooses to use their time to create every single building their faction uses then that's something the player can do. Not doing so would have No Effect on game-play and what your buildings do, but, it Would let players become more attached to their created faction and even let them fight against that faction later with another player created faction and have it retain the look the player created for it.

This would be far preferable to the steps that had to be taken with the Elven Mod and Undead Rising for Elemental. I don't think it would be very hard for the team from a coding perspective and shouldn't take long to do as the fundamentals are already in place. The pay off would be a game that the player could be much more invested in should the player choose to be and in the long run could add a lot to replayability as well.

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Problem is that the building designer in Elemental is much more robust and has a very large learning curve compared to that of GalCiv2. It would need to be made more intuitive for it to be a mainstream feature such as you described. I don't feel like it's worth the effort.

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Quoting Sir_Linque,

reply 1

I can see where you're coming from Linque, I just don't agree. To me learning how to use the tile builder to build buildings wasn't much harder than building ships in GalCiv. The only part of the Elemental editors that required me to learn something new was the spell animation tool and creating effects. I still see being able to use the base tile designer as is in Elemental to make your faction's cities look unique to it would add a lot to the depth of the game for customization. To most of the people who stick with the game long term and play it over and over again, that means a lot. Also for many of us I think, or to me at least, it was customization that led me to being a loyal Stardock fan and customer.

I do agree with you that the UI for the tile creator could be a little more intuitive. Even though they are very similar the one from GalCiv 2 seems to function a lot better and smoother which has always striked me as odd since they're basically the same tool.

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