@Satrhan: Yeah, I liked that mod. It's a good idea. But as a solution it has two flaws. The first is RAM usage. Since the tiles are much more complicated they would use monstrously more RAM. There would be all these new more complicated assets taking up memory (and of course they'd have to be made, dev time isn't infinite). The second is that it doesn't solve the problem in an elegant way that's similar to real cities. If you stick residential housing onto upgrade tiles, the city will end up looking too regimented, rather than organic and natural as would be preferred. It additionally doesn't solve the issue of inconsistent city sizes, since size is still dependent on how many (and how large) upgrades are built.
That's not to say that your mod is a bad thing. If it were to be reborn for Fallen Enchantress I would use it, even if my suggestion with house placement is used. It adds to the size and appearance of a city. But for those stuck on a 32-bit OS, more complicated building models are a bad thing.
I like this idea too. Maybe slums spawn automatically at set city population levels and then you could build housing structures that would replace some slums later that could boost the prestige of that city or other bonus(es)? i.e. people in the nice houses you spent resources building would be happier and maybe more productive then the slum only living ones that are crap buildings. Perhaps you could only build 1 house per city level and maybe there'd be 2-3 housing levels in the tech tree providing more population capacity/prestiege/reduce unrest/etc at some levels?
I don't think housing should be assumed to be slums like that. But this does open up the possibility for "special housing" improvements, a category which currently is mostly defined by the "Slums" building.
Quoting Cruxador, reply 5
The idea wasn't exactly "fill up squares until you get around to building on them". I was conceiving them as actual buildings (albeit ones without mechanical effect) that would use space. This was somewhat intended to flush with Frogboy's plan to remove the ability to place buildings manually, since it makes the house placement more or less irrelevant for the purposes of player choice, but even without that it's a good plan, so long as they can be demolished.
Indeed, I was simply saying that if the buildings were generated naturally as cities increased in size, and could be built over with no adverse effects that it would help make giant cities look like giant cities instead of relying upon the player to build underpowered and expensive buildings to make their cities look like their size.
Ah, right. Yeah I don't see any real reason to penalize building over housing if people want to.
I would prefer it if the outlying territory had small towns as part of the ground cover function. This would be double good because adding any more housing to the game needs to be optional for low end computers.
People with low-end computers can play at lowered settings once that's an option. This would up the RAM usage a bit, but the degree to which that's true can be minimized by re-using models, rotated and otherwise. There's a cost to this, as with everything, but I think it's pretty minimal. Putting villages as ground cover is sort of a good idea, but it brings up a problem: Players are going to want to interact with that. If you can't sack the outlying villages of a nation (because they don't mechanically exist) you're gonna feel cheated.
