[Suggestion] Majesty-like houses

Because a city without housing makes no sense.

from Elemental Forums

Right now, there's a bunch of housing models sitting around, and cities never include any form of housing besides slums. Housing was removed because spamming "build house" was a shitty mechanic and took away from building interesting things. But cities without housing are just silly. The simplest solution is to add houses without making the player build them. Just place functionless "house" buildings as population milestones are reached. Use existing housing models with random rotation. This has the benefit of letting city size be somewhat related to city level as well as not looking silly, and distinctive faction-based house models will also make it easier to have cities look specific to factions. The game "Majesty: A Fantasy Kingdom Sim" had peasants construct housing in this manner and it worked quite well.

There are also little detail things that can make this even better, such as having the Slum building spread by adding new Slum models instead of other new house models.

8,447 views 11 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

Majesty, that was a fun one.  Though insanely frustrating at times due to the designed lack of unit control.  I like the slums idea.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

You know... Having a random set of three or four "house" tiles fill up squares for your city until you build on them would be pretty cool. Would make the level 4 cities that I never get around to building anything in because I can't afford the maintenance and don't need the buildings look like large and important cities.

Offworld Trading Company
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

Would also be neat if small houses showed up in the vicinity of the city. They wouldn't have to do something, they'd just be there for the visuals.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

and that would solve the cannot remove building because it won't be adjacent anymore crap.Sounds good to me!

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Malsqueek, reply 2
You know... Having a random set of three or four "house" tiles fill up squares for your city until you build on them would be pretty cool. Would make the level 4 cities that I never get around to building anything in because I can't afford the maintenance and don't need the buildings look like large and important cities.
End of Malsqueek's quote
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.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top


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?

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

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.
End of Cruxador's quote

 

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.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

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. 

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

There is a much easier solution than having actual building tiles spawn, and that is redesigning the tiles. [Blatant self-promotion] I started working on a mod that would do just that for WoM. I never finished it due to losing interest in that game, but I think the screenshots show how much difference changing the tiles could make. LINK.

Another option would be to change the 'city border' tile. These are the cosmetic fences or walls that are placed on the outside of the city. These tiles are the size of a full small building tile, but only the edge closest to the town is used. If you move the fence to the far side of the tile, you could fill up the space with houses. This would create a ring of houses around the town. It might look silly, but if done right it could work I think.

Sean, I would also like some satellite towns, to make the land seem more cultured. But I would prefer if they were actual game objects, like resources. How about pioneers being able to build a farming village on fertile land within a cities influence zone? This village could send (a portion) of its grain production to the city. This would kill two birds with one stone, as it would make the country side seem more alive, and it would allow you to cut some of the +1 grain or +10 food per grain buildings.

But it seems that city building is getting it's long overdue overhaul, so all of this might not be needed, who knows...

Reply #10 from Elemental Forums Top


I like the OP idea. It was in Majesty and it's working like that in Tropico series.

Reply #11 from Elemental Forums Top

@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.

Quoting cparkin01, reply 6

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?
End of cparkin01's quote
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 Malsqueek, reply 7

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.
End of Malsqueek's quote
Ah, right. Yeah I don't see any real reason to penalize building over housing if people want to.

Quoting seanw3, reply 8
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. 
End of seanw3's quote
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.