A very frequent request I see made is to ‘improve the terrain tool’, in particular to ‘add the ability to raise and lower terrain’. I personally doubt that the current functionality of the terrain tool will ever be extended because it amounts to unlimited control of enemy unit pathing and that would be simply too powerful because it entirely trivializes the combat aspect of the game. In its current form it is already the most powerful way to set up defenses for your base, and the only thing keeping that power in check is the “frustrating” limitations of needing to work with the existing lay of the land. If the tool was buffed it would then be necessary to also remove the slope restrictions on the pathing of invading units, which would remove its power completely and reduce terrain to being purely aesthetic.
For anyone determined to have complete control of terraforming, there already exists a mod to let you change it however you want.
I would like to see an improvement in making a suitable slope for a road to get to the nice flat spot for a mine on the crazy steep mountains! Or maby some advice on how to do this?
I have seen many pictures showing such slopes in the forums, are these only achived with mods?
Even without improvment to the terraforming, people allready mess with ai pathhing and block entire sections of a map off… the only diffrence is, how much of a hassle and pain it is to do that.
Yea on complete flat maps, that tool, is useless either way, but for people that want to build nice Mountain settlements, it just looks weird with all the sharp edges.
Blockquote I would like to see an improvement in making a suitable slope for a road to get to the nice flat spot for a mine on the crazy steep mountains! Or maby some advice on how to do this? I have seen many pictures showing such slopes in the forums, are these only achived with mods?
I can use the native terrain tool to flatten an area - it often takes 5-10 runs over the same patch of land, but it flattens eventually. Roads, I usually try to find natural paths, but every once in a while I’ll build a long flat road along a steep slope by finding an entry point and then doing 1-square-wide terrain flattening tool along the cliff face.
Just a single 1x10 from a high point to a low point is pretty good at creating a pathable slope. If you do it twice it will often make the outside ends unpathable, so it requires somewhat of a light touch. Perhaps the hardest part of using the terrain tool is knowing beforehand what the outcome will be, thus it requires a fair bit of experience to use it well without just becoming frustrated.
One improvement that I think would really help players enjoy the tool would be the ability to preview the outcome of a terrain order, possibly made to appear by holding shift while using the tool.
We certainly do, but the difference is that currently its potential is very limited by the existing terrain because you can only ever average the height of two areas. If it were possible to add and remove height you’d start to see bases with a mile long snaking ramp/ditch entrance and a quick entrance, with the mile long one ‘turned on’ for raids by closing the quick entrance with a terrain lowering and then ‘turned off’ again after the raid by opening the quick entrance with a terrain raising. You would also never see another stone wall beyond an aesthetic desire, as you could just raise an invisible unpassable terrain wall wherever you wanted around your base.
Thank you Meow-Beep! Yes it was frustration that made me ask the question!
I do not play with raiders or any other war type game. I tried once on Pioneer and my population was decimated so badly every 3 years I couldn’t get enough defences to survive the next wave! I will stick to my sprawling, wide open villages and keep hopeing the devs will allow passifist the choice to include wild animals to spice things up a bit!
I feel this is balanced well by the labour cost, if a player wants to spend 200 in-game years making a fort they still need to contend with raiders and everything while doing so. My biggest issue with it is how janky it needs to look to ensure the raiders can’t just walk straight up your cliff and ensure you get the height bonus while shooting them; it feels almost necessary on high-pop late-game Vanquisher. I feel slopes should reduce movement speed depending on their scale and some of the higher natural slopes should be unpathable; I’m not sure if raiders have stats like our villagers but a fatigue mechanic might help as well.
If we ever see a direct “raise-lower” option I wouldn’t mind a resource associated with it, such as Stone or soil(could be used for farming) which you need to move around and stockpile to add a cost to building up an area. Make a 1x1x1 cube fill/removal cost real resources and labour and it won’t be too oppressive. Some scaffolding would be nice as well to save our acrophobic labourers.
oh man I have been having the hardest time with making slopes, I found this nice mountain with some deep mines but when I tried to make a path up I ended up getting a few people trapped on a flat spot and they died, I wish I could select the people and force them to work on the flattening I placed underneath them but they just kept saying they were unable to work and no one else came to work on it before they died