So I found an exploitable bug where I could “anchor” an elevation with walls, a palisade wall to be specific but haven’t tried another wall. I lined up a few walls on a flat ground, then used a flattening tool on those walls, added another column of terrain with extreme elevation, and stacked the job 5-10 times. This resulted in getting a whole land elevated out of thin air if the wall was on the high ground, or removing an entire mountain if the wall was on the low ground.
I’m sure this was unintentional and I should have reported this as a bug. But instead, I think we could have something similar to this as a feature instead. The reason is simply that this gave me a reason to keep playing even after year 250+ (about 40+ hours of playtime), and I’m not even close to 50% done.
To provide more into my perspective, here’s how I felt during the playthrough:
The action was deliberate and specific, and the incremental result was satisfying, especially as I completed a “district” block.
This requires a lot of time and labor, so I can’t rush it early on.
I need relatively mobile planning, keeping the city functioning while making a major modification to the layout.
Overall, this gave me a sense of long-time chase late in the game where I feel like my entire city is slowly evolving in a quite believable way.
I don’t really think that it should be something to do with terrain, but having something that requires time and effort as a long-term goal late in the game would be incredible instead of the game being a simple rush to get all available buildings installed.
The idea that I get during my playtime if we’re going for this total terrain modification was this:
A stone foundation for elevating the ground:
3x3 work area to create a single grid of stone foundation, or maybe even multiple size setup similar to arborist’s tree placement but it always requires 2 extra grid work areas (e.g 5x5 work area for 3x3 stone foundation) to accommodate for terrain normalization.
The stone foundation is stackable, so we can achieve any elevation we want, a single unit at a time.
Maybe also make this stone foundation terrible for farms or maybe simply just kill any vegetation but I wouldn’t prefer that tbh.
To add extra work, the stone foundation could also require extra support structure so it gets harder to build the higher the ground we want
from the development perspective, this will require some kind of vertical axis grid so we can make sure that it’s always possible to get our stone foundation perfectly lined up.
to make things organized, the foundation shouldn’t be recognized as a “building” so it can’t be destroyed or moved around.
This could also be used simply for aesthetics by having stone flooring, especially for big, vital buildings like the city center, trade, temple, etc.
A “Mine” for de-elevation:
Works similar to Rimworld’s moisture pump, but we could control the range and don’t allow any building to be inside its work area.
The mine extracts either clay, sand, or stone (especially when built on top of stone foundation) during the process.
The mine get destroyed (but could be rebuilt) as it achieve certain elevation.
As an addition, a landslide mechanic would be great to support this.
I have used lately the mod for terraforming - i would not say that it is cheating or exploiting - it actually takes a lot of time and clicks to get the desired results. Considering that 1 sec = 1 day or something, it actually simulates very good the real time it takes to change the smoothness or elevation of ground. Maybe would make sense some mechanics like this - you can change the land elevation with clicks, but the actual amount of land changed would create some work credit that the labors will come to work on later. Maybe make some logic, that half of the free labors will work on the terrain-modification-credit until it is done. This way it would also affect the real work, but you can take 2 years only to focus on terrain and later pay with labor price. I also support the mechanics that raiders and villagers should be able to pass any terrain if really required - use ladder, boats, swim or fill land - if it is blocked, then work to get there. You can slow down people, but you cannot stop even with vertical cliff or wall.
Best defense ever !!!