Very often, I spend lot of workforce “flattening” the land and the result is a slightly less slope or slightly less irregular terrain (which is still insufficient to build on top of it). Sometimes after several flattening passes, it will work (sometimes not) but I have no visibility whatsoever on the investment it will take before the area is useable.
I like the idea to flatten the ground but as of now it is quite a burden to me.
Could the player have a direct feedback of how much it would take to make the selected area buildable ? And then if he decides it is worth it, he can spend even an insane amount of workforce on it ?
Ideally, it could also be tied to the building I want to make on top of it (and I should see the building cost + flattening cost separated when trying to place it). This will help handling possible different tolerance for irregular terrains (maybe a farm accepts a slope terrain while a building would not).
A separate flattening tool can still be useable for specific situations but I would love to have control over the final looks of the terrain. Will it be averaged and flat ? Higher ? Lower ?
Last, being able to make some “terraces” would also be great, or allow buildings to be made on top of a slope terrain for an additional stone cost for instance.
Most likely you are not doing it correctly. It does take a while to figure out the best way to use it. Once you get to know what it’s doing then it’s not that bad. If you just keep flattening the same area that is mostly flat but inclined over and over it really doesn’t do much. If you want to flatten an area, find a small area that is 2x2 or 2x3 that is flat or really close. Flatten it once to get it flat for a building. Then take that 2x2 area and expand it to a 2x3 area. The flatten tool averages the land. It may take a couple passes, but they are short. Once you have a 2x3 area then you are golden. Now the 6 squares you have will pull any 2 slightly lower/higher squares to their level. If the 2 are a bit different then you may need to do the 2x2 again, the 2x3 again, then the 2x4 to get it flat. But this is generally only when the land is really steep. Just keep expanding that area out one row at a time. If the change is large enough to affect your reference area, then you have to redo the smaller area sometimes.
They will rise and fall with the tools, but it can have some bad side effects so try to do the land transforming first if you can. You can get villagers stuck unable to escape and they will die from starvation. It also can cause the buildings to get screwed up and on an angle to the grid system. It still works but the buildings look messed up.
This afternoon, I spent more than two hours flattening a section of 3X4 that was barely inclined. I had to flatten up to 4 squares further than the building so that I could finally place it.
The tool is capricious: I had tried to flatten a residential area by starting from a small flat area and adding only one sloped box. When I arrived at the other end, the relief was no longer flat where I had started.
Yeah, as I mentioned, you many times have to redo the initial reference area. You’ll notice in my image above the clay brick factories are on a slope. I just didn’t feel like spending more time redoing the reference area where the warehouses are to get that area flat when the buildings would already place down, and I was concerned of having an impassible slope from there to around the corner as the stockyard area was a bit lower, so the slope actually worked to connect them so I left it.
I guess I kind of understand the idea. But from my perspective this is extremely costly in user actions until you get the result you want. I expect to be able to set a target to the workers : “please make this flat and x meters above sea level” and leave them be. Just like when I say go chop trees in this area and I don’t have to micromanage them too much. It somewhat feels like the opposite of the rest of the game.
Having tried this the same way as The Sims, I have found it works the opposite way. You start with the bit you want flattened and draw towards a tile that is the level you want. But you can’t select more than one new tile at a time or they all start working on a tile and make each one the same as its neighbor - leaving it in a dreadful mess. I would like it if it was the same as sims. If we could place the cursor on a tile the desired height then drag out from there and all the included tiles ended up the same height as the starting tile
