making best use of existing terrain is part of the challenge. Since enemies can’t cross waterbodies, the ability you ask for will break the game.
However, rerolling maps does get annoying. Maybe some customization will be nice. Either I get all the minerals in one spot, but the spot is very open and vulnerable to attack from all sides, or I do find a great defensible spot, but all the minerals are on the other side of the map.
No, the terrain tool should get two modifier keys/buttons which either raise the selected area to its highest selected point or lower it all to its lowest point, so we can more efficiently sculpt the land to an usable shape (which almost always is simply flat). And the standard terrain tool still tries to create a smooth gradient or mean height between the highest and lowest points.
That’s really all that is needed and would also make the terrain tool much more practical without making it too powerful, because you’re still limited by the existing terrain features.
Also the amount of work force needed should scale with the volume of earth being moved to an extent, to make very large scale terraforming an investment that requires either a lot of time or free workers.
If you give some time to think about it, you will realize 3rd option - gradient as you call it - is still needed for at least building roads.
I agree. Currently, mountain roads look like stairs. I have been able to create decent-looking slopes, but I don’t know how I did it. It seems that the gradient appears only when the slope difference is too high for the game to turn it flat.
But other times, when I DO need to land to be purely flat (for building), the game simply wouldn’t do it, and leaves a slight gradient no matter how many times I use the flatten tool.
It is infuriating, and inconsistent. Not how a feature should behave.
I too think the tool should have two modes. In true flat mode, if the selected land can’t be fully flattened, it should show red squares, indicating invalid placement.
You have to do it multiple times, starting at the highest point and then widening the area to flatten. It’s like pulling off the top then the next layer and next layer and so on, each time starting at your original point and expanding the area to be flattened.
Alright!, we are in week 2 after the 9.3 announcment, time for the performace update to be released…
Not even in public testing yet so …
If you select small chunk of ground, it will be flattened. If you select wide chunk of ground, gradient comes into play. It works the same way if you want to flatten the ground for some building and it is important to select only the building size area if you want it to be efficient.
Personally, I select 3 or 4 squares in a line, no more than that. I try to make sure a majority of the squares are already at the height I’m looking for, so really only 1 needs to be adjusted. And I use the Tacticat method of putting down two lines like this but with a empty line between them, because the game will automatically also adjust the empty space between the lines, so it’s like free terraforming.
Time consuming, but anything more than a 2x2 square, I use this line method and it works fine.
the messages they sent everybody on may 30th said pretty clear that it was gonna be playtesting in a couple weeks… TODAY is a couple of weeks so i don’t think you should be putting ellipsis in your replies…
Just release anything, whatever it is, to make this game playable. I love the game, but can’t really start over every time I hit 500+ pop. It just doesn’t work on a large monitor no matter what computer I have. Just do a smaller performance only patch as soon as you can.
I have played 900+ pop. It isn’t easy, but doable. I only have an ancient GTX 970 graphics card.
But you do need at least 32GB RAM. That one is non-negotiable, and I do not think the update will change anything in that regard. It is written in Unity after all. It is bound to bottleneck at least one of your hardware components for no reason whatsoever. Subnautica hit the GPU, this one hits the RAM. Both legendary games, hurt by Unity. Crate Entertainment is aware of this issue, and recommends turning on virtual memory. But virtual memory is slow.
I upgraded to 32GB solely for this game.
Zantai: “We wanted to give you a quick heads up that v0.9.3 should be entering public playtesting in the next couple weeks.”
Not is. Have patience
More that 0.9.3 playtesting, I’m actually hyped for the roadmap until 1.0, so the State of Early Access update. Can’t wait to read it.
An update on the playtest: we are still working through some known issues that came about as a result of optimization. As such, we have decided to postpone the playtest to next week. We’ll keep you posted!
Now don’t everyone start posting that ‘next week’ starts on Sunday on American calendars and therefore we should get The Word in 3 days . . .
and let’s not forget that a week consists of seven days. Why the update could even be eight days from now 
I confess, I’m as anxious as anyone for the new playtest to drop, because I’ve been putting off starting a new game until it does. But I couldn’t resist counseling patience given that the design team is wrestling with so many things at once and, probably, now looking at Deadlines approaching to prepare for Launch - I can afford to wait a few days . . .
too much puberty in your post.
Yeah, unity is a pretty crappy platform for serious games. I think that unity is mostly for mobile games, while PC games need to be made by something more serious. Memory thing is false, I have a PC with 32gigs and also a laptop with 16 gigs, both gaming beasts. The laptop is fluid until around 800 pop, while the PC struggles after500. It’s also 2k vs 4k so that’s the main difference, so the higher the screen size the lower the fps. I have 4k with a wide screen monitor, 27 inches vs small laptop screen, so the laptop will outperform a better built PC with higher end graphics and also processor, memory etc. It’s not optimized at this stage, so hopefully they can do better with the next update, although I fear that unity is just a bad platform for strategy games of this scale