Proper Snap-Grid Building for Less Micro

A grid shows where a 2x3 rock ends, and your 5x6 Factory can begin.

You sure all of the structures in the game are made of 1/6th of factory length parts?

But as I said earlier, PA isn't not inherently grid based, so you need to do it a different way than Starcraft 2 which you used as an example.

Mike

Well, our buildings snap-align to local objects.
Just make a localized mouse-over grid?

I found the organic placement totally fine. If a person is more organized, then so is their base, if not, its a mess. Grids are the remnant of limitation. Unless we had adjacency bonuses, the grid is not nescessary.

A grid help to min-max your space.
More clumped up storage means wider avenues for troop movements.
Better concave on attacking enemy forces.

It's the same reason that Beijing's main roads were built to use as runways.
It's not just income and production. Base building is also the art of engineering your layout to be militarized.

But how do you define the grid? I can see maybe Extending a grid from teh nearest structure that you want to build by, but you already have that in the form of the way structures snap to other structures, I think it'd just be better to refine that system instead of trying to do something separate that does the same thing.

Mike

To be fair, the structure snap is a poor system if you want spaces between your structures.

If you want space between your structures anyways they don't have to exactly line up do they?

Plus if you do a thing where when choosing the orientation of a structure you can have it 'snap' to certain orientations, like every 15 degrees for example. The 3D app I use does exactly this which is great to getting things to be parallel and what not.

Mike

In my ideal world, the entire planet would be some sort of "grid".
Either a point cloud, or hexagon. Doesn't have to be square.

But the reasonable request I think is not a new thing, but rather give us the visuals.
To do an overlay of my the surroundings when I place a structure.

Doesn't matter what you use for a grid, it doesn't work unless the game is made with that in mind, which PA wasn't. This is even more so the case on a Sphere, where a grid systems works less and less in general the farther away you get from the equator.

For PA the best bet is some kind of 'Unbuildable Overlay' that highlights areas you can't build in.

Mike

True, but it does fall under the umbrella of "improve building handling".

Though I just got a thought; What if you had the option to lock building rotation to the north/south axis, allowing a poor man's radial grid? It'd certainly work on big planets and/or metal worlds, where you'd want to line stuff up against the terrain for maximum base efficiency.

a hex-grids work fine on spheres

No they don't.

whoops, i thought a geodesic needed only hexagons
but it's still a far better approximation than rectangles (better than both would be local grids where the ground is p much flat around individual buildings but w/e)
or a tri-grid

Even given that, how you you make building placement work? It takes more than just having a grid.

Mike

The Soccerball-pattern of hexagons and pentagons work.

BUT.

What happens when you make the soccerball planet bigger (or smaller)? It stops working, unless you also make the hexagons and pentagons smaller. You can't do that though, because buildings need to be the same size.

Scale buildings for the smallest feasible planet(scale 2 moon maybe?) that you'd expect to have a large number of buildings on?

Still won't work, because the "grid" won't match the buildings.

well, when you go to place a building down it snaps it to a intersection on the grid