Build grid suggestions/discussion

Wait a second........

Buildings are square.

You already have a build grid.

All the naysaying aside I feel like area and line build commands null the aesthetic concern pretty quickly. It is very easy to quickly build a large symmetrical base. I'm not sure why you would want too all to badly, but it's easy to do.

Btw, I'm glad no one is forcing me to. My enemy is not always on a right angle away from my base.

Unfortunately, that doesn't hold true on a sphere.

Eh? Please explain, as I really think you have no idea what you are talking about.

Buildings are square. If you want to build in a grid, build in a grid. The square grid from older games just makes you unable to place a building in a particular square, even if you could place it with half of the building in both squares.

Cover a planet with buildings.

I mean cover it. So that there is literally no unoccupied space at all.

You will find that on a sphere, it's impossible to use squares.

Challenge accepted.

Edit: Challenge Declined. My game crashed trying to render all those walls.

LOL ! did you "really" try to cover a planet with walls ? ! ?

I didn't know there were PA players in lunatic asylums...

Grids on spheres.

Starcraft is built around grids and placement. It seems pretty natural that SC players would hate freebuilding.

In the same way that SC players probably don't like that it's harder to accurately place resource gathering buildings or snap buildings to lock off areas and ramps, perhaps your idea for grid building will not be well recieved for PA players due to placing un-necessary restrictions on how and where we can place our buildings. I can't see a reason that benefits us at all. If your concern is about having pretty/symmetrical/precise building placement for cosmetic base arrangements and spacing then you can mostly achieve that using line/circle building with area commands in the game already. I can place a building wherever I want and rotate it to face whichever direction benefits my strategy, why would I want these restrictions?

Also, you do realise that PA has undulating hills all over the place right? It's not a (nearly) perfect sphere unless you specifically set the height range to 0.

Build 20 walls wide. From the edges, build 20 walls up on each side. The top of this desired square will not be 20 walls wide. Tissot's indicatrix might help you visualize this better.

So this example is specifically for square grids on a sphere, how PA stands now.
While I understand that we are likely way, WAY too far gone for a revamp...

But theoretically speaking, a geodesic grid would have been possible scenario right?
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geodesic_grid
With each hex being 1m in length.
Terrain could still be procedurally generated.
And planet sizes would be whole numbers of circumference around.
Factories could fill 9 hexes.

I presume that everything is so ingrained in the current method that no amount of modding could give us a geodesic system?

Yes.

When I say 'my game crashed due to wall spam', it crashed because there were too many wall area commands, the game lagged out and Windows force closed it.

Edit: Metas post actually displays my point of view perfectly. He tries to build a build grid of hexagonal tiles, and runs into exactly the same issue he would if he had done it in a square. The options are use different shape walls to build tiles. But you still have the same limiting factor you will always have.

Simply put, if you don't have enough surface area to build stuff, it still won't fit.

A build grid just makes that more artificial

IMO the best way to implement a grid system would be one that is based on local building placement rather than a global grid. I mean, the buildings have metric size ratios right? (like basic gen is 2x2, storage is 3x3, etc.). This way when you place a building in an area, there could be a player-defined option to display a local grid that makes building edges just about parallel and evenly spaced using the current auto-snap feature.

It seems possible for the large, non-defensive buildings over a small area.

Regardless, I think it is unnecessary.

Yes, for the way the way a planet is composed in PA at the moment.

But it doesn't have to be that way for a sphere.




Those could have a grid.

What does a grid actually ACHIEVE?

Because if you have a grid, you can't place stuff on flat ground that it can fit on, because there's a grid there saying "Nope, sorry, you have to be half a tile in *that* direction."


Clearly that depends on the size of the grid. But if the grid is as large as the current wall, you actually haven't improved the situation at all

Well, if it "can fit on", then it should be quite clear from how the terrain is displayed.
A grid is a way of showing how it all fits together.

Think of it like lego.
If you have a 2x4 brick.
Then it fits in a 2x4 open area.

Heh, I can think of a few tags your account is missing too... Seriously the guys making this game are professionals and they aren't even the only Computer Science guys on the forums either. "The more you know, the more you know you don't know" has been my experience in life, so when someone comes here claiming they know better than the devs and all the community combined yet they haven't even played the game... Well, we all know which category you fall into

How do you think the rest of us do it? No one can force anything, but the devs do listen to us which is why it's important for the community to shut down bad ideas and filter only the well-thought out 1s up to get the dev's attention.

If you look closely at the bottom right picture, the terrain height causes your hexes to have different sizes. It would be kind of hard to make a line of walls if you're going to have huge gaps on the slopes of hills.

This is what we want - an organised base with no useless spacing between buildings.
A/B/C - buildings sized 3x3/2x2/1x1
X - free space

XXXXXX
AAACCXC
AAABBXBB
AAABBXBB
XXXXXX
On a square map with a normal grid it's easy to do, in PA, not so much.

As it is now placing building B right next to building A and aligning the bottom edge (so you have enough room for building C without it sticking out) is impossible, but if the building corners snapped together you could easily make bases like this without a grid.

But building that closely together is likely to get you in a lot of trouble in this game.