Hello PA community, I wanted to what the rest of you think about these two building placement methods as they both are valid. Grid placement, I feel, is superior as it provides a more reproducible way to build bases. It also keeps things less hectic and requires less concentration. However, Free placement also has its perks. Free form has the potential of 360 degrees of rotation for any building with as opposed to 90 degrees for grid placement. So what do the rest of you think? Post your opinions!
When you say "reproducible," are you referring to building your base the same way every time in order to maximise speed or whatever? I definitely prefer the idea of free-form building with rotation, but I'd quite like to be able to build grids of buildings like power generators because that pleases me. So the current method of free-form with snapping works rather nicely for me.
How fast units come off the factory ramp is important to balancing build times, with free placement you can position the ramp towards a front, thus reducing travel time for your units. Also an isometric grid system isn't ideal for a 3D map like a sphere. I think a free placement system with smooth structure placement is better, and I think works needs to be done on the structure snapping, right now its clunky. Remember there is a lot more to building a 3D map then just rolling a 2D isometric map around a ball, isometric maps are a large cop-out in comparison.
Grid placement sounds nice, but like stated above mapping to a sphere would be hard. I like the free form and if you want to grid up your power then build one and grid off that.
I want both. I want to be able to press 2 buttons and queue 10 of the same buildings in a row or 2, 3 rows. Obviously you won't have enough time to click 7 billion times to build stuff on each planet so building multiple buildings according to a grid and a template would be nice.
This+Templates would make me a happy person. OP, please make this a multipoll with edgesnap and templates as options. Edgesnap is what we have now.
How to grid buildings on spheres: Make a "grid" of points on the sphere. Snap building centers/corner to the grid point. The grid won't be tesselating, but you can live with a few places where they don't align perfectly.
THEN WHAT'S THE POINT OF A GRID?! This is like putting a $1000 scope on a rifle and then shooting it with one hand! Having no grid would be just as good as having an imperfect grid. And arguably, you CAN put a grid on a sphere. It's called a geodesic sphere overlay. But you would have to keep the size of the individual triangles identical for each celestial body, which is positively lame because it would look shitty on smaller planets. And that's not even taking terrain into account! How the hell would you put a grid on a MOUNTAIN?! My point is, STOP IT WITH GRIDS. You can "grid" a sphere, but you cannot "grid" a planet. A planet is not a sphere. A planet is more comparable to a large ball of clay that a young child just got done playing with, including the scratch marks, finger-holes, shed hair and toothpicks. A planet is gloriously imperfect.
Well said mushroomars. For simplicity just take a look on google maps and zoom out all the way (or just grab an old school atlas and find the world map). The grid works well near the equator but anywhere else... Well, just take look . There are a lot of workarounds like a region grid, temporary grid and who knows how many geographical projections (is that the correct word?) you can think of but those will work only for a part of a planet given it is smooth enough. On a moon or an asteroid? Forget even about those workarounds. As long as you don't leave that region, it will be fine, but once you do it will look horrible :-D .
i would like if the game had free placement with an ui option to lock to a grid, so you can form nicely looking bases, just for the fun of having good screenshots or videos^^
Sorry, but it's these kind of bugs that can make or break a game. Things like pathfinding, building placement should just work flawlessly.
Well actually a template sounds great! Not sure how big you'd want one but I'd say a 4x4 with the option to build 4x1 etc... Just bind the selections to certain keys. 4x4 might seem small but I don't want over kill cause I assume once more tiers are given to us then building placement size would change?
