New Biome Idea: City Ruins

:?

....or maintenance drones endlessly repairing and cleaning the city

Cool idea, I like it. TBH with the galaxy being kinda large Im generally in favour of as many different biomes/worlds as is feasible, variety being the spice of life etc.

How do you think engineering bots first came about? Start with a heavy duty industrial bot, add 50 thousand years of technology, and you have an all purpose lathe.

Hmm. Would the ruins have any bits of familiar wreckage in them? Pieces of civilization is one thing, but finding dead husks of peewees and tanks would be quite a grim sight!

"Previous Battlefield Biome", eh bobucles?

Now that is much cooler.

^^same

i didn't read the five pages of discussion, but i would say that this is a great idea. i don't think that city ruins and metal planet feel the same.

it would rather give more background to the game, humanity is extinct or something near from this, but at some point there were humans, so it makes sense to have deserted cities, and it's a nice spot to place capturable stuff.

Awesome stuff, I like the idea of city ruins. Not so much a fan of the OP's acid rain damaging units consistently, but I would love to war across progenitor ruins.

yay; dev team's with us !!

I really want to see a city/civilization biome, even if it's post-release.

It would add a lot more customization to add a ruins/civilization slider for how colonized the planet was. 0 would be an untouched planet; low numbers would look like planets that were just starting to be colonized, terraformed, or mined; mid-range to higher numbers have a couple of large cities scattered throughout; and maxed out would cover the entire planet.

I think a big reason it might be difficult to execute will be to make sure all the meshes and textures fit together to make a believable city, especially considering roads connecting everything would be expected. An easy way around this might be to have most of the city buried, so all that shows are the taller features. Skyscrapers are the obvious choice, but highways can also emerge from the ground, creating ramps to set defenses on or to create choke points. Other remnants of civilization might remain too like stadiums, radio towers or large dishes, remnants of a space elevator, and mining equipment.

It would be awesome to see ruins in the jungle, covered in foliage. Have buildings poking out of dunes in the desert or snow on an ice planet. Some would be in the ocean after climate change or shifting continents sunk them. They should even be available on lava planets as the former residents could have been trying to mine it for valuable resources, or maybe the planet destabilized and turned from a life supporting biome to a hellish landscape. I don't like the idea of acid rain, though.

I love the idea of a city biome personally. Not something we are currently planning for launch though.

I like the idea, and I'm really glad to see the devs back this (even for post launch). It has a very "mod" feel for me though, and has me thinking about the difficulty of modding in new biomes (which could take loads of the dev's back). How might the game accommodate the smooth addition of things like new biomes if you are currently having to tweek the procedural generation? That, to me, sounds much more involved than a simple mod... Also, what is Uber's plan for adopting mods that are considered by most of the community as good additions (such as city biomes) into the base game? Will you remake your own versions of them from scratch or include the mod as-is into the base game? If neither, I fear a fractured player base where the community is divided into those who play vanilla PA and those who play with mods.

I would actually like to have ruins on all planets.

So that there sometimes are remains of older civilizations. That would be interesting.

I think if you have an entire planet, it would be very random and hard to navigate, not to mention annoying.

But as a new biome, i think the idea is solid.

It's great to hear this is a possibility after launch. Makes me curious as to what else they have in mind, especially if there's anything they want to add that hasn't been discussed in the forums or publicly announced.

Pictures are worth a thousand words; this particular one is also worth several hundreds of thousands of metal in reclaimables. Cities made metal storages useful in TA, and added an interesting environment where metal didn't come out of the ground.

Oh that is pretty neat, reclaiming metal from old cities. i love that

I must say I quite liked the Total Annihilation urban tileset [these pics are 3rd party maps made using the tileset]

I don't think this should be officially a part of the game; it doesn't fit with the lore.

Now you're saying... but ruins should last long enough to qualify under the "The age of humanity has long passed..." bit, right?

WRONG.

The robots aren't just fighting over human worlds. They are spreading across the entire galaxy. Being that humanity is gone, any remnants *of* humanity will be limited to, at best, a few hundred worlds. In a galaxy that may contain so many worlds you need scientific notation to express it. Surely those core worlds would have been the first to be struck by kinetic energy weapons (i.e. asteroids), and any human ruins on those worlds destroyed.

It would take a retcon to make it right.

I don't think there's a reason to why they have to be human cities.

The cities can be made by a much earlier stage of the Uberian robots (the ones now in the game). Y'know, from before they "perfected war technology" and perhaps even from before Nanolathing.

Don't have to be on every map as well.

weeee ^^ devs are with us