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Building variety

AC Feedback and Suggestions
#1

Looking at the latest screenshots from Ancient Cities, e.g. in the following topic : https://forum.ancient-cities.com/t/screenshotsaturday/268, there is a certain repetition in buildings to be noticed.

Will the game be offering us with a variety on the graphical appearance from same styled buildings? The screenshots thus far are obviously in a very early stage, however also when taking competitors in account most stick to one design for their buildings with at most some minor varieties on little trinkets attached to the buildings. This gives a rather bland look to villages, especially in games set in a historical timeframe.

This tends to be most noticeable on the most frequent building of all, housing.

How will Ancient Cities approach this? Will we see multiple styles for the same building? Will the most common buildings perhaps offer an even wide variety of unique models?

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#2

At this moment of development we are forcing ourselves to have as less items of each type as possible, because any design or technical change may imply the need to update all the assets already in the game.
So we have just one small and one big house assets, only 2 trees, only one kind of animal and so on.

When the gameplay and tech finally settle down we will start to introduce more content and variety.

For buildings the easy way is to build different models for each type, easy but costly because each building have several build and decay states plus several level of detail.
We have in our minds a mix between this and some procedural help to get variety. But this is still in the design sheet.

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#3

On this topic you may can trust on the steam-workshop (after release of course). Some other Citybuilding-Games (e.g. Cities Skylines) have a great workshop community thus gaining much more variety with their buildings.

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#4

On this subject, I think it would be interesting to see buildings/dwellings made of different materials based on the geography and available materials in a given area. Obviously this would need to be a feature added later but, the idea would be that if your tribe lives in a well forested area, then wood is plentiful for building, however, if your tribe lives in an arid area like the American Southwest, wood is not a viable building material which is why the Adobe building style came into common practice there, similarly, it isn’t a coincidence that Pacific islanders use a lot of Palm fronds in the construction of their dwellings.

Once you move into later stages of development I think looking at this concept would not only be ascetically pleasing and create building variety but, also make more logical sense from building material availability perspective.

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#5

How about having a few different building modules (different sizes or layouts), which can be attached together, with doorways appearing between if desired? Or if building vertically, trapdoor with staircase or ladder? (But only if required, so that two separate dwellings can still be butted together without a connection appearing).
And will we be able to follow citizens into their dwellings, perhaps adding furnishings etc, or will it be more like Banished, where citizens disappear into their dwellings to eat & sleep unwatched?

#6

We know that, but creating assets for AC is few times more complicated that creating them for other games where only one model need to be done per building. In AC several building and decaying models need to be done. We wonder if that can be too cumbersome for modders to be attracted massively to AC.

We have some ideas to implement this to some extend -only texture based-.

Interiors will be not present in the game. We simply have not the workforce for that.
So citizens inside buildings will hidden -but accesible from the building UI-

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#7

Thanks.
In that case can’t we start with a basic “single room” module for a family and then a few different “extra room” modules that could be added onto it - sideways & upwards? Maybe this would be automatic, as families got bigger, but it would be nice if the extensions could be added slightly random, to add variety as well as capacity to the dwellings.
There’d be a limit to the final size of course. So excess family members would have to move out and set up for themselves (either building new or moving into empty houses?). Or if a family got smaller, rooms that weren’t needed could fall into decay.
I don’t know if I’m asking too much here, Just suggestions :slight_smile:

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