Could city creation work like sim city? Where you lay down roads–which at first would just be carved out dirt and houses–which would resemble simple huts/cabins. Then as more research (and money) you invest into technology, you unlock different tools like a power supply tower, sewer system, paved roads, better houses, etc. But also with the money, you’d have to possess the necessary materials like wood, stone, and metal to build buildings. So you could venture out into your planet as your creature/avatar to collect resources. And of course as you evolve your civilization things like disease wpuld decrease bc you have hospitals and a clean sewer system. Thus population would increase. Then youd also have to worry about waging war with neighboring cities bc they ght wanna take you down if you’re a threat. Or maybe trade with you if you have many excess resources. Also: Id like to design floorplans for the houses so your creatures can go in and out and they could interact with objects that you put in there like a chair or stove. Instead of being the stiff, solid blocks that Spore had.
…so basically simcity creator with more interactions?
Yeah. seems cool.
Yea. Basically.
Well yeah, sounds good to me
This made me think, what would the “city” stage look like? I assume it would be in the God’s-Eye persective. Will it be using a hex-grid like a lot of strategy games? Would it be better to make it completely free-place or keep it to a grid-like placing system for buildings and roads? Would units have free roam capabilities or would they follow a set of grid movements?
Each has it’s own advantages and disadvantages. Grid style maps would make building placements be a lot smoother but would make things that move look awkward if forced to move along said grid. A completely free system would make units look a lot better but cities might be harder to develop as the game goes on. So take the best of both and make cities grid based and units move freely?
Also how will buildings look? I assume that the player could make them, like in spore, but would we keep the same system that spore used to place them or will we make it more customizable? All these really depend on how y’all want the stage to function. Do you want it to be like a strategy game (Ex: Civ V) or do you want it to be more like what spore did and make it minimal strategy needed to “win”?
AFAIK, Strategy Mode spans the late Awakening Stage all the way up to Ascension (if that’s still planned).
Pretty sure units move freely, grids would be a dramatic departure from unconstrained movement in the previous stages.
To add my two cents to the thread itself, I would prefer most city development be left to the AI, since it would be immensely tedious for the player to build each individual house within each individual block where each individual street is paved. Even if the player Nation has nationalized most facets of urban planning, the bureaucrats (or geomancers, or whoever) would still be the ones mandating projects.
So basically the player makes a base model for a city and then the AI makes the other cities function based on that and it’s unique needs?
That could work, too, but I was thinking more along the lines of the AI having Tech Editor-made structures be built as needed, with the player, as the state, making other build orders for things like courts and military bases.
i think you should be able to control some of the city creating, all if you are communist.
Or just let the AI do stuff, until you interfere with it
Society centers would likely be a continuation of nests in aware stage. A species that is adapted for digging would have an easier time (imagine the shovel a worm like creature would carry) building underground cities in awakening and early society stages. There are 5 places cities can be built: On the ground, underground, floating on water, submerged in water and flying in air. Venice can be considered a submerged city. An amphibian species would have been able to make use of the parts of buildings that are underwater. Floating and flying cities would have strict building material restrictions and aren’t likely to have the same environment around them to forage and cultivate, so they would be rarer than others.
Society stage starts with the building of the first settlement. I think this transition may be very similar to becoming multicellular.
| Multicell | Society |
|---|---|
| Cells | Buildings |
| Tissues | Zones |
| Organism | City |
| Society | Country |
| Hive mind? | One world government |
| Polynucleate | Çatalhöyük (no street/indoors difference) |
| Neurons, blood vessels, trachea, … | Roads, pipes, electricity cables, etc |
| Nucleus | Town square, church, white house, etc |
| Germ layers | Old city center vs newer expansion outside |
| Evolution | Building? Rebuilding? |
| Predation | Mortal engines (mod?) |
| Proteins | Population/factories |
| Iron chunk | Mountain with an iron mine |
| Cell membrane/skin/exoskeleton | City walls/great wall of china |
| Dead body | Unoccupied buildings |
| Decomposition | Falling into disrepair |
The city editor can have three parts, the building editor, zone editor and infrastructure. Buildings are designed and zones are designed using them. Houses are used to make residential areas, factories make industrial areas and more than one type of building can exist in a zone, so there can be mixed use zoning. World wonders would be rogue buildings that don’t form zones, or have their own zones.
In awakening, the player can design and place the huts/cabins one by one. In society, that would be repetitive and maybe impossible (I am assuming there wouldn’t be 5 buildings in a city like in spore). That’s where the zones come in.
So how do we place zones? Hexagons? That’s better than squares I guess, but spore didn’t have a fixed grid, so why should thrive have something worse? I’d like to be able to paint the ground with my cursor like this
That video divided the zones of the city with respect to time, not purpose, but new zones for the same purpose would be created in the game too, if tissue cities are accepted. For example, the player may run out of forests, so switches to building from stone, and later to reinforced concrete for building skyscrapers.
The endpoint of painting the ground is covering the planet completely with cities.
The amount of farms required for a given population is way more than what is needed to house them. Farms may be built with painting the ground in a fertile valley.
Vertical farming removes the high surface area requirement, because it now uses the power in the power infrastructure instead of the sunlight for fulfilling the energy needs of the biologic population. Farming skyscrapers can be dispersed inside other tissues. Without hunger no longer being an issue, the population can keep increasing exponentially[1] and create an ecumenopolis. With no more free land to expand to, the cities from then on, would expand either by growing tall or digging deep, these two are probably the same thing because the material to add new floors would come from digging if not imported. When the planets transformation into the city matter gets completed, the planet can disintegrate into small spaceships and those can join the others in the dyson swarm.
And the Eiffel tower becomes a touristic spaceship.
Another idea: different colors. Eastern and western Berlin look different when viewed from space at night because they adopted different lightbulbs during the cold war. Bulb editor? Random color for each civ? What if a planet wants to do a rainbow mexican wave at aliens? That could be used as a pre-radio communication method in a Trappist-1 system where its possible to see the continents of other planets with a naked eye.
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Where does all that energy come from? Fusion, unless the planet lost its oceans. In that case, the civilization can turn a planet/moon in their solar system into a black hole and use that for mass energy conversion. ↩︎