City Customization

[DeletedUser]

[Summary] Buildings need to be able to rotate. Rivers need to be added just like the pathways we have now, they could give culture.
[Details] - Clarify your idea by explaining the specifics. I think that's clear enough.
[Reasons for implementing] – All cities look very much the same, no way to personality it. When I played farmville, I used to go look at many many farms to see what people had done with them, this game they are all the same. Here if you've seen one, you've pretty much seen them all. Becoming very boring to look at.
[Impact on other game features] – Happier players, better looking cities.

 

[DeletedUser814]

Hello Zilal,

Thank you for taking the time to give us your thoughts on how we can improve Elvenar! Unfortunately, the option to rotate buildings has already been ruled out by our Game Designers, for the reasons given in the transcript of the live Q&A session in July. The relevant section can be seen below:

Will it be possible to rotate buildings? It would make easier to build my city.
This is a question we actually receive quite often. Now, the short answer is no. But here is why. Every city builder needs features that make placing buildings challenging. In Elvenar, this challenge comes mainly from two sources: The one is that most buildings need a street connection, and the other is that every building has a fixed shape. The combination of this makes it challenging to build an efficient city. Of course, the downside of every challenge is that sometimes it feels like a burden. If you could rotate the buildings, this would make things much easier. But the downside of a low challenge is: when it gets too easy, it also gets boring quite fast. So, since this "city puzzling" is a core mechanic in Elvenar, we never implemented any technical base to make it possible to rotate buildings.

However, the ability to have rivers in your city that would add culture is a good idea that we could consider forwarding to the development team, as it would allow players to make more personal choices about the aesthetics of their city. So, what are thoughts of the community? Would you like to see rivers running through your city?

 

[DeletedUser]

I only have room for a http://grammarist.com/usage/crick/

Just as I was passing a place where a kind of a cowpath crossed the crick, here comes a couple of men tearing up the path as tight as they could foot it.
[Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, by Mark Twain]

 

[DeletedUser]

Sorry but I totally disagree with this statement “The combination of this makes it challenging “

The way it is right now you either sell a building for more space or wait for an expansion, not challenging at all and as I've said, makes all cities look the same. = boring.

 

[DeletedUser1124]

Whereas I think that this game is really very good, there is a lot of scope to do things without having to spend real money, and for this, a HUGE thumbs up to you!
However, I have to admit that the challenge is finding the space, or freeing up the space in order to grow. Most advanced cities do look very similar, so if there was a chance of perhaps customising the buildings, not in size or shape, but perhaps in decoration - after all, in real life, no 2 properties are painted the same colour.
But, at the end of the day, I am really enjoying this game.
Perhaps rivers would be a nice idea, especially if workshops could be built near them in order to operate, rather than the pathways - just might make it a bit more interesting.

 

[DeletedUser]

Hello Zilal,

Thank you for taking the time to give us your thoughts on how we can improve Elvenar! Unfortunately, the option to rotate buildings has already been ruled out by our Game Designers, for the reasons given in the transcript of the live Q&A session in July. The relevant section can be seen below:



However, the ability to have rivers in your city that would add culture is a good idea that we could consider forwarding to the development team, as it would allow players to make more personal choices about the aesthetics of their city. So, what are thoughts of the community? Would you like to see rivers running through your city?

I think rivers would be great they could operate the same way as paths.. culture bonus

 

[DeletedUser]

Rivers functioning as paths? Would we then get animations of elves paddling around in little canoes too? Yes that would be awesome!

Nevertheless the initial idea behind this post appears to be to add complexity to the game, so how about this variant?:

• Rivers add culture like paths, however do not connect buildings (basically acting like 1 tile culture buildings)
• A non-stackable culture bonus (say +20%) is applied to any two connected tiles of a river. Or the culture bonus increases by every further connected tile by 2% for example.

That would mean that making your river longer increases the amount of culture obtained. In order to make this feasible there would either have to be upgraded forms of rivers to make them competitive with the culture buildings of one's era or some other incentive to build these rivers.

Would be a neat way to add something 'new' to the game though.

 

[DeletedUser]

Agree that it is boring that the cities tend to look the same, especially as people end up invariably binning all but the latest culture buildings and possibly ones they spent real money on, as not doing so equals a waste of space. Additionally, all our other buildings end up looking the same as we upgrade them. I suggested something similar a while back and people said it would slow the server down, though. The issue with rotating the buildings will stay as is, but even so I do think adding some variation to aesthetics would be nice. I realise people will argue the game is not aesthetics based like Zynga games tend to be, but OTOH a lot of work has gone into the graphics, so why not allow more scope for diverse designs?

 

[DeletedUser]

cities tend to look the same, especially as people end up invariably binning all but the latest culture buildings and possibly ones they spent real money on, as not doing so equals a waste of space.

This is an 'issue' that I always had in FoE as well. It would be great if there were some option or feature implemented that would allow to have buildings from other eras/chapters without such enormous losses in productivity.

On the other hand... All that happens when we "waste" space is that we progress slower. Perhaps it's just our greed to get every last point we can that causes such an 'issue'. Although, then again, this whole greed thing is the entire point of the game: to build the most efficient city you can. Or is that the misconception...?

 

[DeletedUser]

On the other hand... All that happens when we "waste" space is that we progress slower. Perhaps it's just our greed to get every last point we can that causes such an 'issue'. Although, then again, this whole greed thing is the entire point of the game: to build the most efficient city you can. Or is that the misconception...?

Well I don't know about you, but I already find the game very slow, and I'm not really the super rushy type in these things, so if one were to start giving up space for aesthetics, I think one might end up just quitting out of boredom. I'm currently unable to do much of anything on Winyandor due to lack of space even without indulging my desire to have a diverse cityscape, and it's been so for a while. I really don't think it's possible except if one is a very casual player. At least for the culture buildings, surely upgrading them would provide an alternative to the 100x the same thing issue?