Multi-house villages

[zookeeper]

I think villages would look better if we shrunk the houses and generally put multiple houses on each village tile. Also, it would make the scale of villages and castles more consistent. Now, some may say that the scale of the terrains and units is intentionally wacky to begin with, but it doesn't hurt to have the wackiness be at least a bit consistent internally. We wouldn't want the tropical forest trees be twice as big as the regular forest trees, or to have some villages consist of few small houses and some of one big house - I see this as the same thing: the scale of buildings would be nice to be at least somewhat consistent.

Anyway, here's one sketch I made. I think that particularly with units in the village, a multi-house village could look a lot better. Especially in the future, when we could overlay some houses on top of the units semi-translucently (no translucency in my fake screenie, just hard overlap). Note that I'm not suggesting that we do something like this before we can make it look good, which might require the inevitable graphics engine overhaul. Also note that we can prevent houses (since they almost invariably overlap the hex borders) from hovering over adjacent mountains, castles, water or other unfitting terrain relatively easily, so that's not a worry.

We could also have something else than houses in a village, like a small patch of garden next to a single house, or a house and a windmill or well, or whatever. I don't believe this would make villages harder to spot and distinguish, if done well.

Now, how would you feel about this kind of change in the long term, technical issues aside?

[turin]

IMHO having the unit stand in the dirt in the middle of a village, instead of somehow on top of the house, looks better. And I do like the way the shrunken villages look in general.


However, for some maps, the shrunken villages make no sense. In particular, I'm thinking of "defend the city" maps or talking maps that take place in cities. If this change is made, I'd like for both options to remain open.

[Darth Fool]

Can you do a mock up of how a multi-house village would look with several adjacent villages? Say, one village surrounded by other villages or maybe 3 adjacent villages? Overall, it looks pretty good and i think it could be a good idea.

[Eternal]

This is very very good indeed! I'm all in for this.
Suits much better to the landscape's scale too.

Maybe if you'd put many villages adjacent to each other you could get towns and cities? Multi hex villages like them multi hex mountains.

Would it increase download size too much?

[zookeeper]

Can you do a mock up of how a multi-house village would look with several adjacent villages? Say, one village surrounded by other villages or maybe 3 adjacent villages?

Ok, I'll try to do some mock-ups of how adjacent villages could look like. Luckily though, it's quite a rare situation (mostly used in maps trying to depict a big city).

Maybe if you'd put many villages adjacent to each other you could get towns and cities? Multi hex villages like them multi hex mountains.

Would it increase download size too much?

No, there probably wouldn't be zillions of tiles, even though the number of village images could easily quadruple (or more). And the multihex method could indeed be used for some adjacent village formations.

Anyway, for making sure adjacent villages and villages adjacent to castles, water and stuff look ok, I was initially thinking of creating directional variants. For example, the normal human multi-house village would have extra variations for situations when there's "blocking terrain" (like a mountain or lava) in some direction (let's say, northwest or north), and that variation would then not have a house in the northwest/north side (which would otherwise overlap the mountains or whatever to the north/northwest). A bit like how the new swamp reeds have these reed-castle-s/sw/nw/n/ne/se.png images that are used when there's a castle (or other similar) hex in a particular direction.

[JW]

VERY NICE!!!!

Couldn't there still be large village images for city maps still? We'd just need the new terrain system implemented for the new terrain symbols...

[Eleazar]

Sorry to be a wet blanket, but something important has been overlooked—the size of a hex.
Most of the mini-village buildings are outside of the hex they belong to. While overlapping an adjacent hex is OK, IMHO this goes too far. It won't be possible to do this sort of thing in corners of caves or in nooks with mountains on many sides. In many situations that can be found on current maps, you'll be able to fit only one of your mini-villages near the village hex. This kind of approach would probably lead to a common situation where it's not obvious which of one or more hexes is actually "village". Halfway implementing it so that with some graphics you to inbetween the buildings, and with others you go on the buildings, would only aggravate the problem

[zookeeper]

Sorry to be a wet blanket, but something important has been overlooked—the size of a hex.
Most of the mini-village buildings are outside of the hex they belong to. While overlapping an adjacent hex is OK, IMHO this goes too far. It won't be possible to do this sort of thing in corners of caves or in nooks with mountains on many sides. In many situations that can be found on current maps, you'll be able to fit only one of your mini-villages near the village hex. This kind of approach would probably lead to a common situation where it's not obvious which of one or more hexes is actually "village". Halfway implementing it so that with some graphics you to inbetween the buildings, and with others you go on the buildings, would only aggravate the problem

Would these convince you otherwise?

Of course, do note that we would need to move the units to stand in the middle of the hexes (as I've done on all these images which have units) for these to work well, but I see no reason why we wouldn't want to do that in any case when it's made possible.

And I think it should be rather obvious what hex is the village hex, if we put a some trampled ground or other similar stuff between the houses.

However, we'd have to solve issues like how the rightmost wolf rider in the above mock-up would overlap with the southern house of the village, if the rider attacked a unit in the southeast (in melee).

[freim]

As I said on irc: I'm against this idea.

Good:
- More in line with the rest of the terrain scalewise

Bad:
- I'm consistently against resizing of pixel artwork in this way. It makes them look fuzzy and bad
- Looks even more wack scalewise compared to units, it just looks bad to me
- It would be a huge mistage to loose all the fine details in the current village artwork
- Realism isn't more important than indicating significance and clarity and this doesn't improve on that

[Sapient]

I totally agree with freim. However, I think there should be a multi-hex terrain for villages that makes them looks more like cities.

[Jetrel]

I totally agree with freim. However, I think there should be a multi-hex terrain for villages that makes them looks more like cities.

You mean, like what zookeeper suggested except "no resizing of village images" and "spread across several tiles"? (Which of course changes the proposal fundamentally)

I would welcome a way to make multiple village tiles, "right next to each other", look better than they do now.

[Sapient]

I totally agree with freim. However, I think there should be a multi-hex terrain for villages that makes them looks more like cities.

You mean, like what zookeeper suggested except "no resizing of village images" and "spread across several tiles"? (Which of course changes the proposal fundamentally)

Right, like in Sim City. Granted, having multiple villages next to each other is a rare situation (and thus a low priority). Still, it would be nice to have.