Small tiles for fans of beautiful cities.

[Akira Kurosawa]

Since casual strategy players often like to build beautiful cities for fun, there is a need to separate buildings and create smooth passages between them, I would like to ask the developers to add at least one small marble tile with a passable texture to the list of buildings and with a texture area like that of a sentry towers, which can easily separate one building from another at the same distance. In the description, it will be possible to say that this tile is nothing more than a decorative object. Naturally, tiles should be available from the earliest era and be able to "stick" to other tiles and buildings or objects.

What do you say to that?

Edited February 13, 2023 by Radament

[sternstaub]

could (or might) also be interesting to have streets. exspecially as they were important to some civs, namely Romans. they loved streets and books. really. AFAIK. streets could give the AI a pathfinding method (on some civs?) and give infantry movement bonus. But probably a feature which would be useful only on larger maps. In that case, that would of course exceed the purely decorative means.

although that might lead to many entities, as buildings are entities (AFAIK). thus it probably has a rat tail (no idea if this saying exists in eng) attached to it, because it might be useful to have a separate 2d-layer and separate handling for such special kind of object. Because less performance impact if it can be reduced to 2d and match the terrain in some way.

In other words: i am not sure if such tiles would scale well with the current state of the engine. my guess is that it would be best to do it with a mod (if you intend to use it only for sandbox anyway..). So it sounds like you think about a singleplayer kind of scenario here.
If this were to be implemented in the base game, it would pose an additional source of unexpected behaviour and maybe lag, because each tile would be handled as an entity.
But i might well be wrong on that.

Please note that i do appreciate the basic idea: having some kind of basic (infra-)structuring possibility in the game, be it only decorative. Although, as i mentioned, the different civs had different attitudes and uses of infrastructures, because of different natural formations, flora etc. .
Little excourse: in my city, there is a street called "Pontstraße", where "Pont-" comes from the latin "pons", which refers to a bridge. Nowadays, there is only little water in the area, because it is quite urbanized by now; but long ago, the area lay outside of the city and was swampy. The romans thus built kind of a wooden bridge-road - their road system and organization was a great strength of theirs, after all! 
And hence originates the present name of the street. 
What i want to say with this: It DID play a role back then.

Edited February 13, 2023 by sternstaub

[Akira Kurosawa]

It's just that in the Age of Empires, houses are attached to squares on the coordinate grid, which makes it easy to indent to the desired distance.

[maroder]

sounds like a fun thing that could be explored in a mod. Could even go as far and require all buildings (- walls -towers) to be connected to a territory root via a road. That might lead to some interesting gampleay. Much more strategic planning of the city layout.

[Akira Kurosawa]

On 13/02/2023 at 9:45 PM, sternstaub said:

although that might lead to many entities, as buildings are entities (AFAIK).

There is another option - to make two borders for "sticking" buildings: one border - back to back, the other - at a distance of "one tower". Then the tiles for the indent will not be needed. Or make a switch for a visible "grid of coordinates", where each cell could be in area like a tower, where it will be possible to place buildings, "sticking" to the squares on the grid.

Edited February 15, 2023 by Radament

[Thomas Brown]

Another approach is to create two boundaries for "sticking" buildings: one border should be next to each other, while the other should be "one tower" apart. The tiles for the indent won't be required after that. Rather, choose a visible "grid of coordinates" with each cell resembling a tower, allowing for the placement of structures that "stick" to the grid's squares.