Urban Development

[GunChleoc]

For African civs, we could look at fractal designs http://www.ted.com/talks/ron_eglash_on_african_fractals

[agentx]

Thanks GunChleoc, that looks very interesting:



And is probably based on a simple algo.

[agentx]

While browsing TED I found this organism who apparently perfectly knows how to spread efficiently over a map and have an eye on available resources. Now I wonder what amount of code is needed to make Hannibal at least look as clever as slime mold.

[LordGood]

Pataliputra was a rectangular palisaded city, grid pattern cities weren't exactly uncommon

Carthaginian cities too, I think.

[agentx]

Wikipedia - Structure: Though parts of the ancient city (Pataliputra) have been excavated, much of it still lies buried beneath modern Patna. During the Mauryan period, the city was described as being shaped as parallelogram, approximately 1.5 miles wide and 9 miles long. Its wooden walls were pierced by 64 gates. These were thought to have been converted to strong stone walls during the time of Ashoka.

Honest question to the 3D gurus: With culling, LOS and fog of war, why do big maps have impact on fps? I mean cities have been much bigger than fifty houses during the relevant century...

[Stan`]

Fog of war sometimes double the number of actors, culling is not fully optimized, see #3073; I don't think LOS lower the number of polys in objects

[agentx]

Stan, I think, you got my point: Regardless of the size of the map there is an upper limit to polygon shown, at least as long the cam is restricted.

[agentx]

I tried last week week to get some grip on the settlement, but completely underestimated the complexity. Then I played a few games and tried to figure out why, where and when I create buildings and how that could be mapped onto Hannibal. First I made a list of the buildings which should be included/considered: Houses, fields, farmstead, storehouse, barracks, blacksmith, temple, market, fortress and towers. That leaves the ptol without a decent cavalry, but ok, they have houses for free.

There is no way without houses, once build they are useful to train females and garrison them in case of an attack. I think, there is no rationale to either build them at the edge of a settlement or in the middle. So probably it is a good idea to place them away from the centre to have space for other buildings.

A bot can easily do the micro and run coralls instead of fields or both. Again preferably suburban structures and mandatory for food.

Farmsteads provide useful tecs and may reduce walking distances for gatherers. I like the compact squared layout of 8 fields with farmstead as center.

Storehouses have tecs, and usually go with the other resources. They may result into another settlement with houses and tower(s), that depends on area risk and resource prospect.

The blacksmith is only good for the tecs it could be placed everywhere and needs no tower.

Barracks and the temple, because of tecs and garrison. Very near to the centre, like the market.

Centre and fortress can guard each other.

Well, and towers are useful everywhere.

The thing is most buildings that should be close to the center (temple, market, fortress) are available later in the game and some space needs to be reserved. Also, these are rather huge buildings. Roughly there are three types:

Ring 1: Temple, market, 1 barrack, 3 towers, 1 fortress

Ring 2: Houses, + towers

Ring 3: Support: fields, farmstead, blacksmith + towers(?)

From that point I think the circular layout above make still sense and also a squared layout with center buildings rather close to each other, enclosed by a wide street. As Ascii art:

          Square                   Circle       HHHHH  HHHHH                 H H H       HHHHH  HHHHH                HH T HH       HHH  CB  HHH              HH B C M HH       HHH  TM  HHH                HH F HH       HHHHH  HHHHH                 H H H        HHHHH  HHHHH

The square should also have exits/streets in W/E direction. Towers could replace houses as needed. I'm still not quite sure how it looks, because the civs with huge houses would fall in the square category.

I plan to make Hannibal build palisades on alert in wide streets to slow the enemy down and remove them after attack.

Images next week....