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[Orange-of-Cthulhu]

So I think different civs should have different styles of architecture.

For humans it can be say, some civs make square houses, some civs make rectangular buildings, some civs make large buildings, some civs make small, some civs make houses only on ground floow, some civs always have a first floor and so on.

Dwarves it can also be some civs like to make corridors with rooms having an entrance to a corridor, some civs build rooms with doors connecting them and don't use corridors, it can be if a civ builds a lot on a single level or make a staircase with a few rooms on each level.

And so on.

FURTHERMORE - a site's history should be reflected in it's buildings. If "rectangular bulidings with just a ground floor"-style civ founded the site, the "old town" will be rectangular houses with just a ground floor. BUT the site got conquered by "square 2 story buildings"-civ that constructed some more buildings. And these are, well you guessed it, square and with 2 stories. And then after that, a dwarven civ took over the site, and they added some burrows.

The result would be that cities became unique.

And you could actully see just by walking around if the city had been peacefully owned by the same people all along, or if it had a colorfull history with many owners.

Add also statues, that each owner would put up a bunch of statues of their rulers, gods and events and so on and leave the old ones. Then it would be like walking around in legends mode.

(One can add even more things like preferred material of buildings, do they keep trees or cut them down and what not.)

[Azerty]

Different architectural styles would certainly help to differenciate between civilizations.

And the main factor, besides randomness, was the environment: for exemple, a very hot environment would lead to an architecture ensuring hot air doesn't enter but is made colder before while cold environment would see buildings made to conserve heat.

[Moeteru]

I really like this suggestion. It would make cities a lot more fun to explore while also making the world's history more evident to the player.
If rulers are putting up statues of themselves there definitely needs to be a mechanic where conquering civs may deface the statues erected by the previous owners. The game could just add an extra note to the description saying something like "the figure's nose has been broken off" or "this statue has been severely damaged by vandalism".

[Starver]

As well as Single-Storey, as an option, can I suggest "Second (and above?) Storey only" for (in lieu of actual flooding possibilities, though esturine settlements could pretend they are protecting from that) as an in-game/worldgen 'reaction' to raiding?

i.e. the 'Welsh' theory behind the design of some of Chester's architecture (scroll down a bit) which is a theory/fact echoed (rightly or wrongly) for various other border-towns with similar but perhaps less extant surviving versions of the basic design.

Though there it mentions lower (more vulnerable to unwanted access) premises, at ground-level, you could template your building footprints as solid walls (or accessible only from above the 'ground-level cellars', within), have the building entrances-proper at Z+1, with optional street-length and street-crossing walkways (yeah, I know there's fliers and climbers, but either they aren't raiding here or they weren't imagined to) and limited-but-sufficient up-accesses to support a peacetime traffic into and out of the premises but feasibly (trapdoor-topped ramps?) lockable-off at the first sign of town-banditry.

(The flood-planes version would be simpler. Whatever the design for a ground-building would be but at Z+1 base, with corner (maybe other) pillars below and stair/ramp access uncomplicated by need of a nominal 'barrier'. You could have inter-building walkways for the right kind of community, even if they aren't habitually in the water. Or a further option - Z+1 building, Z=0 and Z-1 'piles' in shallow-but-open water, as an option when the dev-arc with boats in it starts to become/near reality.)

[NW_Kohaku]

I'd have to back the argument that real architecture is generally more a matter of where you lived and what materials were available than cultural.

Take roofs.  In the Middle East or other desert areas, they classically tended to build more cube-like houses of sun-dried mud brick with flat roofs... because there was little rain and no snow in the desert that would collapse such a roof.  Go to a place like Norway, and they have extremely steep roofs because allowing snow to pile up on the roof would lead to its collapse, so the steeper the slope of the roof, the less snow can stick on to weigh the roof down.  Norwegian homes are also typically made of the kind of evergreen wood that exists in Norway, not sun-dried mud bricks because those would never dry in the sun in damp, cold Norway.

Likewise, buildings in cold regions like Norway are going to be dug partially into the ground, because the ground is warmer than the freezing sub-arctic winds.  In cold environments, houses were often built as a pit in the ground with a (very pointy) roof overhead you kept warm with a fire in the middle.  Ironically, in the hottest deserts, you do the something similar, because being underground can be cooler than the sun-scorched surface of the earth.  It's in more temperate areas you build tall and let the breeze in.

Building material is also geographical, as Asian architecture is characterized by using bamboo, such as those curving bamboo roofs.  (Which is created when the bamboo naturally just sags in the middle, making a curve.)  It's not that only Asians had a culture that appreciated bamboo, it's that it only grew in Asia.  Bamboo grows more rapidly than trees, so it's a natural fit for renewable sources of wood, and it also isn't as hard to chop down and transport since they're individually smaller.

The only place you really see culturally-influenced differences in architecture is when you're dealing with religion, palaces, or monuments, like your typical mosque being quite different from a cathedral of the era.  (Many cathedrals, for a start, tended to be deliberately designed to fit a cross-like shape.)  Palaces and monuments, likewise, put form over function, and therefore are going to showcase more symbolic architecture than practical ones.  The homes most people lived in were very very broadly similar along the coasts of the Mediterranean, regardless of which cultures or religions had recently conquered them because the typical house or workplace was a function over form affair.

[Starver]

Particularly good points.

For cultures that may inhabit a small area[1] it's probably simple.

1) What materials are there? For the dwarf, there's al(most al)ways rock, you'd think, and elves are probably going to ensure there are trees (and do their elfine thing about it), but humans on an open plain might need to be sparing with everything but turf, for at least newly established settlements.

2) What do conditions dictate? As said above. Though with licence. Winterfell's 'spindle-tops' of wood are(/were?) quoted as impractical with possible/probable/periodically-certain snow in that region, not being fairy-tale/disneyesque/germanic that would not crush, but I think there's canon-excuse that if the wooden roof (installed as a machicolated hoarding, astride the stronger snow-proof roofing, for practical defensive purposes) gets damaged, it'll get fixed. (As soon as it seems needed. (Bran may have 'fallen' from one of the towers that hadn't been 'reopened' since a prior reconsolidation of active living/utility/defensive areas.>

3) Some cultural quirk. As above, a dwarf may always dig, an elf may prefer to nest, but other than that there's the geometricism (round/long/square-houses), a tendency towards a material that isn't ultralocal (but regional, at least, without needing cross-cultural importation) that might be used in 2nd+ phase of building (replacing/surrounding whatever establishing buildings had to be rude-cut into the landscaps first, in all but the most planned-in-advance towns with materials carted in especially for the founding - a sign of a rich, (over?)confident and expanding culture), little details like many small windows (not that this is much noted at the moment) vs fewer larger ones.

4) Building use standards, specific to the building-type and culture. Do all religious buildings 'face' the same direction/towards one worldpoint, or best effort? Is the town-hall (or equivalent) an easily accessible 'public' area, access and egress through any of the gaps between the roof-supporting columns to come and cheer your opinions out as one of the people, or is a defensible keep in which the local business is conducted in closed-sessions, or strictly vetted access to the public gallery to discourage troublemakers? Once homes are big enough to have more than one or two rooms to them, is there a 'reception' room/'front room kept for best'/granny-annex/separate bedroom-cum-office for husband and wife/etc.. or do any or all of these become(/stay) subsumed within the original 'family' room?

5) Historic devopment. Not just when invasian happens, but an intra-cultural shift. Bits of York, for example: Modern çsympathetic' buildings, a few brutalist designs, interbellum architecture, Victorian streets, mediæval streetplan, distinct viking naming/influence, traces of Rome preserved/recreated (with plenty of in-betweeny bits), where there are three or four main 'invasion' changes, but many more is just signs-of-the-times, like the huge portal cut through the city walls for the newly-developed railway that doesn't even go in there any more, with the 'new' through-station off slightly outside.


I'm not entirely sure how Tarn would do half of all this (never mind a few more ideas I couldn't quite classify) in a worldgen procedurally-led process capable of generating a century or two (or ten) of 'history', and perhaps a bit of faked pre-history too, of a non-stagnant site. Maybe a few less-ambitious twists, to start. Assemble a dozen 'template temples', and use one or other of them for every founded settlement, when it becomes time to render, plus consistent-with-home-civ also add new/additional ones to places later touched by that other influence. A 'ruination' process, or ruined-version by straight template can be used where a later change is judged harsh enough. (Plus "ruined cities" is an Adventuring trope, whether you expect a little idol under a boulder-trap in a jungle or a city with hidden artefacts buried by dunes in a desert. We probably should see some, however so created. Plagued towns left abandoned by drastic depopulation some time ago; refugees fled a whole front-line village quite recently; trading post anticipated copious future residents but fell on hard times, after setting up plots, and those who had come then left...)

I'd like to see some 'Old Town, New Town' bits (c.f. Edinburgh), if not 'Old New-Town' (Milton Keynes? <Foo> Garden City? Noo Yoik?) from afresh, but could be fiddly to work out the parameters involved in implementing them (especially such that every city is not just Edinburgh, more or less).


[1] This may be circular. A sub-culture of a bigger and more expansive example might find they have developed a localised style distinct from their parentage and thus become known as a new culture: "You moved here from Caveshire? I suppose you found you had to build your own cave, here in Swamptopia..."