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[Aqizzar]

Chalk me up for another person who think the cities would likely be a bear to navigate, by the current standards of navigation in Adventure Mode.  I looked at those maps, with the irregularly placed buildings enclosing yards, and I had a serious Daggerfall flashback, isn't a bad thing by any means.  But yeah, navigation.

I do like how organic the cities look, but the lack of a central plan of any kind - public buildings, open squares, direct paths from one entrance to another - makes them feel a bit unnatural.  All of the paths being the same size will make them really cramped and maze-like when walking around in them.

Still, holy crap, cities.  Whoa.

[Sunday]

Man, I feel really unimaginative. I was just expecting slightly bigger towns, with more varieties of building. Those cities are huge.

[Mel_Vixen]

For a real (european) medieval town pretty good even if its not perfect yet. For comparsion take these two maps from the 17th respective 18th century map of my Hometown: map-1650 and map-1714 (Both maps have no copyright and are linked from the wiki-commons)

In citys that were on a trade route you could normaly go from one gate to another in a (more or less) straight line. The citys on the toadys maps almost do that but somehow this straight path gets obstructed on the last meters every time.

[Kogut]

Yes, his cities are rather "organic" than "planned".
And I just realised - is it possible that dwarves will use designs copied from player?

[monk12]

There's an interesting nugget of speculation- the possibility of Planned Communities. Ye Olde cities that grow naturally over time end up looking quite a bit like what those pictures do, but what happens when Rome burns and Nero decides to rebuild it along more organized lines? Given the nature of dwarves (or the immortal races) it is entirely plausible that they would plan their settlements far in advance, regardless of whether they ever expect to be a major city.

[Dwarfu]

I peed my pants a little...and squeeled in a way a man shouldn't.

Just sayin'.

[Neonivek]

Hmmm I thought Cities tended to have Spiderweb designs somewhere and then more organised designs the further out you go.

I should start looking it up.

[Untelligent]

One problem I had with the big cities in the Elder Scrolls games (which I've been of the opinion that DF will become increasingly similar to) was that it took an annoyingly long time to walk from important building A in one part of the city to important building B on the other part of the city, and these new DF cities look even bigger. When towns have various important buildings in them and other stuff to do, will there be any plans to prevent intra-city walks from being too long and monotonous?

[Caldfir]

When towns have various important buildings in them and other stuff to do, will there be any plans to prevent intra-city walks from being too long and monotonous?

I don't know if that's going to be a problem right away.  Remember that the reason you generally end up walking for so long is quests that send you to fetch from every point of the map, and, thus far, DF quests aren't really like that.  Add to this the fact that "slow travel" in adventure mode is relatively speedy (for the player) compared to a 3D game, and the problem might be solved. 

We'll have to wait and see if there is an annoyance there before we need a fix I think. 

[onodera]

Will building materials reflect the location of the city and the importance of the building?
I imagine a city on the plains will have mostly brick buildings, with only the city hall and the cathedral made of stone. We just need to get adobe bricks or more charcoal from one log or animal poo fuel, because it'll be easier to build it out of wood now.

[Bralbaard]

Those cities are absolutely amazing! I expected some small improvements to the existing cities for this release, I never expected that complex and realistic city maps like these would be possible through procedural generation, It seriously puts any megaproject I have ever build to shame. I'm seriously considering putting this and a lot of other praise in bold green letters to make sure toady reads it. 

[NW_Kohaku]

Modern humans and Neanderthals once coexisted in the same place simultaneously. It's not very improbably at all if they are somewhat closely related. At least dwarves, elves and humans seem like they'd have a rather recent common ancestor.

Actually, I've rather liked the comparison of dwarves to Neanderthals... 

Neanderthals evolved and split off from the branch of humanity before humans as a species fully formed, and left Africa for Europe before humans emerged there, and when humans eventually caught up with neanderthals in Europe, they largely coexisted for tens of thousands of years before the genocide wiped all the neanderthals out. 

Neanderthals also had some distinct differences from humans - they were shorter and hairier (like dwarves), and as such, were poor long-distance runners, but were also stronger and more compact (like dwarves), which made them better suited for colder environments in forests, where they could ambush prey from close range (where their lack of running ability wasn't such a liability).  They attacked prey larger than themselves head-on, in spite of the dangerous nature of their prey, such as trying to kill a wooly mammoth by jumping on its back and stabbing it with a wooden spear repeatedly, hopefully before it throws the neanderthal off its back and gores him/her.

In short, they were suicidally aggressive creatures with an absurdly high incidence of injury and a short lifespan.  (Like dwarves.)

A creature like a dwarf, which is different from a human in that they are adapted to living in caves predominantly makes some evolutionary sense, provided they have a common ancestor to explain the very many similarities their people have.  (Of course, that's assuming evolution, and not creation, since apparently, the world literally springs from nothing with creatures coming into existence at a random age at year 0.)

There's an interesting nugget of speculation- the possibility of Planned Communities. Ye Olde cities that grow naturally over time end up looking quite a bit like what those pictures do, but what happens when Rome burns and Nero decides to rebuild it along more organized lines? Given the nature of dwarves (or the immortal races) it is entirely plausible that they would plan their settlements far in advance, regardless of whether they ever expect to be a major city.

(Purely a technical aside, here...)

Nero rebuilt the chunk of Rome that burned down to be an absurdly massive personal pleasure palace for himself on the taxpayer's dime.  That's when the story that he fiddled while Rome burned got circulated by his political enemies: They wanted to paint him as the guy who enjoys and profits from the suffering of the Roman people. 

When Nero died, they tore that palace down, and built the Colosseum in its place.  This was because the next emperor (who managed to last a while, at least, Nero's death sparked "The year of Four Emperors") wanted to make a public statement that his reign would be unlike Nero's by dismantling the pleasure palace, and building a massive public amusement center where average Romans could enjoy public games - using public land and money for public use rather than his own personal pleasure.


What I'm most wondering about while looking at those cities is what happens with all that open space in the middle of those buildings...  Are they used as neighborhood parks?  Or is there no way to directly access them, and nobody uses those open areas?

I also notice that the size of the buildings are all generally similar.  Some houses are two or three times the size of the smallest buildings, but if you start talking about Roman towns, there were always the really wealthy, upper-class citizens who had estates with larger amounts of land and a personal garden and the like. 

I also notice the "corners" of some of the ring-shaped clusters of buildings have unusually large amounts of unused space - the builders aren't trying to make non-rectangular buildings to take up some extra space that they could get away with building into...

Ancient and Medieval cities, where there weren't real building codes, were often expanded by the people living in them, which meant that middle-class families over generations would try to split or build extended conjoined homes taking up all the space they could get, and filling in the gaps (creating the sort of long, continuous rows of houses you see in those maps - all the space in the alleyways are filled in over time).  Having those corners that don't take up the space they can take up looks unnatural because of it.

[Dante]

These are all cities of the maximum size

I doubt navigation will really be a problem most of the time.

The buildings often enclose yards where several families will keep their pigs and other beasts and birds.

So. Cool.

I note every city has exactly four cardinal gates, but presumably 'cleaning up' will change that too. All I can really wish for is the old days of embarking on other people's settlements. My mind is buzzing with plans for blocking the gates and flooding a whole city...

[Cruxador]

What I'm most wondering about while looking at those cities is what happens with all that open space in the middle of those buildings...  Are they used as neighborhood parks?  Or is there no way to directly access them, and nobody uses those open areas?

I'm pretty sure that's what he was referring to with the following:

The buildings often enclose yards where several families will keep their pigs and other beasts and birds. Later these yards will be used for additional buildings and they'll also be expanded out in this release and merged with roads to support things like market squares.

[therahedwig]

Hmmm I thought Cities tended to have Spiderweb designs somewhere and then more organised designs the further out you go.

I should start looking it up.

The cities you're thinking off are usually cities build around military posts. The center being the old encampment.

However, often cities grew as part of a port(London, Amsterdam) or a trading route. The trading route ones tend to have the trading route being huge-ass inbetween.

I hope the cities will somewhat respect the surroundings. Or that people will start modifying the surroundings: like channels.
Perhaps city fires will become a worldgen thing now(Pretty much all medieval cities out there had a couple of huge cityfires that destroyed half the town, until they realised it might be a better idea to forbid making houses of wood.)