The new town maps are looking increasingly better, but I still dislike them for one thing: the circularity. Each settlement is a perfectly circular web of roads. And no matter the size of the village/town/city, they all take up the same space. It gets repetitive and boring very soon. Unfortunately, it looks that it's such a fundamental part of Toady's design that it's impossible to change. I suppose the circular web is the very building block of the new towns that can't be replaced.
Also I really hate all the random roads - there's way too many of them in the village parts of the map. But I've already rambled a lot about it here so I won't repeat myself.
(EDIT: But looking at the older town pictures it seems Toady has reduces the number of roads a bit, so there's that.)
Someone already brought this up, but not all the roads are actually roads so much as they are borders separating the different plots of land.
Toady has also mentioned that he thinks the towns are too similar, but seems to be more focused on getting the framework working. He mentioned that eventually they will be other town types, but the reason these ones are circular is because they are based on Manors. The keyword Toady uses is framework, which means he's designing something that can deal with more than one way of doing things, so the spiral web shaped towns is not necessarily the only thing it is capable of. I assume it is just what Toady is using to test the framework.
The maps are also too similar to each other, without branching out into different styles of dividing up land, etc., and they don't really respect their own history or the elevation. The rivers still have exclusion zones (the blocky part). Later there will have to be river-oriented industries/etc. with associated stuffs. The main roads are also a bit ignored by people that should appreciate them. I suppose inns will help that. Overall, we aren't there yet, but these layouts here are likely to unchange for this release (aside from the village cleanup stuff, which'll be farmy and animalish), and I think this framework can accomodate future town updates for a while.
Ideally, towns will someday be able to have more variance, but until the framework is considered done it is probably best that it sticks with a simple pattern to start with (adding additional patterns can be rather easy (comparatively) with the proper foresight and design). It could be possible that one framework can handle the towns of all the civilizations through the use of proper design. Even then, the town framework probably wouldn't be complete until modders can define town creation patterns of their own (which is likely to be a
loooong way off).
And even if the current framework is only capable of a circular pattern it will pave the way for a more robust framework in the future. Sometimes in programing, you have to program something that is good enough so you can see how it works. Then go back and program again once you know what you are doing. It is kind of like writing multiple drafts for a paper. You write the rough draft to get an idea of what you want to do. The rough draft can be used to see where the paper needs improvement as well as showing if more research on the topic needs to be done.
Even after this update towns are still going to get updates in the (relatively speaking) near future. Even after that other civs sites will get worked on during the Army Arc.
Er... that was a bit long wasn't it... TL;DR: Yes, Toady thinks the towns are to similar too, but currently it is good enough to expand upon, test out, and learn from.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 1195164 times)