Add view of building spaces that ignores buildings, flags, trees and removable rocks

[daniel-santos]

Problem

Show/hide building spaces is definitely useful, but there are times when decisions during game play must be made. "Do I build this medium building here, or should I try to clear more trees / stones and see if I can fit my large building here?" Or, perhaps, disassemble a small building to make another building space larger.

The problem is that this requires game play time and resources (woodcutters, stonemasons, builder,) in order for the player gain information about the map terrain that the tribe already has when that part of the map has been seen and the territory elevations should be known. This also costs delay in critical building decisions.

Proposed solutions

Perhaps the easiest way to implement this is just a separate show/hide toggle that displays all building spaces ignoring buildings, stones, trees and other objects that can be removed (if there are any). If a building space is blocked, then it can still be displayed with color-faded, translucent icon, and a normal (full-color, opaque) icon otherwise. Here's some examples in 8-bit RGBA

But I can think of a number of alternate implementations. One would be to add toggle-able setting(s) to the show/hide menu for the showing building spaces obscured by trees, stones, and buildings, either as a single or three separate settings. This would cause the normal show/hide view to also show building spaces that are blocked by removable objects.

In such a view, if a tile could accommodate (the center of) a medium building if spaces around it were cleared, but can have a small building as-is, then it could be displayed as a small building (with color) drawn on top of a medium building who's color is faded, and perhaps with an alpha of 50-75% or such. For example:

As a final enhancement, mousing over the tile that could accommodate a larger building if adjacent tiles were cleared, then those tiles could be marked with a highlight or some overlay to show which objects are preventing a larger building space.

[tothxa]

The editor has this ("Show Maximum Building Spaces"), but it was voted down for in-game, because discovering the map by clearing your land from trees and rocks was considered an important part of the gameplay.