Restructuring your city is a pain

[Seizan]

So, I'm at a point were I have 70ish people. And they want well light paths, health and faith.
And I decided to restructure my whole city. Because it's quite messy and I don't like it. It's not well structured to support all the people's desires.
And so I am moving pretty much everything around. And it is hella annoying.
Here are some things that stand out and could be improved in my opinion:

1. the shaking of the city. Whenever I move something or place foundation the city shakes a bit. Really annoying. Making it hard to do the work fast. Especially if you need to place multiple paths.

2. you cannot move stacked buildings. if you have 2 houses stacked on top of each other, I have to move the top and then the bottom one. I also saw a post about an exploit, so I guess it would really be better if you could only move the stacked building. and not remove the top again. I also don't see why you would ever want to do that. Sell the top part, sure. But from what I can tell, you cannot put a different thing on top, so why remove it?

3. You cannot build next to path foundations. I have to build a path, wait for it to be build and then place the building next to it. I don't really see why the buildings aren't built instantly. I mean sure, it's more realistic this way. Who cares tho? Not like it matters. I don't really how this waiting is important.
Compared to an RTS like Age of Empires it does matter. Here though?
Alternatively, allow building next to path foundations. Yes, there is no path yet. You can easily tell your people to "build a 10 paths there and a house at the end".
I can't think of any other game where you have to wait for paths to be built and also are required to connect your buildings to a path.
Either paths are built instantly, you don't have to connect them to paths or the building can't be built until the path is finished. Or the building won't be working until it has a connection. This current state is rather annoying.

Edit: turns out you can build onto path foundations. You simply cannot move buildings to path foundations. Only to build paths. My bad. I am mostly moving buildings, so it seemed like it doesnt work at all.
Would be nice if you could move buildings to path foundations too. I mean, you are MOVING a BUILDING. So technically they will destroy one and build it in the new place. I don't see why this shouldn't be doable. Would make restructoring cities a lot more enjoyable.

[Wlerin]

Main reason you can't move buildings onto unbuilt paths is because it *doesn't* get destroyed and rebuilt (that would cost a lot more without the Town Center upgrades). You're moving an intact building, with no downtime waiting for it to build.

[Maehlice]

Originally posted by Seizan:

1. the shaking of the city. Whenever I move something or place foundation the city shakes a bit. Really annoying. Making it hard to do the work fast. Especially if you need to place multiple paths.

Yep. It's terrible. We can't even move paths without a wobble. Do that at the extremes of the canvas, and it's enough to get motion sickness. And then moving lift buildings!? SMH.

[Seizan]

Originally posted by Wlerin:

Main reason you can't move buildings onto unbuilt paths is because it *doesn't* get destroyed and rebuilt (that would cost a lot more without the Town Center upgrades). You're moving an intact building, with no downtime waiting for it to build.

I meant like if we think about it realisticly. For the game I see no reason why you should not be able to to move it to an unbuilt path. Even if you argue, it is working and moving it to an unbuild path halts it's production. Then you could simply freeze/halt it. So the building does not contribute anything until it is connected.

The current way simply makes restructuring rather annoying without any benefit or good reason.

[fredtuna]

Thanks for the feedback.
I will look at the wobble when moving buildings and see what I can do about it.

For moving stacks, I can look at this as well although it is a bigger, more intrusive change so I can't promise anything.

For moving buildings on unbuilt paths, as people commented, the problem is that you are moving a finished building on support paths that are not yet constructed and that may never be constructed. Addressing this would require changing how buildings work, introducing edge cases that are not necessarily easy or obvious to solve so it's not something we are willing to do at this point.

[Ghostlight]

Few city builders allow the type of building movement this one does. It actually trivialises good city planning which I personally find a negative to this game. I'd prefer you could not move any items around so easily, if at all. City builder games are better restarted from scratch each time you feel your knowledge and skills have improved.

[fredtuna]

As of patch 1.7, there is now a slider in the settings to adjust the intensity of the city wobble and tilt.

[Mazian]

I am unable to move housing without being forced to quit out of the game about 1/3rd of every buildings moved. The house gets stuck on the cursor.

Select a house (1st or 2nd level house).
Press Z

Expect the house to be placed anywhere that I have free (built) pathing

Actual experience is that you cannot cancel the move and you cannot complete the move. I am forced to quit out of the game and reload to clear the cursor.

Virtually unplayable. I've had to quit and restart 20 times in the last 2 hours (mostly in the last 30 minutes since I started to realize that I needed to structure things differently because of minarets and their area of effect.)

Edit: Found a workaround for restarting. If I click Build and select another building, it'll cancel the house move action. Still a pain to deal with but the workaround is a substantially lower impact than actually restarting the game.

[fredtuna]

Originally posted by Mazian:

I am unable to move housing without being forced to quit out of the game about 1/3rd of every buildings moved. The house gets stuck on the cursor.

Select a house (1st or 2nd level house).
Press Z

Expect the house to be placed anywhere that I have free (built) pathing

Actual experience is that you cannot cancel the move and you cannot complete the move. I am forced to quit out of the game and reload to clear the cursor.

Virtually unplayable. I've had to quit and restart 20 times in the last 2 hours (mostly in the last 30 minutes since I started to realize that I needed to structure things differently because of minarets and their area of effect.)

Edit: Found a workaround for restarting. If I click Build and select another building, it'll cancel the house move action. Still a pain to deal with but the workaround is a substantially lower impact than actually restarting the game.

The bug happens when your mouse is over the house you are moving when you hit Z. This one slipped our tests but I have a fix locally that should make it in a patch soon.

Sorry about that! Thanks for letting us know about it.

[fredtuna]

This issue is now fixed in patch 1.7.1.

[::Maethendias::]

fun fact, you dont need to restructure your entire city to get light paths, research both lights and minetta, and unlock shrines, they have a much larger radius than both (lights and minetta), but also both light paths and provide faith


only actually use lights on path that you dont have to redo much anyways (like at the edges of your city, or when you dont need to move around much stuff either)

[Wlerin]

Shrines also fit nicely into housing blocks. I don't think I've ever even built a minaret.

[::Maethendias::]

^ indeed they do
the only downside to shrines is that they kind of look wonky af

[Teddykrieger_Michel]

Let a little bit place between your buildings, and than you have place for lights, new paths, etc. Use balloons to hold city in the air. If the city loose balance, you can move the balloons to get balance.

[djsumdog]

Originally posted by fredtuna:

Originally posted by Mazian:

I am unable to move housing without being forced to quit out of the game about 1/3rd of every buildings moved. The house gets stuck on the cursor.

Select a house (1st or 2nd level house).
Press Z

Expect the house to be placed anywhere that I have free (built) pathing

Actual experience is that you cannot cancel the move and you cannot complete the move. I am forced to quit out of the game and reload to clear the cursor.

Virtually unplayable. I've had to quit and restart 20 times in the last 2 hours (mostly in the last 30 minutes since I started to realize that I needed to structure things differently because of minarets and their area of effect.)

Edit: Found a workaround for restarting. If I click Build and select another building, it'll cancel the house move action. Still a pain to deal with but the workaround is a substantially lower impact than actually restarting the game.

The bug happens when your mouse is over the house you are moving when you hit Z. This one slipped our tests but I have a fix locally that should make it in a patch soon.

Sorry about that! Thanks for letting us know about it.

This was fixed? I just ran into this issue and purchased the game this week. If I move things with Z or even without Z, sometimes they won't move. I have to his escape several times and try again. It happens with both housing and storage (both single and stacked).

If I hit ` to see the console, I see several NullPointer errors.

[fredtuna]

Originally posted by djsumdog:

Originally posted by fredtuna:

The bug happens when your mouse is over the house you are moving when you hit Z. This one slipped our tests but I have a fix locally that should make it in a patch soon.

Sorry about that! Thanks for letting us know about it.

This was fixed? I just ran into this issue and purchased the game this week. If I move things with Z or even without Z, sometimes they won't move. I have to his escape several times and try again. It happens with both housing and storage (both single and stacked).

If I hit ` to see the console, I see several NullPointer errors.

This seems like a different bug. Does the issue still happen after saving and loading? Can you send me your log files and latest save file at support[at]thewandering[dot]band ?

They are located here:
%AppData%\..\LocalLow\The Wandering Band LLC\Airborne Kingdom\Player.log
%AppData%\..\LocalLow\The Wandering Band LLC\Airborne Kingdom\Save Files