On 3/28/2018 at 8:44 AM, suliman said:

Any disagreements or comments on there "findings"?

The findings are fine, but you didn't answer the questions by @Tom Sloper, what should the player experience while building in your game? Is building a relevant part of the game, puzzling how to place buildings, or is the main part elsewhere, you just need the city and its buildings as a basic layering but the player should have to bother with it much?

In other words, think from the game goal; if you make every building a different size vs make every building the same size, the player gets a totally different experience. You as designer decide what the player "feels" here, and that feeling should fit in the goal of the game. A kids game should make it simple, a puzzle game should make it hard to place buildings.

The game experience goal is driving.

Good point Alberth. It's not aiming to be a simplistic game, that's for sure. 

I guess I have to start in the middle and try it out to get a feel for it. I want building placement to require some planning, but not be frustratingly complicated either. My pan for now is to have a small number of different sizes, so the player can recognize the sizes easily and fit those into planning the grid. Im also making the graphics so i can more easily change my mind down the line.

So in some sense I cannot make a final decision before developing the game more, but the input from this thread made me question some things and made it clearer in my head what the different alternatives would mean for the game.

Part of the challenge in these games is that things are NOT uniform.

Old SimCity example: You had a road. Now you need to make it a freeway. Except freeways must be aligned on a 3x3 grid, which doesn't match your road position, so you have to bulldoze some subdivisions.

Other example: You build living spaces, but then you need to put in a park. Except a park is 5x5 on a grid that's typically 6x6.

Other examples: You get a reward building. Except it's one tile bigger than your major tile, and it has to be placed in the center of things to deliver the best boost.

If you don't want that challenge, make everything 3x3, 6x3, and 6x6,

On 3/30/2018 at 10:09 AM, suliman said:

I want building placement to require some planning, but not be frustratingly complicated either.

It's a challenge only if a player makes it a challenge. I am playing Forge of empires and Elvenar, and they both change orientation as well as size of many buildings on each new "chapter" or "era". They stay recognizable, since a house still looks like a house, and factory still looks like a factory.

While I enjoy packing everything as much as possible (which causes having to shuffle a lot of buildings at times), I see other people with varying degrees of understanding or willingness how to deal with the buildings. They cope by doing less tightly packing, or even no packing at all (a street all around each building, horribly inefficient in my view). So the user has a choice in those games, take on the challenge or keep it simple at the cost of less houses or factories, or at the cost of needing more area extensions.

It makes that a wider audience can find these games enjoyable. Give users a choice, but there should be pain somewhere with each option (or everybody will go for the one painless option, and your careful design is all useless).