Building Blueprint Simplification

[Deantwo]

First off, I don't mind the new building designer. Making building designs is fairly easy and can looks awesome.

However the issue is when it comes to defining what that blueprint is gonna be used for. Do you add more "workshops" so it works as a factory, sure but then do you also add "arenas" so it can be used as an arena? You can do that if you want, but why? A building blueprint with 20 workshops and 10 arenas would be huge and would never be able to do both things at the same time.
Freedom of design is good, but there is no need to allow players to make horribly stupid designs with a ton of different uses but is bad at all of them.

I suggest that morale buildings, military buildings and government buildings all get restricted so that they can only be used for their intended purpose.

Examples:

• An arena blueprint should only be usable as an arena.
  
• A church blueprint should only be usable as a church.
  
• A housing blueprint could be used as any housing type building.
  
• Factory blueprints can be generic and used for any factory type building.
  

This would also make assigning volume for morale buildings a lot easier. Select the morale building type you want it to be, set the number of "levels" it should count as by assigning volume to a single "morale space" type volume.

Disallow adding morale type volumes to none morale buildings, to prevent adding useless volume that will be wasted.

Related suggestion: (Idea thread) Building Room Numbers instead of Volume

[nightslaysanta]

i think this will make it more complicated then it already is

[OnePercent]

I suggest that all agriculture requires more horizontal space (so should restrict that for specific use) than every other building which can be placed vertically. I want to be able to have 1 monolithic arcology which caters for my city surrounded by the food that feeds it. Picture giant arcology building with flat farm fields around it and a future space elevator in the middle: 

[Deantwo]

I suggest that all agriculture requires more horizontal space (so should restrict that for specific use) than every other building which can be placed vertically.

Farms are already defined with "fields" created from agriculture sites.

[nightslaysanta]

but the fields are also used in orchards and logging camps

[Vectorus]

What I would really like is for agricultural land to be drawable onto the terrain - independent of actual, functional sites. Then you could use fences and ditches to create vast systems of realistic, cultivated fields, without using up your building or data limit. The hinterlands of most cities, let alone proper countryside, are so big that to model them with buildings would be unreasonable.



I don't know why I chose a reconstruction of Antioch specifically, but look at all that land stretching away to the horizon. It would be hard to do that with buildings alone.

[Deantwo]

I still think this is one of the biggest issues right now.

We have a ton of broken useless blueprints on the building blueprint exchange. Some broken because of bugs that need fixing, some useless because they were made for older versions of the system, and some are just plain bad and shouldn't be used or shown on the public exchange for new players.

This is why I so much want the "Empire Building Blueprint List" feature, so new players have a simple list of working blueprints when they first start out. But with that we also still need buildings to be simpler to design and use.
See: (Idea thread) Empire Building Blueprints List

A small change that would make building blueprints a little easier and less likely to be broken, would be to add ~100 commodity storage for each workshop. It would mean that a factory building would always have at least some storage, and always enough to do at least one run of its manufacturing line with all workshops assigned.
See: (Bug report) Inventory Full, Not Replacing Lower Quality

We also do have ideas for more customizable buildings, so we don't need so many building blueprints of many different sizes.
See: (Idea thread) Factory Complexes and Civilian Malls

[Deantwo]

Another minor suggestion.

Make most buildings disallow vehicle parking spots. It is way too often that we see new players having used an aircraft factory blueprint as another type of building. This is likely because the building blueprints start with "A", so they are at the top of the dropdown list.

But using an aircraft factory blueprint for another building type means that it will fetch vehicles to its parking spots, confusing new players when their newly made space rocket or helicopter vanish. Aircraft factory blueprints (and vehicle factory blueprints) also rarely have more than one workshop or very little commodity storage.

Edit: Basically, don't make the default aircraft factory blueprint work like such a good workshop factory, assign unneeded volume to framework instead.

[Deantwo]

Could even make it totally simple, remove all volume allocation from buildings whatsoever. Instead just calculate some default building stats depending on total volume size.

For example if you place a factory with 1000m³ volume, give it 10 workshops and 10'000 commodity storage. If you use the same blueprint for a retail store, it gets 10 stores and 10'000 commodity storage.

It is simple to understand that more volume is better, and a building would never be badly designed or used for the wrong purpose.

[Deantwo]

Lets talk about "fields".

I really dislike how fields are this weird sub-type of sites. They are confusing to use and define, I can't figure out how to turn a site into a field for example.

Fields also limit the way we can design certain buildings in some odd ways. For the first couple of farms it makes sense, primitive farming requires a lot of land. But more advanced farming can be done more efficiently with green houses or vertical farming. This is especially noticeable on non-habitable worlds.

Same can be said for logging camps when compared to mines. A mine can cover a large area to have as many rocks as possible, but it still needs the amount of workshops. However a logging camp uses fields for whatever reason, so you need the logging camp to cover a large area and workshops doesn't matter.