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Aesthetics

Started by Demonocracy, May 20, 2014, 07:22:46 AM

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Demonocracy

I've been viewing other user's towns.  They look beautiful, and mine does not.

Don't get me wrong--my towns are functional and work, but I can't help but notice that I'd be ashamed of taking screenshots of my towns because they're messy and disorganized.  I think this may be because I'm trying to do the whole min/max thing based on my prior gaming experiences, and Banished is a unique game that doesn't even require that mindset.

For those who focus on aesthetics:  Was this a focused effort?  Did you start out the same way I am now?

rkelly17

@Demonocracy, I started out just trying to survive. Then I moved on to trying a sort of European village surrounded by fields approach. In those towns I was putting town hall, church, school and hospital around the market--which turned out to be a contagion factory during epidemics. Then I moved to more North American style farming with house, barn and fields. Then I started reading the various Banished fora and was blown away by how downright beautiful some people's cities are. I think that some of the people who first got me paying attention to beauty were @solarscreen and @slink, in fact. I'm still frustrated by my own inability top get my towns looking the way I want them to look.

mariesalias

@Demonocracy  You are not alone. My towns tend to be a mess too. I try to make them pretty but I get distracted by something else (in game) and the next thing I know, I have changed everything. I have started a few towns with the express purpose of making them picturesque but have failed every time. Thankfully there are other posters who post pictures of their lovely towns and serve as inspiration for us all!

Demonocracy

I'm so jealous though.  : (

mariesalias

Look at what you like in the towns you think are beautiful. Pick just one or two elements that you particularly like. Then make a town with the purpose of incorporating those into it. Don't worry about beautifying anything else, just the elements you chose. Then when you figure out how to implement those in your own way, you can go back and pick another element or two to work on. Along the way, you will develop your own feel and taste and style for beautifying your town.

Remember too, that most of us have been playing Banished for months now. :)

slink

#5
This is what my very first town looked like after playing it for nine days.  Much of it has been rebuilt at some point, one building at a time.  In the first saved game for Penhorse, I didn't even understand how the road-fronts work on the buildings, and I wasted space.  It started out very messy.  It is a small map so there was not much I could do with it after having learned how to use all of the buildings except for the quarry, the mine, the chapel, and the tavern.  Is it ugly now?  I don't know.  You tell me.  It's a lot different from what I build now.  Now I don't waste space on cemeteries smaller than 19 x 20.  I only build orchards 15 x 4.  I plan for marketplaces before I start, and every house I build now is within the circle of a market and on the same side of the river with it.  The hospital is not on a main thoroughfare, cramped between more heavily used buildings.  Fishing docks are only built on the better sites.  And so on.   :)

Demonocracy

@slink

It's beautiful still.  I don't know how you got away with that.  Mine looks like... Just... awful. 

I'd show it if I weren't so ashamed of it.  (Maybe I will later.)

But the thing of it is that I've learned a great deal about how to build functional towns in Banished but not much about how to beautify it.

One of the things I learned so far--which may be wrong entirely--expansion is based almost completely surrounding Markets.  As long as homes, storehouses, and stockpiles are nearby each one, it's all good.  Though Vendors seem to go to great lengths to gather material, so it's not necessarily required as long as the homes are within that radius.

But as far as beautifying?  I've learned... nothing.  It's disappointing to me.  I'm looking at my functional town and thinking, "Meh."

I may start a new town with the sole purpose of beauty and see how that works out for me.

Kaldir

#7
@Demonocracy: Can it be that you are just much harder on yourself than on others?

There certainly are a couple of people that build towns that stand out from the rest. For me, those are @solarscreen, @slink and Kangaredditroo (see here). Sometimes the presentation of a town makes it beautiful. For instance this one from @rkelly17. He doesn't show much of an overview of the town and it's still pretty small, but all the small details are certainly beautiful and suggest it will grow into a pretty cool town.
But those are the top beautificators. Someone like Kangaredditroo goes to great lengths to make his towns look real nice, with triple-width roads and such; those are not your average towns anymore. @slink is more of a natural talent, as far as I can tell from what I read here.

Maybe your own villages are pretty decent looking, just not equal yet to the best (or maybe they are, but you don't see it). If you really want to know, best is to post some images and ask what you could improve to make them look better. The community here is pretty friendly.

And what @mariesalias suggests is quite simple but efficient. I think I'll try that in one of my next villages, as my town planning can certainly improve a lot visually.

Edit: fixed a broken link

slink

One thing I noticed early on was that my building style is more oriented towards circles, while many others are oriented towards long straight lines.  I finally put that down, unfairly or not, to gender difference.  ;D  But the game was designed around the radii of circles, I do believe, so my building style meshes well with the game mechanics.

Demonocracy

Gender difference is a pretty interesting theory.

I don't know what your gender is (nor anyone else's), but I'm a female and I prefer straight lines.  My mind has a difficult time wrapping around curves.

canis39

Demonocracy, I'd be very interested in seeing what you consider "awful".  My towns are hardly planned out at all so they tend to be extremely fragmented but I can rationalize by saying that they are "organic" or "natural" instead of "planned" or "mapped".  :)

Demonocracy

Quote from: canis39 on May 20, 2014, 05:46:28 PM
Demonocracy, I'd be very interested in seeing what you consider "awful".

You asked for it!  I posted a couple examples over here. : )

solarscreen

Here's my riverside boardwalk!



Technology - Home Theater - Astronomy - Pyrotechnics

mariesalias

@solarscreen Interesting idea. I hope you post a picture of it once there are other buildings along it.

Kaldir

#14
Love the boardwalk. I used a similar one in one of my towns: