A QoL suggetion about terrain grid. (with a picture)

This is not new idea. Showing color squares to indicate where you can build and the range of your diffensive buildings like towers/castles only when you are build a building. This is very common in the modern RTS games.

The advantage is we don’t need terrain grid to measure the range of buildings anymore. Besides, indicating the unbuildable terrain can avoid the invisible gaps when we build walls.

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That’s pretty much it. To better see the exact arrow coverage of a Tower/Castle/Town Center, add an option to highlight tiles in range of the fortification when building or selecting the fortification. Maybe by an in-match option, such as holding down a certain key before clicking to build or select.

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this is a great idea, but the coding (aka effort/money required) might not be worthwhile according to devs

If this is activated only when building or when pressing a dedicated hotkey, it can also be used to keep good graphics without removing all the useless plants.

It could also go nicely with the Tile Indicator suggestion.

Is it possible, and would it be possible with a mod?
It looks like it could be really useful for building house walls on hills. Currently I find that extremely hard, even with the grid.

You mean that you have seen the devs explicitly say this, or is it just speculation ? I don’t think it’s very hard to implement, it’s probably more of a QOL vs unfair advantage thing.

I could be wrong, but if that thing was an option, I’d pretty much always want to have it on, and would have a massive advantage compared to people who don’t use it. The problem is, unlike “small trees”, this one is super intrusive, and would make the game unwatchable if pros started to use it. Not saying I’m against changes to improve building readability, but the way OP suggested it would probably be detrimental to the game

Of course it’s speculation. But you yourself explain how accurate that speculation is

“should we code this side line thing which will only help a portion of the players and might even be detrimental to the game OR should we fix pathing which will help everyone”

“Mmmmm that’s a tough one… Wow how do we decide”

I mean the OP’s suggestion looks like low effort in terms of code, it’s basically the grid with custom colors depending on the value of the tile, and rendered in foreground. This would be easily modded if the API allowed it (but it doesn’t). Pathfinding is definitely much harder

The OP also suggested only having it look this way when you are placing a building.
It wouldn’t really be detrimental to the experience when you only see it <5% of the time, imo. I do agree it would be best not to give players the option of having the game always look like that, I suspect it would be more overwhelming than anything else.