tjn wrote:The ability to move sections of plan is critical to being able to use the planning tool on a large scale at all, in my opinion. Who wants to put a lot of work into planning a large area only to find later that it would've been better for it to be shifted by a block or two and have to redraw the whole thing (while trying to remember its details)? It's immediately and strongly demoralizing and discourages bothering to do such planning in the first place. It also means that, even if you never make mistakes counting squares, your planning has to be contiguous. You can't draw plans for different areas, buildings, or sides of a room as the ideas come to you, and decide what will go in between later without risking it not fitting well or at all.
Move is the most important of the actions listed in the title, in my opinion, but since that's equivalent to cut then paste, and copy would also be useful, implementing a clipboard (logically, at least—it wouldn't have to be viewable in the UI necessarily) with those three operations at once would seem to make a whole lot of sense.
i think that this should really be the highest priority in development. as an engineer myself, i know that planning/design is the most important part of a project. i always pause the game and start my plans in the tool but its soooo limited. its great you can place walls and such, but when i plan a prison i think of the bigger picture, i think of things that i have to unlock but i know i will use them, like certain rooms and functions. but i always hit a snag at some point when i cant give a label to a room. then eventually if its a room or item thats unlocked after much research i sometimes forget the purpose of the room in the muck of building and planning and making sure the objects get placed right in the first parts of the actual building process.
the best thing i can do is to use the room designator to give a room a purpose but not all rooms will allow you to assign because the area itself is not indoors. for example, i tend to plan my cell block first, but i always want a security office pretty centralized in the block itself so i can have dedicated cc monitors and phone taps. all things that cant be designated in plan mode. if there was a
label/note tool, my plans would work so much better because after focusing so much attention to the little details in plan mode, as much as allowable due to its limits, i move on to another area and sometimes lose track of the overall because i cant label a room that isnt unlocked yet. that and other small objects.
one other thing i do to remind myself of a room to use is put an item like desk, chair, etc. but when placing little objects in a map without there being a foundation first, confuses the workers and they will place a set of objects then just forget about anything else, and a long line of trucks will back up with boxes in the deliveries and they just fiddle around. that is until i cancel certain stuff and replace stuff.
also phase planning would be great. sometimes i plan out a section of build at a time so that my workers can do the whole things in a few minutes. but i dont want them to start on the back part of the map away from the delivery square by the road.
great game, first post.
