Poll: How often do you use city plans?

One of the biggest features ROTC Introduced was the ability for settlers to build their settlements by themselves. I am curious however as to how many people actually use it.

As for myself, I don't care much for it. The OCD in me always screams at the mismanagement of space most plans have (I like to cram as many plots into the space available as I can, ESPECIALLY on my institute runs) so I always find myself manual building to max out the number of plots I can put on it. Abernathy or Sunset Coop for example I wouldn't dare let the settlers touch that, since I turn those into massive food production (and both of those are among the few times I actually use residential plots.) Not to mention it runs against my design philosophy which says that all settlements MUST have minimum crop production, a doctor, a scav depot, a faction base, and an artillery piece (minutemen only) at the bare minimum.

I've decided to try it with settlements that are... annoying to work with, IE Red Rocket, Bunker Hill, and Hangmans Alley. Though I'm having had second thoughts regarding the first one, loaded a new save, and just built from scratch.

Have been using city plans for all my settlements, except Mechanist layer, which is my robot caravan hub, and Spectacle island, for which I build my own custom settlement.

I really enjoy not having to spend ages setting up basic outposts on every single settlement. Allows me to go full out on few select ones. I also find it great fun to take over the settlements after lvl 3 and add to it in the theme laid out. Yes some might not be so efficient with space, but honestly I don't need 30 settlers in every settlement. And it is just more challenging to try and fit personal touches into settlements that way.

I build them so many times while they're in beta.. yeah.. I'll pass. LOL

I tend to use the city plans for settlements I don’t visit often, like County Crossing, Sunshine, Zimona, Finch and sometimes The Slog. The rest I like to build myself, and if I hit on a plan I like I use Transfer Settlements to save it for future use.

I use them all the time. No idea why really ...

Yagisan said:

I use them all the time. No idea why really ...

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Cause you're weird. Just sayn.. hehehe

I want to use them so i can hands-off the settlement building side of things & go kill stuff. Sadly so far i've really only tried sanctuary as far as level 1 city...and i don't like the default plan. I find it claustrophobic & frustrating to navigate & even with optimized smaller plans i took an immediate 10fps hit upgrading to sanctuary level 1.

Going to try a few other cities & see if this is a common theme, or if sanctuary is a one-off.

woodfuzzy said:

Cause you're weird. Just sayn.. hehehe

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My wife would agree. I prefer the term "special".

Brygo said:

Going to try a few other cities & see if this is a common theme, or if sanctuary is a one-off.

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Of the vanilla plans I've tried - they each have quite different feels depending on who the primary author is.

Brygo said:

I want to use them so i can hands-off the settlement building side of things & go kill stuff. Sadly so far i've really only tried sanctuary as far as level 1 city...and i don't like the default plan. I find it claustrophobic & frustrating to navigate & even with optimized smaller plans i took an immediate 10fps hit upgrading to sanctuary level 1.

Going to try a few other cities & see if this is a common theme, or if sanctuary is a one-off.

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Sanctuary and Hangman's Alley are 2 that you may still find a bit hard to handle. For me HA has always been an issue with FPS. There's something around the Tunnel Merchant that my system doesn't like at all. LOL

Just started using RotC (I was busy before building my own settlements! lol) for a few settlements and it's been amazing. The cinematic is so cool! It leaved me jaw-dropping the first time! hehe

Settlements wich I use city plan (my savegame is still very fresh, just 50 hours... didn't leave the northeast part of the map yet) are Albernaty Farm, Sunshine Tidings Co-op and Starlight Drive-in. Sanctuary and Red Rocket I like to built myself. I tried the Sanctuary city plan but didn't like very much.

I tend to use city plans for the majority of the settlements, although there are a handful which either I am only just getting around to checking out or generally dislike.

In general, there are a ton of farms across the Commonwealth for which the city plans work quite well and the plan for The Castle does a pretty solid job of restoring the fortifications, so it's rare that I don't use that one.

Red Rocket, however, I've only just put down on my most recent playthrough so I'm not sure what I'll think of it when it's fully developed; traditionally I use it as a personal base of operations rather than a settlement, but we'll see. Honestly, it's kind of in an awkward spot: it's so close to Sanctuary that for anything a town might provide, you might as well just go to Sanctuary. I have noticed that Red Rocket's a bit of a death trap if you're running a mod like Vertical Spawns (or probably any of a number of mods that increase the density of enemies in a location). All it takes is one settlement raid to draw all the settlers into the death trap of Concord. I lost seven settlers today to one such occurrence.

*In any case, the other city plan that I tend to not use is Sanctuary. Or perhaps more accurately, I tend to put off using it until I'm too frustrated to continue manual construction. I've always found the Sanctuary build kind of weird because it's got an enormous build area, especially in comparison to other settlements, but all the stuff in the plan is concentrated in a really dense little knot around your pre-war home. I look at the bridge into the settlement, or the stone retaining wall overlooking the stream, or the Impenetrable Hedges of Ultimate Defense™ and I see a build site that's begging to be given a proper rebuild with a fully fortified perimeter to lock down all potential avenues of approach. So then I work on trying to make that a reality and it goes pretty poorly. Most of the gaps to plug up with walls, fences, or martial plots are either too narrow for even a single construction or are just wide enough that one won't do the job and multiple will obviously not fit; trying to tetris in these features results in strange gaps and awkward angles that do the job, but leave it looking like I need to have my Imaginary Fortress Architect's License revoked. I probably ought to look into mods that allow me to clip things into static features and other constructions, but still, it's a large area to cover manually which eats up a tremendous volume of resources and even more time.

*TL;DR: I'd advocate a fortress build of Sanctuary that better utilizes the large settlement area and its promising potential defensive features.

I've always found the Sanctuary build kind of weird because it's got an enormous build area, especially in comparison to other settlements, but all the stuff in the plan is concentrated in a really dense little knot around your pre-war home.

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I have to admit, that's also part of what what put me off of using city plans: not being impressed in the slightest with Sanctuary's building plan (first impressions and all of that).

That, and the forementioned fact I like to jam as many plots into a space as possible. That, and lack of walls on most l0 ones. That kind of annoys me, since building walls is typically the very first thing I end up doing when I build a settlement, something War of the Commonwealth taught me to do straightaway if I didn't want my settlers getting slaughted by the truckload (ESPECIALLY with WSE, BLD, and Super Mutant Redux). I don't run War of the Commonwealth anymore (though I might run it again), I run Endless Warfare now, but still.

The part of sanctuary that nearly had me at desk flipping was when it did level 1 wall off most of the playground & didn't put down anymore outdoor AG plots, but put some interior AG plots inside the prewar houses...WTH!!. i honestly can't remember if that was random or if i had set designer's choice by that point, but it irritated the piss out of me.

I don't know about performance, but for lore/story reason's i don't mind Hangman's Alley being complicated. It's an alley, you have to be extremely clever to make something useful out of the available space. Sanctuary just drives me nuts that they packed all this stuff into a small area of the whole thing while some pre-standing houses are pretty much left wasted. Why would a settler build a brand new complicated building with walkways & stairs, & doors everywhere when they have a usable house right there that just needs a little patching for living space then build business/industrial in new homemade buildings later?

Know VikingBaggins had a few simple plans made that didn't require much additional mods, but i'm having the issue where they won't show in my plan list & I'm unsure why. Sent him a PM to see if he can help me figure out what I've done wrong, just waiting for reply.

On my first play through I used City plans for all settlements but on my current
play through I have a few more manual builds. To some extent it depends on
my mood and previous experiences.

Ok, I just saw the video for the update Rotc 2.0 and the optimized city plan for Sanctuary is amazing!

I don't mind that they put everything in just a small portion of the settlement, because if you think about it, makes sense. People are trying to survive, wich one is easier, trying to defend a huge area or build walls in a small area and live there? Pretty sure the second option! But the original city plan was a little weird for me... or I just didn't have the patience to wait until lvl 3. lol

for those who don't mind the spoiler, kinggath shows the lvl3 optimzed city plan in the update video:

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I'll concede the point that trying to defend a smaller area is obviously easier, but if they're going for ease of defense it still bugs me that the settlers wouldn't have picked an area with better sight lines and features more easily adapted for defenses.

I don't use any city plans at the moment. I tried several of them around the map on my current game, but I kept running into missing pieces, and broken textures. I'm not sure if that is my fault (something in my mod list) or if there was something else I needed to do, but I could not fix it.

The other issue I have is I really like the Logistics mod. I don't think that is supported automagically, which means I have to place it, and power it, and now I'm dealing with plan conflicts.

I guess I should try again now that there are optimized city plans. I really enjoy all the effort KingGath and the rest of the team has put into this, so it would be a shame to let it go to waste in my personal version of Massachusetts.

I use the city plans for ever area aside from the start. And i enjoy finding good ones for player added places.

XBone user, so I tend to be very conservative in my own builds, and use the RotC city plans sparingly - mostly for places I just don't know what to do with, like Hangman's. I find placing platforms too frustrating in a lot of spaces, and so let the city plan handle it.
But places like Sanctuary, Starlight, Sunshine, I often do the same (manual) builds, even when playing a different character, because something about the plots I use "just make sense" for that settlement. Sunshine? Gotta build a Brewery. Graygarden? Robot Recyclers and upgrades, and a Solar Power Plant. Starlight? Mayor's Hut and manufacturing.
Thank you all for making this available to us XBox users!