RotC How can I be sure things I place aren't in the way?

[Ulfgard the Unmaker]

First off, I'd like to say that I'm in awe of all that Sim Settlements is, as well as its various expansions, and community-generated content. I am, however, a bit in the dark as to exactly how RotC works and I was hoping you fine folks might be able to enlighten me.

So the foundation layer marks out, roughly, the area in which future buildings are going to appear. This part I understand. Is there any other indicator as to where a building might appear as the settlement develops? A tier 3 settlement is obviously far more developed than a tier 0 settlement, which makes sense of course, but as things get more and more complex it has been difficult for me (up to this point at least) to reasonably predict the kinds of changes in layout that tend to occur as a settlement advances. This is both awesome and excellent, and I really adore having the opportunity to explore each of the settlements as it grows. At the same time, though, it leaves me effectively paralyzed with fear in the event that I need or want to place anything down on my own until after a settlement has maxed out at level 3. I'm very concerned that any little thing I put down will be in the path of a future building or pathway that I can rarely justify doing so. This is so much the case that I feel almost obliged to set player involvement to low so that I don't have to add on to the existing settlement for fear of disrupting the assigned plan. Does anyone else see where I'm coming from?

I'm sure it's really stupid for me to be an anxiety-ridden mess over here about something so simple, but... frankly I'm anxiety-ridden mess anyway and would really appreciate a bit more information on how everything comes together (or indicators I might be able to take better notice of in future) so that I can better enjoy the masterfully-crafted content with which I've been provided.

Thank you so much, and I'm sorry to ask such a stupid question.

 

[woodfuzzy]

In a nut shell.. grab a settlement expansion mod like All Settlements Expanded.
Most of the vanilla RotC City Plans stay inside the vanilla borders. The ones that do venture outside the borders don't place to much stuff out there.
Anyway.. with a settlement expansion mod you have room to do what you want or need to do, without fear of having your artillery end up inside a crane. LOL
All of the CP's are walled or use the entire build area. Excluding Sanctuary.. So until they reach level 3, I personally stay outside the vanilla borders.

 

[serratiamarcensens]

I've had this problem, where I put down temporary beds, jobs, food, water (because I sent a ton of settlers to a place at Lvl 0 that doesn't compensate for that may people) to then find it's covered by objects later on. I don't use a settlement expansion mod so usually I just refresh the city and wait for that sweet point were the city disappears and I can grab/move those objects to somewhere else.

I also, at this point, wait until a city hits level 3 to see how it's designed and laid out - I find that I mostly love the designs and layout, but sometimes I want to just switch plot types or make the location more self sufficient. Once I've figured out how I want to tweak it, I reset the city to level 0 and put down all the bits and pieces I want for level 3. Then I console in a ton of gold bars to (relatively) speed up the leveling process. I figure when I've waited 1-3 ingame months to reach level 3 the first time, I can speed up the second time. In smaller spaces I just ignore the temporary things I've set up (i.e. a mine floating in the air because I want level 4 farms in Tenpines) since they will be scrapped anyway once their purpose is complete.

 

[Ulfgard the Unmaker]

So in summation, I need to either expand the build area and work beyond the established borders or just kind of wing it. I was kind of afraid those would be the answers I got, but thank you both very much for responding. I guess I'll just have to keep any eye out for things merging through each other and be prepared to do a bit of rearranging.

 

[tankthing]

One of the key design decisions for RotC was that the settlements were supposed to be handled by the settlers (via the building plans). There's not a lot of room in many of them to do much self-building, nor was there supposed to be. There may be some opportunity for plan creators to leave a "self-build" space in city plans with an obvious demarcation between the plan area and the RotC settlement area.

 

[Ulfgard the Unmaker]

Makes total sense, and I love how detailed RotC's default plans are. I just wanna reiterate that. I don't mean to complain. It just feels kind of nerve-wracking on my end and potentially super disruptive to the design when for whatever reason I have to plop down an extra building to bridge a need and keep things running smoothly.

I think I'll just have to get used to the idea of putting temp stuff down and deconstructing it and backpedalling once the need is satisfied without the use of the temp object or structure. Shouldn't be so hard, right? Like stitches, almost. You don't really want to leave them in there literally forever, so once they've done their job of holding a wound closed so it knits back together, you give them a snip and remove them.

 

[Nafen]

This has been a problem for me when trying to fit a Logistics Station into my cities somewhere. I came back to a settlement today to find that there was a damn school bus clipping through my logistics station! :D

 

[Cube]

Using Place Everywhere, I've been able to setup all my Logistic Stations and Artillery plots practically outside of the settlements' green zones. I just leave a corner or the very front edge of the plot inside the build zone to make sure it is still considered part of the settlement. Plus you can easily build a power pylon inside the build zone and run it's wire outside to the plot's power pole.

 

[Destynova99]

Huh... I wish I knew this earlier. I assumed that the empty foundation plots in city plans were there so we could place whatever we wanted. Oh well, I suppose it'll get a bit crowded later on.