#alpha 18

Upgraded to reinforced concrete or better, and painted with JaWoodle purple and black stripes. :) 

Also added a pair of turrets with a switch. I don’t expect to use those much, and I leave them off between horde nights. They’re just there for backup.

Since I took these screenshots I’ve moved the claim block forward to cover the entire structure, and I’ve also saved a copy of the structure as a prefab.

Yeah. So, one of the things they were supposed to have fixed was how badly the roads follow the terrain. I don’t have any good screenshots of the terrain in question, but let’s just say that it’s impassible on any ground vehicle in one direction, and a major pain in the ass in the other (only because you can bypass the vertical cliff going up in that direction).

So Kaligineux and I dug a tunnel. I mapped it out and dug the initial tunnel; he helped me enlarge it enough to drive a truck through; then he enlarged it further and lined it with concrete walls and a roof. 

I want to note that he did most of the work, and I’m pretty sure he used his own (in-game) resources for the concrete and metal framing and painting.

One end of the tunnel aligns with the road perfectly. The other end comes out over passable terrain, but I got tired of crossing it and having to find the best insertion point. So I did this.

Note that in comparison to Kaligineux’s work, I did this entirely in creative mode. Also I used the new narrow wedges for the same reason they exist in the first place, which are only available in creative mode (or with a patch). 

And before anybody yells “cheat!” I want to point out that the stupid game made it impossible to easily drive between two connected, adjacent cities. I could just as easily have leveled the mountain using the terrain editing tools. (Well, by “just as easily” I really mean “those tools suck ass and WTF did the Fun Pimps think they were solving?”, but I still could have done it.) 

Also I kind of liked the idea of a tunnel through the mountain, so instead of fixing the terrain, I made a tunnel through the mountain. Anyway, here we go; a ramp giving clean access to the East end of the tunnel. And an awesome tunnel.

And all without any decent editing tools. So, Fun Pimps, the tools you gave us are OK for raising and dropping mountains. How about something that will let us do more subtle transformations? I have a section of road that’s really rough because I tried to smooth out a huge bump and instead churned the road into a godawful mess. You make gentle banks in your maps but don’t let us do the same. Why not a tool where I can mark an area and say “slope the marked area to match the connected blocks along the edges?” Why not a tool that says “Make this area perfectly even” or “perfectly flat”? Yeah, I know I can mark an area and delete it... can I mark an area and and fill it? In Creative Mode? No. Can I mark an area and say “raise it to the tops of the blocks?” No. 

The tools you gave us have zero subtlety. So far, for the terrain sculpting tools, you’ve given us Jack and Shit, and Jack left town.

And it doesn’t help that you still give us impassible roads. And then make impassible terrain. Going around is a poor option at best.