I have been reading through some threads about city content and ways to make it better. I do feel that cities are rather limited in content. The gardens we get can't be manipulated except forplacement, the benches, while nice to appearance arent useable. Also, the question in the end comes back to "How do we make player cities unique" when we have so few options. I like what I have read other say about strongholds, because that makes the stronghold cities unique in appearance to the average cities. Yes, flags, troops, recruiters... the works. I really did like the ability to change the banners on giuld halls, would be a good idea.
A few other options, more to the planet specific but possible to go everywhere.
Allow cities to place trees and specific vegetation to go along with the stuff around the city, not like a garden, more like having a tree from one of the gardens and making it into a decoration like a lamp, something you can place but doesnt really require that you lose development room for houses. Also, making the patio's on the player houses decoratable. Instead of seeing blank empty steps where you just walk up allow people to place a faction flag, or an aurillian banner, maybe even a statue or two, to make their home unique from all the rest of the houses.
More types of houses for each planet would also be awesome, and making generic houses a COMPLETELY different style of house from the Corellian would be an excellent idea just to increase diversity. Outside of adding new styles of houses, another option would be adding texture changes and paint kits for the houses that we have existing. Instead of having to make entirely new designs, for example on naboo the medium houses have vine growth on the sides of the biuldings, why not make a kit that alters where and how dense the vine growth is, some people might not want any on their house, some might want their house nearly covered. There slaos the doors being 1 set color, could make the doors color alterable. Also, to step beyond that we have the trim and roof colors of houses. Maybe some likethe corellian white, but maybe someone wants their house to have blue trim instead... why not?
The area inside the space on the map consumed by a house should be useable, in this I include the roof of giuld halls, This would also reduce the towns expenses, say the mayor requests that everyone puts a street lamp on their port or the land surrounding it, then the town gets lit up at no maintenance cost to the town, and also allows for every person that places one to pick a color for their own home to be lit up on the outside at night.
To the people that want to put walls around their towns, I agree it should be an option, but yes it could be used for griefing, How about instead of the 1 opening idea I saw posted, you make it like a certain number per city level, say a level 1 can have 10 wall sections, and a level 2 20.... The town will never be full enclused but it would be more like keren where there could be a halfwall for the town. Also who is to say the walls would be PVP blocks, some might use it to block the view of factories outside of the city to make the city feel more of a community and less of an industrial complex. Could be used to enhance asthetics instead of used as a hinderance. Beyond the idea of large concrete walls that have little to no asthetic value what about the little iron fences common to naboo architecture covered in the red vines? I don't know what an equivalent for the other architecture types are but those might be nice to be able to place around the town, outside of a finite garden set up.
On the gardens what about having a blank palate that you can mix and match what you want to place on them, into them. Make it a structure like any other that needs to be decorated by hand to have all the goodies on it. You want a fountain place a fountain,a couples chairs, place the chairs, then it acts as a changable biuldable structure rather than something that you place and have no effect on. Allow us to add and remove items from them at will, add an administrator list to it so that a city could team together and design a garden layout, with whatever they want to add to it. Small garden 25 items, mediumd 50, large 100....
If you give us the creative playground and not a prefab jungle we can truly make something unique, and I'm sure we've all said things like these before, so for those that have had ideas like this, Awesome. Hope this helps some things.
