Politician Archive

Placing mission terminals is an exercise in frustration.

You must face in the direction that you desire the mission terminal to face, which is unintuitive in the extreme, and since there is no feedback, you have to figure out how to place them yourself.

Also, since you cannot control your facing very well, you end up with a ragged line of terminals all facing off the line by 1-20 degrees.

There is no rotate command.

There is no align command (come ON devs, if there was EVER an item that should have align, it's terminals!)

I spent 20k credits trying to place several terminals in a row the other night. Money sink indeed.

RbT

Yes, mission terminals and the direction is pretty tiresome. If you try to place them allong a wall you might try to go into 1st person view ... look on the ground, get your back against the wall ... and see that the bottom of the wall you should see on the bottom of your screen is parallel with the bottom of your monitor or game window.

You might also want to make use of the detailed ingame location monitor you get by pressing CTRL+SHIFT+G ... I often use this tool to determine the hight objects have to go in houses to go exactly on top of a table.

You know this brings up another issue: placing ANY decoration is a tedious process if you want to place it accurately. How hard would it be to implement an overhead projection map like we get when we place houses/harvestors so we can actually SEE the placement and how much space it takes up?

• When I went to place a fountain, I was told I was 'too close' to my bank, but there appeared to be plenty of room to do this. Using a personal harvy, I got an overhead projection and saw that the fountain took up 3 squares, which infringed on the bank's territory. I wound up moving the bank to make room for my fountain.

• Placing fountains and braziers need to be accurate. I used a personal harvy and dropped it. Took a waypoint on its location, destroyed the harvey, stood on the exact spot of the waypoint, and dropped the fountain. This is a pretty accurate way to place a decoration, but it is EXPENSIVE and time consuming and not necessary with an overhead projection.

• Picking up your decorations and replacing them also comes with another danger: if you do not REMOVE the decoration but only PICK UP, the city is still charged for the decoration. What if you don't immediately place the decoration down again? Your city winds up paying for a decor that is in your back pack.

• Make the grid of small decorations like streetlamps and mission terms to be 2 X 2, giving it a smaller footprint than our regular grids of 8 X 8, so we can still place them close together yet give us 'snap to' accuracy.