That’s actually what i intend to do, the blue next to the colour storage in that picture being hers so i’d get her to fill that up.
What I think many people do when laying out a city is to put roads in a grid pattern and most of all usually do that on a separate beacon. Then once the city is filled up they tend to make a road on the outside edges of a perfectly compact city and that road is of course on a separate beacon but that means that only the inside edges have plots plotted and not the outside so this beacon will be considered to be uncompact…
If the outer road would be added to the main beacon then it would not flag it
This feels like an overkill system to stop the reservation abuse. Why stop plotting and footfall too, wouldn’t it be enough to stop reservations when the beacon becomes uncompact? This would allow open towns to still plot roads, they don’t need reservations to begin with. A closed town would have to fill the holes if they don’t want free plotting, just like before the reservations existed. Roads don’t require reservations, they were also fine before the whole reservation system existed, right?
If the point of the reservation system was to make unwanted merges go away, give beacons the option to opt out of the merge.
Everyone was saying “plot your whole town beforehand so others can’t ruin your expansion”. That’s not possible anymore with this implementation.
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Just preplot some of the new shops and everything should be fine.
If the city dies out you should remove the no longer needed roads. No reason to keep this dead mess in the sky.
You have preplanned a mall expansion bigger then your existing mall. I know there’s no malice in your intent but if everyone would just grab such a huge “expansion area” we would need way more planets.
If a beacon is uncompact the web page marks the whole beacon in yellow, not only the uncompactness-causing part.
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Maybe it’s time to collect some threshold values that work for our builds:
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A portion of my area is close enough to land that cuddletrunks have been wandering far into my lake area. To reduce that from happening, i would move some of my areas away from the lands where they spawn. I just been avoiding that task for a while. Now I got some motivation to work on that, cut back on my area.
Thank you James, had a feeling it had to be that this whole time but i couldn’t tell 
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In response to the OP striving to find such a balance is difficult as everyone has their play style. I think this system restricts the boundless nature of the game. There are other possibly more simple adjustments that could likely help. Also I think this will end up causing more blind panic and rage quits along with dev time on assessing beacons.
I think keeping the compactness system for public (infrastructure builds) is likely useful along with further mechanics to allow the infrastructure owner more control over what can be built and being able to disconnect someone from the settlement if for example they take a mall plot and never build their shop or leave their shop empty etc. This way they get no FF so they can’t just park and leech.
This leads into an idea like many before it to have options at the beacon control so i won’t divert this topic but i will make a separate post.
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It didn’t work this way for me.
Although it is close to okay. When I changed the threshold to .24 the yellow went away.
The idea of a different beacon (or perhaps a setting) that would assign a beacon as a road by the player… I wonder how well that would work, since a lot of communities are set up with roads. But the level of balance on what a road-type beacon gets over a non-road… my brain hides under a rock from too much thought.
I personally dont invest much time in footfall or prestige mechanics (other than the mechanics that give me a buffer of protection).
What if there was an option to disable other players from sucking up the prestiege? I vaguely recall the purpose of the surrounding reservations was to prevent other players from taking ownership of a town…
Any chance to give players the option to share prestige, or not share?
To be fair, I think this system is unnecessarily complex and is intrinsically unbalanced towards people that hate roads. Also, it seems to create more problems than it solves. I guess the devs aim to tackle the settlement take-overs / plot reservation abuse at once, but these are two different problems that need different solutions. I suggest to completely get rid of the presented mechanism.
my alternative solutions:
Problem: settlement take-overs
Solution: opt-out beacon
Problem: reservation abuse
Solution: provide 1 reservation plot per 4 plots. players can reserve any area to their own liking.
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After reading through the OP post and all the comments within this thread, in my honest opinion, this system should be held off, until the settlement system as a whole is combed over and redone with underlying subsystems set in place rather than be added on to a already complex system.
The compactness system should be held off for now till it is better refined internally.
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I do really like this idea. could be added into beacon permissions? Assigned to allow all by default. Make it work like the permissions in the current system that gives players permission to plot within the reservation, or not. To give players permission to absorb/merge prestiege, or not.
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We are at 100% capacity right now. All shops are plotted.
The upper left new village is on it’s own beacon and not compact at all, but it’s not yellow.
did you read the op?
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This wont stop octopus settlements.
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Since when are these a problem? The octopus nature of these settlements are not the actual problem. The actual problem is that settlements are blocked from expanding and/or settlements are taken over against peoples will. The proposed system won’t prevent this.
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I wish I had an opinion but ps4, so I guess I just wait and see.
I’m really not worried. If my builds dont fit the definition of compact I would be shocked.
I’ve decided to let go of some roads and have a few main roads, the roads I do have going around the planet are staying. I’m going to tidy up the entire settlement and see where this takes me. since I have multiple settlement locations across the entire Xa Frant planet, the roads are needed! also, I have 2020 plans to have cottages on the roadsides and in-pit stops or rentable homes
all the roads I currently own are connected to settlements owned by me or friends. no one got forced to join and no one will be forced in THE FUTURE,
NOTE: those that attached themself a while back to the future cannot ask me to remove my road it’s your fault so you have to de-attach and everything will be fine!
if you think you got forced into it tell me where?
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