They’re asking for our input to find the right ratio, even 
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Holy cow there are negative prestige blocks? I hope mud isn’t one of them…
Anything natural used to be, thankfully that is no longer the case.
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Incorrect. All blocks have positive prestige.
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@james hey bud when will there be new releases of the planet maps if those will be released. Just curious on changes
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Yes, if people are going to insist on reacting to the example photos, @james might need to drop in several sets of them at different ratios so people can pick the ratio that works best for them and seems fair and give feedback on which ratio that was.
Could you make all of the controls into pointable buttons? Normally I adore interfaces that don’t need a pointing device, and long for a world remade with ncurses, but maybe b/c I’m on a Mac(?) or some reason I can’t get anything to respond to the keystroke commands + - < >
The selector controls work fine, this website is awesome.
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Corruption used to be negative but it was changed a while ago. Which is good! Since I’m using way more corruption now
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Used to be when I first played. No negative blocks for a while now.
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I’d love to see new maps, but I’m sure those are coming soon.
Has anyone had more luck finding a decent threshold, if one even exists?
I remain highly concerned about this system.
The default threshold’s of both methods should work fine for me 
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Had a play around with the app and on initial loading my build is yellow. Playing around with the <> it becomes blue at Faces=0.44, 0.45 and above its yellow. Is this okay? I think my main issue is my Build has one beacon which includes the road through. But even with this and adjusting the value I think faces = 0.4 looks fair? (not an expert and a bit lost around the whole proposal ;P)
muaaaahahahahaaaaa…
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I was slow to realise there’s nothing in these calculations directly counting reserved plots; it makes sense to me that if you want to build a city, there’s only so much road you get to lay down using the reserve control who moves in. Once people move in you don’t need the reservation on the populated sections of road. If you want to lay your roads down all the way out to the far ends of your vision for the city, you totally can, you just have to make some decisions about how much control you want over what settles on the land enclosed by your roads. If you want to let things happen organically inside those road-boundaried enclosures, you leave plot reservations off. You’re allowed to have some room for growth so having developed areas surrounded by reserved plots falls within the intent of the reservation feature. If you have a long road heading out of your city, there’s a limit to how much of that road you can control settlement along without coughing up the plots to fully own that control. This MMO has a great sandbox that lets people play without dealing with the grand strategy part of the game, the more bling and room you want, the more you run into the rules of that part of the game you’d otherwise never have to deal with. The beacons hold as much of the game rules as they can, and what you’ve plotted is yours, and there’s a non-beacon rule against blocking people in (some people like becoming part of a growing city, especially if no one builds a cool new road going by them but blocks the one plot between your former rural shindigs and that road so you can’t make a walkway or plant flowers or anything but stare at that crappy empty plot between you and the road, forever, unless you talk to them or the devs or whoever about it).
Anyway, until I realised the maps had no information about actually reserved plots in them, the faces had to be <.25 to be reasonable for a road network, and that other calculation had to be <.05 to allow the same. Which didn’t seem to have any ability to prevent reservation abuse at all, and then voila I realised the maps signal non-compactness whether or not reservations are turned on; if reservations are turned off, non-compactness is irrelevant and you don’t have anything to worry about, nor would you have to worry if reservations are turned on if your “city blocks” have other beacons plotting the space inside them (like when a bunch of people have moved in and have their own beacons plotting that space – it doesn’t have to be 100% plotted, the reservations would let you hold some of that land if you wanted to and develop it in a way that suits the builds people made in that space) – road networks on the map still glow yellow even if the spaces between the roads are filled in, the “faces” algorithm seems to do better. Both limit how much future growth you get to control between your roads without real plots plotting the land.
This seems great for letting some organic growth happen, though if you’ve got the plots you don’t have to let it happen at all. If you’re super anxious about it, make a lot of very small city blocks and undertand that you have to “develop” the city yourself with your plots until people move in and more plots are covered without your plots.
I’ve always had the PPS off at the mall and the mall walkways/roads rec’d a bad compactness rating - even with everyone’s builds next to it.
Ironically, I believe I had the PPS on at my base elsewhere, and all of those roads/bridges rec’d a great compactness rating. Not sure if PPS is part of the formula or not 
The compactness rating only tells you what that ratio with that algorithm would classify as uncompact, the reservations have to be turned on for it to have any meaning with regard to reservation abuse. It’s not a “good!/baaad…” ratio in and of itself. Looser spaghetti cities are awesome because they can grow more organically and in theory would have more places to tuck in and build oneself into being part of the city. The journal objectives have a reward for finding a city (and another for the capital city iirc) and building yourself into it, which can’t happen until you find a city on a planet somewhere that lets you settle in it. It took me months to realise it was okay to build in a city that had open spaces, that that was what that objective had actually meant (I asked to move in to my first city then built in the countryside after that for a long time – except malls, because they had signs inviting one to open a shop, and so on and so forth – I’m sure I’m not the only person to have made their home beacon in a mall – they’re cities).
Unless people want to get all Lord of the Flies and start abusing each other socially over whether their stuff glows on the test map at whatever ratio etc etc etc… then compactness might mean something to the poor people caught up in that…
See also Kieslowski’s film Blue regarding “liberty” and maybe that’s also part of the meaning of “Boundless”.
While this is true under the assumption that this is intend to only resolve reservation area abuse, I was under the impression this solution was also decided upon to combat general beacon abuse (which was always present, and just exacerbated when the reservation system was introduced).
If we were to deactivate this when reservations are turned off you could still plot snakes and 1 column rows with a couple of plots in between and be fairly sure that you’re claiming significantly more land that the plots it’s costing in order to cordon off land that nobody else (apart from maybe trolls, or the truly uninitiated) is going to plot on.
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It is kind of a multi-step process to do and not just add new file. So it takes some work from him to implement. I know he is planning on update them just hadn’t gotten to it.
Thanks a lot, may i know where u get such info?
And is this info given to you by James or any other dev?
Just wondering why you reply on their behalf. 
I will put up some new maps.
The current process requires us to download snapshots of all the worlds (100GB+) and generate the maps locally. I’ll try and get some online next week.
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