How many floors

Sorry, I would edit my former post but that would jsut confuse people about your post and be a cheap way out of my mistake, so just sorry.

 

The explosions are grand when they fall apart?

Anyway, I get that you have to be vague on purpose. I've seldom seen a situation where a dev could allow themselves not to be vague. And I wouldn't really mind it if there were no second floors (got used to it with The Settlers and Anno and all the other stuff of this sort) so I'm not concerned either way.

Thus I will ask differently. Assuming you would try to make it possible, which direction would you try to go? Not as a dev, but just as a person who sees it being done and is capable of imagining things.

 

Forget second floors, Nobles should live in houses that are suspended in the air by airships at night..this is to protect them from the common people.

 

Would absolutely love the ability to make an iron clad towering monstrosity of steam powered industry. A hundred feet high filled with furnaces spewing carbon and sulfur into the air complete with zeppelin loading docks. Breweries, food processing, metal works, armories, resident 'housing' all of it inside and stacked as high as necessary and bristling with guns and cannons. We shall subjugate this land with the power of iron and steam or go mad trying!

 

I figured it's hard to visualize (or find a way to visualize) multiple visible Z-levels in a fixed perspective game, but I am now very interested in finding games that did implement this correctly.

It seems like you can go the full Z-level approach (switch between Z-levels. examples: DF, DoD) or dynamic switch approach (change visible z-levels of a building based on selected perspective. example: Jagged Alliance: Back In Action), or the approach without levels (everything on every 'level' is visible. example: RollerCoaster Tycoon).

The choice to not use Z-levels at all is there a lot too. Obvious example is Age of Empires.

What you see is that the approach is based on the importance of the visibility of the protagonist.
In DF, the protagonist is either you or your base. In adventure mode, if you go anywhere the camera follows you. In construction mode, if something interesting happens in the base it shows up in the log.
In DoD, the protagonist's perspective is the only perspective, and the camera follows you 24/7.
In Jagged Alliance you've got a group of protagonists, which you have to switch between quite a lot. When you focus on one of them you can still see the rest.
In Roller Coaster Tycoon 2, the protagonists are the park and its roller coasters. It doesn't matter where the guests are at, and whether they're visible. There's too many of them anyways, and if you WANT to see them, it's your fault making it hard to see them.

CWE's protagonist is an entire colony and all of its colonists, unlike RCT2 and DF's no one, and Jagged Alliance's group of four. Due to this fact it's very very hard to come up with a Z-level approach.
If you implement Z-levels like DF, you're gonna have to switch back and forth between levels to see everything (which you don't want).
If you implement them like Jagged Alliance, it's hard to keep track of everything due to the sheer amount of characters and Z-levels you could be looking at. If you exclusively look at floor 2 of a building, you WILL be missing stuff on floors 1, 3, 4 and 5.
And you obviously don't want RCT2-like situations where it's actually impossible to see one person through 4 layers of path, 3 roller coasters, double layers of scenery walls and the rest of 700 nearly identical guests.

It would be really easy to go the AoE-approach of only having the same few possible buildings, where one can either be in- or outside of. But there's already a custom building system in CWE. Mhmmmmm.

So what DOES CWE need? Honestly, I have no idea. But then again, I haven't seen any game implement visibility in multiple overlapping Z-levels in a natural way.

 

I will admit that I am completely biased in my opinion. I want DF style z levels, even if it is only a few, so that I can create complex mechanisms, factories, watchtowers, and the like. The little doll-like people might be cute to look at but I don't care if I can't see all of them at once. I think restricting the player to one z level really (forgive the pun) "flattens" the experience; especially since we're supposed to be using steam power and gears and such to build things. Nope, I want to be able to dive into a robust system that allows for complexity. If I wanted simplicity I would play the Sims; and I play Dwarf Fortress.

 

After the necessary diplomatic obfuscation in this post, now I just want my colonists to "walk upstairs" and vanish into a vague undiscernible nether realm of sinister purpose ala the music of Eric zahn, rather than a clearly depicted yet fundamentally simple second story. "What is upstairs' papa?" "The stars... The stars....The second floor master calls to us child... In the stars...."

 

MY GOD, IT'S FULL OF STAIRS

 

Stairway to Heaven confirmed in game!