Terraforming, love the idea, hate the implementation.

[Drakemoore]

So, I like the terraforming feature and that we need to flatten terrain to build structures / walls, and that we can have villages on hills, etc. I don't have any issue with that.
I have to be honest, I don't mind the digging part of the terraforming, it's the constant need to interact, make dirt piles, move dirt piles one at a time, etc that drives me up the wall. I spend most of my time doing the following: Move dirt piles from quarry to drop off - > move dirt into inventory - > click and move to flag - > hit make level - > repeat.

The survey tool at first glance seemed great, and then later not so much. The fact that you can only make a rather small survey area, and you can't customize it with dig / drop off zones, makes it a very annoying tool to use. The fact that dirt piles only hold 80 units, and a wheel burrow can only move one stock pile is also painful when trying to terraform a large area. What's worse is that wheelbarrows can't drop off dirt in a survey flag.

So here's some ideas that I had.

*Increase dirt stock pile size to something more comfortable to work with, 500, 1000 units.
*Create stockpiles inside of wheelbarrow, e.g. if there's a few hundred pieces of dirt on the ground, I can right click the dirt with the wheelbarrow while holding shift and the wheelbarrow will pick up all of it.
*Let us 'make level' with a wheelbarrow.
*Give us some kind of larger vehicle to move soil with, perhaps have it pulled by an auroch / bull, think of it as a big soil container on wheels. Let it work like a wheelbarrow but hold quite a few piles of dirt.
*Make it so that we can have larger survey flags.
*Make it so that we can customize the flag area with our own 'dig' zones and 'drop off' zones, this means that you could have survey flags where one half of the flag is digging down, while the other side is dropping off to raise the terrain.
*Fix the 'cliff' issues when it comes to terraforming, often times I have to manually remove cliffs because the survey tool isn't good at it.

I'm sure there's other things that could be suggested and I hope others can chime in here. I'm just, sort of burned out on the terraforming part of HnH2, at first I loved the idea but it's taking up more time and effort than I can really spend and taking up most of my play time. I'd move to a flat grasslands if I could but I'm already very invested in where I am.

edit: more ideas

*Let us survey dig to stockpiles instead of only filling to inventory / dropping on ground.
*Let us make us make non rectangular surveys by having the ability to add further tiles to the survey.

[Glorthan]

*Fix the 'cliff' issues when it comes to terraforming, often times I have to manually remove cliffs because the survey tool isn't good at it.

The survey tool is amazing for getting rid of cliffs. Simply make a survey from the top of the cliff with a reasonable area, to covering just the base of the cliff, and voila, cliff gone in 10 seconds flat. The idea is to build up the dirt below the cliff with a (temporary) survey, not dig down the cliff itself.

[Ysh]

You have some good ideas here, it can definitely be made easier. I would also like to see some ways to make a cliff.

[Fierce_Deity]

I would really love it if we could use surveys on acre clay. We don't to dig more than 1 at a time like with dirt. Just please let us survey it.

[Drakemoore]

I guess being able to do that with acre clay would be nice too, my main concern is tools to help mass terraforming to reduce the amount of actions needed, I swear its going to give me carpal tunnel.

[twincannon]

Small bump with a question: is it possible to remove cliff "corner" pieces? like this: http://i.imgur.com/gpNBtIo.png

have tried surveys in just about every way possible. They either make it so you run into the cliff and start sidling along it, or want you to climb the cliff. If you try to reposition manually you leave the survey's range if it's small. Have tried to make surveys on the bottom to build up to it (which works well for straight cliffs, removing the cliff tile by making it walkable), but again the character just walks to the cliff and stops.

[sabinati]

just drop a bunch of soil at the bottom of it and wait for it to decay into the ground

[twincannon]

just drop a bunch of soil at the bottom of it and wait for it to decay into the ground

ohh neat I was wondering if there was a way to manually "plant" soil, and of course the answer is the most logical one! will try this, thanks!

also explains why my previously flat terraformed stuff ended up with little bumps everywhere lol

[stya]

just drop a bunch of soil at the bottom of it and wait for it to decay into the ground

ohh neat I was wondering if there was a way to manually "plant" soil, and of course the answer is the most logical one! will try this, thanks!

also explains why my previously flat terraformed stuff ended up with little bumps everywhere lol

You can actively 'plant' soil like you say by taking one piece and using shift+rmb on the ground.

[tweinst]

Eliminating cliffs is easy with a simple technique. The idea is to rely on the way leveling works, by digging in a high spot and magically teleporting the dirt to a low spot to fill in. You also have to remember that the maximum slope is 2 meters/tile and once you reduce the cliff to this level, it goes away. Each piece of dirt raises one corner of a tile by 0.1 meter.

• First, make a survey that extends back on the high side of the cliff by several tiles (5-10 is good) and on the bottom side of the cliff by enough tiles to allow for the maximum slope.
• Set the height you want to level to, even with the top of the cliff.
• Dump a bunch of dirt in the top area of the survey with shift-right click.
• Standing on top of the new mound, start leveling the area.

You'll dig the mound you added back down to the level of the cliff top, and the dirt should get dumped into the low area, bringing up the low end of the cliff. This works without you having to stand at the tile corners at the base of the cliff, which would be required if you were using shift-click to build it up.

For greater efficiency, you can build up the bottom areas of the cliff that are reachable with shift-click to cut down on the amount of digging you need to do.