by Dakkan » Thu Mar 28, 2019 9:47 pm The inspiration was always a spiral tower design, but square to fit H&H's construction. The Tower of Babel is drawn this way a lot, as well as the middle castle in Super Mario Bros 3 Sky world.
I don't like planning too much though, so most of the pyramid construction was done kindof off the cuff. At first it was just a dumb idea to waste some space to the south.
After the brickwalls were up and the space was allocated, I felt somewhat committed to it.
I don't have any images of the earliest phase of the construction where I smoothed the terrain and paved out the map tile boundary. Starting from a square, I decided each edge of the pyramidal spiral, each ramp, would rise up 2 meters. That's the max difference in elevation between 2 tiles of dirt. This sucked because I knew the ramps wouldn't have the same incline all the way up, but I didn't have to calculate out any of that math garbage with this method either. I also wanted the corners of the pathway to be flat, so every 2 meters I raised the pyramid I needed a 5x5 patch sticking out, and to remove one edge of the pyramid for the ramp on that level. The ramp itself could by added later. It was a little more complicated than this, I needed to decide the wide of the path as well here for paving later.
Early on I was just focusing on edges, to get the pattern down, but I regretted that later. You can see how each 2.0 meter high layer loses 5 tiles on one edge.
You can see how I was still just raising the terrain around the edges. I was very excited for this picture too, yet so much more work to go.
Getting material to fill in the pyramid was becoming a huge problem. At first I really didn't want to start digging large holes around the village, I was worried it would look ugly. It actually ended up looking pretty neat. But first I teleported soil inside the wall with soils and stockpiles placed as such (And thankfully the ability to do this with surveys was implemented a bit earlier!):
But that didn't last long at all, and eventually I had to leave for more dirt.
I was still avoiding filling in the center of the pyramid as well, and also had some village banners in the way:
But there was a point (during a siege I think, because folks needed to come in and lose their redhandedness) where I needed to start filling in the middle.
And from here I can only find 2 images between then and reaching the peak.
The last several layers all went by in the a single night though, it was magical. Paving the sides was easy then, except for the parts of the slope adjacent to the future ramps.
This point was probably the longest amount of time I stopped working on the pyramid, because now the ramps needed to be made, and I knew it was impossible to make them perfect how I wanted. I had fought with the first layer's ramp this whole time and it always sucked.
Look at all that uneven goddamn bs.
For the rest of the pyramid I did it by doing the ramps in halves. Halfway between two platforms I'd raise the terrain to half the height. For the lower levels with long ramps I did this a few times. This was a quick way to at least get the ramps close. In some of these pictures on the higher levels you can still see where I've done this but haven't smoothed it any further yet. SO UNEVEN IT PISSES ME OFF. Then it was just a matter of carrying a lot of dirt and trying to make each edge evenly rise up every X tiles, though frequently that couldn't be done.
Even at this point though the pyramid was a hideous eyesore.
Then paving the rest!
I could do a whole separate post on the different wants I thought to actually decorate it, I don't like doing that stuff so much. I always thought the benches/bluebells on the corners was lame. I found a way to plant trees into paved terrain and thought about doing that for a while. In the end the best parts were the meteoric paving covered by the altar of ruin!
I hope people found this interesting or useful.
