Discussion
Directions given only in words are difficult. Nobody appreciates how difficult until they try. I can say "go that way" and point with my finger; easy. I can show a map and say "follow High Street North", also easy. Not so easy to say "begin at Town Hall door, look to your left, and follow the next cross street by turning left again". It's doubly confusing in a game, in which it's physically impossible for a player to align his body left with the left of a tiny cartoon man exiting an imaginary doorway.
Showing a map with a
compass rose is easiest, in a written essay. In other contexts it may be irrelevant and, if orientation is unimportant, a compass rose plainly is useless.
The orientation here illustrated has been used by many FoE forum posters, not usually with explict definition. My belief is that it predominates because most buildings are drawn facing S; that is, they appear most natural when built on the N side of an E-W road, with their doors facing the street.
A pair of small decos, labeled by Inno devs as East and West, conform to this frame of reference. I am indebted to
Hootengoben for this good notice.
I
recommend this orientation and provide an illustration to define it as a tool, for use by those who find it useful. It is
not a proposal for any alteration to the game nor a rule to be imposed on forum posters. Certainly those who chat casually are always free to do as they like.
I provide a copy-and-paste link to this thread for easy use by those who wish. In contexts where a clickable link is cumbersome or impossible, a simple name is available:
Standard Orientation.
The use case that caught my eye and provoked me to undertake was a detailed argument that a game city's roads should, as far as possible, all run E-W: that a significant advantage is available over N-S roads. I have, in my limited experiments, seen this assertion justified.
If anyone wishes to criticize my illustration, which is my only real contribution here, I am willing to do over.
It is no trouble. Please tell me in which ways it is incomplete or unclear. At the time I thought of adding many things but decided to keep it simple.
As a gift to those whose efforts to explode this thread are not lost on their butt, let me offer the racist joke you did not think to throw my way:
Only an Oriental would worry about Orientation!
Like all such nasty jokes, this one is on the teller: "orientation"
means "finding East".
Thank You!
