Ooo, I love talking about RWG...
Another thing that I would like to see changed on RG maps is the rivers. They don't really go anywhere. They are more like ponds shaped like snakes.
Yes, they look like Oxbow lakes, which means a river would be nearby.
I see several of these ponds at the edge of towns and they each have a bridge going over it.
It would be cool if rivers could run through settlements but I suspect we would have to have some Tile scheme in mind that would make it easy to implement with RWG. For instance, Tile roads enter/exit from from predictable points so RWG knows it is working with Cap, Corner, Intersection, Straight, and T configurations. RWG picks Gateway Tiles to be the interface to the road network.
If we assume that rivers are made to snake across the map similar to roads, the entry point to the city could be a River-Gateway Tile. After that we need a scheme for how RWG can assemble Tiles within the settlement. If we're willing to say a river will ALWAYS pass straight through a settlement, then we need a River Tile, which would be a Straight Tile for roads that crosses a Straight River.
Then we have one more complication to overcome. That is, which District is the river part of? Do we make a River Tile for each District, or do we say there is a River District? That might be the best. Many cities have to worry about flooding along rivers so they treat them as recreational places with parks, bike paths, etc.
I dunno. Just thinking...
The problem is that many POI cannot spawn on the intersection tiles, which are required if you want it to be grid like. So it's not an option if you want those POI unless you want to go through and change all those POI.
I agree, though I think you might make more Tiles so that each of the standard POI sizes were possible on Intersection Tiles rather than change all the POIs to be one size. That's a number of Tiles since you need all combinations for all Districts, probably 2-3 Tiles per district.
A nearly all-Grid city makes lots of sense though for Western states (like AZ) that could plan their cities and had lots of flat space. But I also think cities that are just grids would be less interesting.
A possible compromise would be if the grid were every 2-3 Tiles.
Towns POIs, wilderness POIs and roads are already on a full world grid. There is random variations so wilderness POIs don't look grid like and roads have smoothing.
Oh, maybe I misunderstood. I thought he was talking about a city being a grid of roads, so all Intersection Tiles.