ROOM/FACILITY PLACEMENT
Building interiors as functional room assignments — the infirmary here, engineering there, cell blocks along this wing — where facility layout determines efficiency, routing, and vulnerability.
- SOLO-DEV COST MEDIUM
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN STRATEGY · SIM · BASE-BUILDING · COLONY-SIM
XCOM's ant-farm base made excavation-and-placement a campaign-defining puzzle (adjacency bonuses rewarding planned grids, the satellite rush hinging on facility order), FTL turned the ship's room plan into tactical geography (boarders, fires, and hull breaches play out room by room), Prison Architect and Two Point Hospital are room-planning as genre, Fallout Shelter stacks facility dioramas, and Evil Genius' lair layout doubles as defense design. Designers structure bases as placed rooms because rooms bundle function with geography: an infirmary isn't a stat bonus, it's a place — staff walk to it, wounded are carried through corridors to reach it, invaders can burn it — so placement decisions compound into circulation efficiency, defensive depth, and failure topology (the fire that spreads to adjacent rooms punishes yesterday's layout). Adjacency rules add the optimization layer (labs beside workshops, generators feeding neighbors), and the excavation-or-expansion cost of new space makes the floor plan a long-term commitment players must live inside. The room plan is also the base's face: players recognize their own layouts as personal, and the ant-farm cross-section view is the subgenre's visual signature. Key decisions: adjacency and synergy rules (strong enough to reward planning, loose enough to permit style), whether rooms are threatened (raids, fires, disasters convert layout from spreadsheet to defense), and re-planning friction — demolition and relocation costs determine whether early mistakes are lessons or life sentences. Pitfall: solved layouts — when one arrangement is mathematically optimal and known, every base converges and placement becomes transcription; keeping map constraints varied (irregular dig sites, fixed obstacles, differing entrances) is what forces each base to be its own puzzle rather than a copied answer.
SEEN IN
- XCOM 2
- FTL: FASTER THAN LIGHT
- PRISON ARCHITECT