MS paint style editing of polygons

Level 4 · 14 posts

Topic starter · Aug 13, 2026, 3:15 PM

Id be great if we could just grab a polygon and drag it somewhere with it holding its shape, id be even greater if we could just lasso an entire group of diffrent polygons and move, scale and rotate them like were using shapes in ms paint. This will be very helpful when youre trying to compress your map, if you just want to get that farm in thats outside of the border, shrink that lake thats taking up half the map while keeping its geometry, or rotating a city so the parts you need (industry) are inside the border while you dont need to worry about building the rest of the city.
This feature could save hours of work!

PS: I promise this will be my last suggsetion for this month:)

@iwatkot

Admin

Level 15 · 90 posts

Reply · Aug 13, 2026, 3:23 PM

@gereon First of all, I want to make this clear enough: your requests and feedback are absolutely not something bad or annoying. Quite the opposite. They are super important for me, and I’m fully serious about that. So please don’t stop and definitely don’t make this your last suggestion for the month 😄 Keep them coming. This kind of feedback is crucial for me.

Regarding the actual stuff:

1. Just grab a polygon and drag it somewhere while keeping its shape

Did you try the Transform Tool (8)? It already allows you to move, resize, rotate, and transform a feature while keeping its geometry.

2. Lasso an entire group of different polygons and move, scale, and rotate them together like shapes in MS Paint

This stuff currently works for a single feature. Lasso selection, moving, scaling, rotating. I’ll check if I can extend it to groups of features as well. I agree that being able to transform a whole area together could be very handy.

There is one interesting problem here, though. We can move and transform vector features, but what should happen with the terrain underneath them?

For example, if you move a farm, shrink a lake, or rotate part of a city, the original terrain elevation will stay where it was, so the transformed features may no longer align with it.

How would you expect this to work?

@gereon

Level 4 · 14 posts

Reply · Aug 14, 2026, 8:06 PM

Honestly i really dont have an answer to that, exept for doing it maually. To do so you would need to redo the sculpting/terrainediting features. In the current state all you can do is elevate, and lower the terrain, once you did so theres no way of going back to smooth. You would need to add al the terrainfeatures that the game has, exept you need a way to lift / lower entire sections of the map so we can create realistic y coordinates. If possible a way to mark a terrainfeature like a Hill or a lake and set it up somewhere else. Ineditor it can be hard to guess the real hight or depth of a feature, so we'll need a colorcoded hightmap.
The lasso combined with basic Terrain Editing Features can alrady be very helpful as most maps dont have as much terrain features, and as long as were not talking about the alps, buildingplacement is probably for the most part more important than terrainfeatures.
This is all i could come up with, i hope it helps!