Avoiding tedium- Houses and Zoning

[:1]Avoiding the tedium of building houses is an important thing. Houses can add to the visual feel of a base but I doubt people want to have to personally place every single house.
What I suggest is to adopt the "zoning" aspect from games like Sim City. This is where you simply draw out an area where you would like your houses to be built, and they are built automatically as resources allow and as you need unit cap. I think this would be cool because it would have the visual niceties of having a place for your subjects to live without having to personally build all their houses. Tell them where to live, and they will handle themselves.|||/signed or agreed or whatever, good idea!|||Peacebreaker|||I am for either system as long as it looks like an actual settlement. if I have to place them myself fine, but I prefer the OP's idear.|||Well, it seems we won't be able to make everybody happy in the real estate question - unless:
How about giving the human race(s?) houses, buildable as in soooooo many other RTS (*sigh*) and the evil race doesn't have to build them. Their slave workers bring their own tents or sleep under the open sky. To balance things the evil races troups, workes... have to be more expensive. That shouldn't be a real problem though, the math should be pretty straight forward.
That way everybody can play the way he likes.|||Zoning seems a bit hard to execute. It feels like it would be a little too automated, like it isn't you that has built it.
I don't think it will be too much busywork, in early game you will have to think about when you build houses and it will be important how much they cost etc. But in late game you will probably just drag lines of houses, just like you can do with buildings in supcom.|||chosan|||Well the idea of zoning is that instead of having lines of houses, a village is constructed that doesn't look like a line of cookie-cutter houses.|||Mooilo|||Assuming that they give you the tools and the structures for it. If they're just there as a gameplay element I don't think there'd be anything but houses.