So here’s what it looks like, having terrain-setting “buildings” approximately every 150 meters apart.  Note that in the visible grid here, each grid space is eight meters on a side (ignoring changes of altitude).  Just looking at it, there are far too many of them.  In this region, there are about 130 districts, and each one has a box for adjusting its terrain.

The more I poke with this, the more I’m starting to believe that this might be totally the wrong approach;  maybe I should bite the bullet and really give the player direct “paint the terrain” control.  Maybe that would be best.

It’d certainly be a whole lot simpler than expecting the player to go around fussing with all of these individual “places to go to set terrain settings”.

The only real reason not to do it is for reasons of save files;  right now, saving the data out would use up several hundred megabytes on disc for each save game.  I could probably cut that way down, but I can’t imagine getting it much lower than about 50 megabytes per save, which does feel kind of excessive..