Terrain Types

[Seeker]

More terrain types:

1. Active and dormant volcano: Dormant is very fertile, but has a risk of becoming active...

2. Damage terrains: useful for editors (lava, ash, irradiated areas) they do a little damage each turn.

3. Hills divided into Mediterranean/Chaparral and Foothill, med hills are more agricultural, foothills more barren.

4. Impassable mountain: Would establish a clear line between mountainous but passable terrain (switzerland, nepal) from totally impassable peaks.

5. Rice paddies. More fertile than swamps, found in deltas, don't disappear with irrigation.

6. Ocean Trench: more fish, adds more 'stuff' to look at in the ocean besides coastal/deep sea.

7. Badlands/Mesas: Hills for obs. purposes but very dry, irrigation gives 1 food.

[Trifna]

Any desert? Desert is quite a challenge for an army to pass, and barely possible to colonize or use...

[Nikolai]

Noted.

[Kuciwalker]

I think that with the current food/shields/trade system it will be difficult to differentiate between all of these terrains.

[Lorizael]

Originally posted by skywalker
I think that with the current food/shields/trade system it will be difficult to differentiate between all of these terrains.

Multiply the current numbers by ten and then do some fiddling. I don't think that much variety is necessary, though.

[Trifna]

skywalker: Even if there isn't big differences for production, anyway it brings a landscape and a coherent one. And some terrain may also have some caracteristic that have nothing to do with production, such as harder movement or, like in desert, more serious trouble. I'd find doubtful to see a jeep pass through the desert without any road.

[Fosse]

Originally posted by Lorizael
Multiply the current numbers by ten and then do some fiddling.

Exactly. Suddenly we have more terrain choices, and LOTS more modding capability.

Also... what about terrain type that has very similar (or even identical) production values, with different strategic ones?

So rolling hills and rocky hills have the same produciton values, but rocky hills have a slightly higher movement rate and defense value.


Also... every unit should take more time to enter terrain with higher movement cost. Infantry still moves faster on open land than on mountains, even though it doesn't have wheels or hooves.
So... give even the slow moving units 2 movement points, and faster ones more. Now an infantry slows down when crossing mountains.

[Shogun Gunner]

Each version of civ has yielded better graphics and more terrain types. I see no reason why Civ4 should be any different. Many good reasons mentioned above why a greater variety in terrain is better.

I'm all for it.

[KingSquanto]

I'd definitely like to see more terrian types, even if it is superficious and purely graphic. For the deserts of the southwest and the sandunes of the Sahara don't look identical.
It would also be cool if the landscape effected the culture of the city in any way (prob. to complicated to be feasible, diffrent topic anyways). One thing I would like to see would be the ablitly to trade food between cities. Because in real life, you don't see thriving farms surronding New York, and you don't see towering metroplisis in the middle of Mississippi farm land. Also, maybe if their was a city used a tile long enough and grew large enough, the city would expand to fill more terrian squares, and maybe their could thus be a city terrian type. To export food, you would have to build a special building, which would cost one shield to mantian and horses (medieval times) then oil/rubber modern (trucks.)
I like the idea of multipling the current systems by ten- to keep this from becoming to complicated though, there would be icons to represent 5 and 10 busshels. Then their could be diffrent degrees of desert, grassland, and others, with ranging variables of production, commerce, food, and munoverablilty/habitibility.

[Shogun Gunner]

Many people have bemoaned the fact that you can't ship food from one city to another -- like Civ2 allowed. It has changed strategy significantly.

In Civ2 you could build a city on a hill surrounded with tiles of hills. You just ship a few extra food units to the new city and watch the production boom. I would build one or two of these cities whenever possible, because I could crank out some serious bombers or space ship parts.

In Civ3, each city stands on it's own.

[KingSquanto]

Hmmm.... from that perspective, I can almost see why they took it out. For if food shipping worked that way in real life, then you would see urban metropilii (is that the plural?) throught the nation of every developed country. In the game, it would make hills to important and side cast the more fertile, but balanced regions that are realistic 'good' sites for a city. Has there ever been ideas on how to fix this problem but still keep food redistributing?

[Fosse]

Civ 3 had fewer terrain types than Civ 2. Conquests added some, but still...

Regarding food shipping. It needs to be in and limited somehow. Too many of us want it in, and it is too unrealistic not to have it, that it must be in. It is potentially abusable, so it must be limited.

Solution: It costs money, and one food spent in Springfield doesn't mean one food eaten in Chicago.

Assuming nothing else changes in Conquests:
There can be an "Import Food" button on the city screen. When you click it, a list of your cities come up, and you select from where that food will come, and how much will come. Make it cost the player 1 or 2 gold per busshel per 5 tiles, and make it so that you only get eight busshels for every ten shipped.

There, now it's in... easy to do, and won't be overdone.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by Fosse
Also... every unit should take more time to enter terrain with higher movement cost. Infantry still moves faster on open land than on mountains, even though it doesn't have wheels or hooves.
So... give even the slow moving units 2 movement points, and faster ones more. Now an infantry slows down when crossing mountains.

I think that the round-off actually is a good thing, and it's tied to all the mobility stuff I've been spouting . Infantry, if you model their stats right, become the unit type of choice when in difficult terrain such as mountains or jungles, because the most important stat of mobile units - their higher move points - is worthless there.

[Kuciwalker]

Originally posted by KingSquanto
Hmmm.... from that perspective, I can almost see why they took it out. For if food shipping worked that way in real life, then you would see urban metropilii (is that the plural?) throught the nation of every developed country. In the game, it would make hills to important and side cast the more fertile, but balanced regions that are realistic 'good' sites for a city. Has there ever been ideas on how to fix this problem but still keep food redistributing?

Actually, it wouldn't throw things out of balance at all - you'd need the same number of fertile tiles, but they could all be clumped in one region, like the Great Plains.