Should/will players be allowed to build cities on mountain hexes?

[Verenti]

Do you know how much that would **** over Middle Eastern/North African players on an Earth Map with real starting locations? Hell, any player really. The Aztecs would be Nomads for thousands of years, and I can't image how the Russians would respond favourably to it.

[TimeTraveler]

It is my personal opinion that a settler should be able to found a city on whatever square it can reach without having to be boarded on something else (like a boat). The reason why the player might hesitate to build in mountains, deserts, or tundra, shouldn't be because they can't, but instead because the resources around those areas may be limited (or in the case of the mountains, taking somewhat longer to reach the cities).

However, I suppose in some extreme places like Antarctica, the settler may fail to found a city because the extremely cold temperatures kill it off before it can so much as reach the city site. o.o;

[sophist]

Originally posted by Martinus
At the beginning of the game you can only settle plains. With the development of technology, you gain advances allowing you to settle forests, jungles, hills and eventually mountains, tundras and deserts.

Now, before you develop a technology to settle a given area, you would be able to send a settler there and start a "colony" or "outpost", which would be effectively a 1-pop city, allowed to build only units.

Once you develop the technology necessary to settle that land, such outpost would automatically become a normal 1-pop city and start behaving normally (i.e. would be able to grow and build normal buildings etc.)

I prefer something a little fuzzier. Instead of saying "you can't settle deserts," you require that the player have an adequate supply of fresh water and only allow long distance irrigation/water transport through the construction of terrain improvements that are unlocked by discovering certain technologies. You don't tell the player he/she can't do something; you make it so that it is unprofitable to do that thing. The net result would be something similar to the status quo, only more extreme.

I'd also aim for river valleys instead of plains.

Originally posted by Verenti
Do you know how much that would **** over Middle Eastern/North African players on an Earth Map with real starting locations? Hell, any player really. The Aztecs would be Nomads for thousands of years, and I can't image how the Russians would respond favourably to it.

Well, that's also realistic. After all, most of Russia is even today sparsely populated. Consider this: since the land is not readily habitable, those nations would be a lot less likely to be attacked, because the attacker would have less to gain. If the game incorporated mechanisms whereby a laggard civilization could catch up quickly, it could turn a frustration into an interesting challenge. Also remember that Civ4 will have growth much less dependent on food supply; ideally, it's hard for everyone to grow, no matter how much food they have, as disease, malnutrition, war, etc. will strike all of them. In addition, the decreased advantage of sheer population (bigger == better) that I expect to see in Civ4 will mitigate the disparity further. That would make such start locations less of a disadvantage because starting (say) in Mesopotamia would be simply an advantage, not a game-maker.

[Darkstar]

Sophist, interesting idea. However, standard AI behavior would be to tackle the Russians, because they'd be weaker then other targets. I don't recall hearing that the AI has been changed regarding that, so the Russians would always be a third world nation, being rolled over by the more powerful empires, wouldn't it?

In Civ3, you grab the best city areas first, don't you? If I have the choice of expanding out into some nice plains versus a desert, I choose the plains first, unless there is a pressing strategic need otherwise (ie, establishing a choke hold to peacefully block AI expansion). Being able to settle in the mountains would be the same thing. You'd choose to settle elsewhere for, and would only settle mountains for strategic considerations (resource claiming, forward air base, fortification, etc). Right?

[LordShiva]

Originally posted by Darkstar
Sophist, interesting idea. However, standard AI behavior would be to tackle the Russians, because they'd be weaker then other targets. I don't recall hearing that the AI has been changed regarding that, so the Russians would always be a third world nation, being rolled over by the more powerful empires, wouldn't it?

Well, no. Only on a real world map, and only if you have like 100 civs. They would have their Steppes, and much of E. Europe, and only expand into the tundra later (much like in real life). Mali would have all of sub-saharan Africa, including the fertile west coast. Arabia would have Turkey, Iraq, and possibly either Iran or Egypt. If anyone got screwed over on a real world map, it would be England and Japan.

[sophist]

Originally posted by Darkstar
Sophist, interesting idea. However, standard AI behavior would be to tackle the Russians, because they'd be weaker then other targets. I don't recall hearing that the AI has been changed regarding that, so the Russians would always be a third world nation, being rolled over by the more powerful empires, wouldn't it?

I assume they'd adjust the AI behavior if they adjusted the game rules. However, let's say you're right. That means it would suck to be Russia, but it would be pretty good to be, say, France (on the other side of Germany) or Egypt (on the other side of Turkey) or China (on the other side of the Mongols), because those Russia neighbors would make the strategic mistake of going after that worthless territory (and potentially squabbling with each other once they killed Russia), while you grew and expanded more intelligently.

Originally posted by Darkstar

In Civ3, you grab the best city areas first, don't you? If I have the choice of expanding out into some nice plains versus a desert, I choose the plains first, unless there is a pressing strategic need otherwise (ie, establishing a choke hold to peacefully block AI expansion). Being able to settle in the mountains would be the same thing. You'd choose to settle elsewhere for, and would only settle mountains for strategic considerations (resource claiming, forward air base, fortification, etc). Right?

Right. I'd take that even further and incorporate travel distance into things like corruption (city maintenance calculations) and trade route effectiveness so that your expansion was shaped much more by your ability to move easily in certain directions and not others. Perhaps a modification to roads to make them harder to build (or breaking it into two types: dirt road and paved road) would be called for in order to make you more inclined to expand in the path of least resistance and use sea transport. Then you'd be a lot more likely to have nations like Russia with a nucleus around the Russian rivers that only expanded into Siberia and Central Asia and the Far East much later, or nations like ancient Egype that hugged the Nile and Mediterranean/Red Sea coasts, or the Greeks and Phoenicians, with their Mediterranean colonies, but limited inland expansion, etc.

Originally posted by LordShiva
If anyone got screwed over on a real world map, it would be England and Japan.

That's more a problem of scale than anything else. On a standard and realistically sized Civ world map, Britain and the Japanese islands are tiny. Even worse for Japan, most of the tiles should be mountain tiles. Along the lines of my post further up, I'd (ideally) like to see the world sizes increase by a factor of 2 or 3 (in each direction) with appropriate game rebalancing to compensate and much greater amount of undesirable/unprofitable terrain. Then England and Japan might be big enough to hold a few cities. They'd still have to expand outside their real world regions to be competitive, but it wouldn't be as bad as Civ3. This would (hopefully) go especially far with the incorporation of gameplay elements that make it easier to compete as a Netherlands or a Japan against the Russias, Indias, Chinas, and Americas.

Of course, increasing the map sizes like this would be a huge performance issue. Ways to mitigate this include having a substantial amount of impassable terrain and for the map generators to make bottlenecks more frequently (like Panama or Sinai or the Khyber Pass) so that pathfinding was less open-ended.

[Darkstar]

Originally posted by sophist

I assume they'd adjust the AI behavior if they adjusted the game rules. However, let's say you're right. That means it would suck to be Russia, but it would be pretty good to be, say, France (on the other side of Germany) or Egypt (on the other side of Turkey) or China (on the other side of the Mongols), because those Russia neighbors would make the strategic mistake of going after that worthless territory (and potentially squabbling with each other once they killed Russia), while you grew and expanded more intelligently.

This sounds rather realistic behavior. People going for what they see as the easier target, getting dragged into wars with the others trying to plunder them as well.

As for roads and corruption... corruption is a seriously bad thing (AN ABSOLUTE FUN DESTROYER! ) in Civ. Any suggestion on increasing corruption will get you three strikes with a wet noodle! At least, until we see what is in Civ4.

However, there isn't any reason that we should just have 2 levels of roads. You could have multiple levels of roads, representing game paths/marked trails to full scale autobahns. Certain levels of roading could obviously only be built after the prerequisite tech. Other techs could just reduce the cost of building a road. Each level of roading would reduce the cost of moving over it. And roading a tile to the next level would cost a base + a modifer for the terrain (ie, building roads in mountains is much costlier then building a road across a flood plain). The net result is that it would be easy to road between your big cities down in the valleys, but it would take a long time to reach half that road level in mountains.

[Verenti]

A thought on Corruption:

Every time you change (or in Civ4, Shuffle up) your gov't it should nullify corruption for X turns.

[sophist]

Originally posted by Darkstar

However, there isn't any reason that we should just have 2 levels of roads. You could have multiple levels of roads, representing game paths/marked trails to full scale autobahns. Certain levels of roading could obviously only be built after the prerequisite tech. Other techs could just reduce the cost of building a road. Each level of roading would reduce the cost of moving over it. And roading a tile to the next level would cost a base + a modifer for the terrain (ie, building roads in mountains is much costlier then building a road across a flood plain). The net result is that it would be easy to road between your big cities down in the valleys, but it would take a long time to reach half that road level in mountains.

I think going beyond three levels is excessive. Even that might be too much. Still, I favor:
1) dirt road (no tech): travel cost is 1/3 the tile's normal travel cost. Plains goes from 1 to 1/3. Hills go from 2 to 2/3. Etc. Takes (let's say) 4 turns for an ordinary worker to build.
2) paved road (construction): travel cost is 1/3 everywhere. Takes 10 turns for an ordinary worker to build.
3) highway (automobile): travel cost is 1/12 everywhere. Takes 30 turns for an ordinary worker to build.

Originally posted by Verenti
A thought on Corruption:

Every time you change (or in Civ4, Shuffle up) your gov't it should nullify corruption for X turns.

That would basically counteract the purpose of anarchy keeping you from switching civics too often. It would also ignore the reality of revolutions and governments that come into existence in order to facilitate corruption.

[Sava]

did I miss something?

are there hexes in Civ 4?

[Darkstar]

Sophist, :b Sounds good to me! KISS when possible.

Sava, yes. Yes you have. The hexes just happen to have been deformed into 4 sided figures commonly called squares.

[Adalbertus]

Given that a Civ map usually represents an area larger than 100x150 km^2, a mountain on the map does not represent a single top but a mountaineous region. As such I have no problem with large cities "on" a mountain.
The Etruscans in pre-Roman Italy and quite some other cultures even preferred to build their cities on (quite flat) hilltops for defensive reasons and because there is no flood from the rivers in the valley, and for a steady supply of fresh air. It's fascinating to travel through central Italy and see dozens of innocent small cities on the hills - knowing that each one has a history of ~2700 years ...

Certainly, these cities can grow up to 10000 inhabitants and no more. For more, you have to cope with the swamps - which IMHO is the key to the success of Rome.

[Harovan]

Realism, Shmealism.

Do you guys "realize", that it is not about making a realistic, but a fun and challenging game? You do? Good!

Then you probably also "realize", that cities in Civ do not represent real cities, but regions. The city core represents only the capital of the region. And citizens working on tiles do not represent work force (as opposed to workers), but the rural environment of the city core. They represent villages (if producing mainly food) and small towns (if producing mainly commerce and production) around the capital of the region.

So even in terms of realism there is nothing wrong with being unable to build cities "on mountain top". Just build it on the flat land nearby. In reality (which most of you seem to like so much) larger cities (like capitals of a region) in mountainous regions also tend to be built in the valleys. And if you have a citizen working on the mountain nearby - there you have your small mountain town represented - just like in reality.

[Adalbertus]

I've yet failed to see why not being able to settle in a mountaineous region adds fun or challenge to Civ III. Make the tile water in Civ II, then you can't settle either.

I think that being able to settle in mountains and having to trade efficiency for defence adds more depth. And as long as you solve the problem simply by moving one tile apart (or from Munich to Berlin) there is simply no point in the restriction because it has no influence on the game.

[Harovan]

Originally posted by Sir Ralph
I am against cities on mountains. I am also against cities in deserts, tundra and other inhospitable terrain. My considerations for this matter are not much realism-driven, but rather of tactical and fun nature. It would improve the creation of large unsettled areas. But large, unsettled areas is where much of the fun lies. Hard fights for resources located there and accessible only through colonies. Unexpected troop approaches. And last but not least, barbarians breed there too - if only they would scale their power a bit throughout the time.