Inland Seas

[Indiana Jones]

In all the maps I've played on, whenever water tiles are completely surrounded by land they are treated as a freshwater lake. However, any city built on the shores of the lake cannot build naval units.

Q1: Is there any way around this limitation?

Q2: All of the lakes I have seen have consisted completely of coastal tiles. If I create an enclosed body of water that includes sea and/or ocean tiles will the game treat it like regular oceans?

I would like to be able to do naval combat on area such as the Great Lakes or to be able to create a large inland sea.

[Willem]

If the lake is large enough, it will become an inland sea. I'm not sure how big it has to be however. If that happens, it's no longer freshwater though.

[NeOmega]

I believe if it is less than 21 squares it is feshwater.

[Kloreep]

IIRC, it's freshwater (2 food w/out harbors, no ships) if there are only coastal tiles, and an inland sea (acts just like the ocean) if there are sea and/or ocean tiles.

Edit: Crosspost. I just ran a scenario, and NeOmega is correct; a small inland ocean with a sea tile was counted as a lake, and a large inland sea of only coast was counted as an ocean.

[Bambul]

But if you have a lake with a single tile of land at the narrowest point along it (next to the sea) and you build a city there, then you will be able to put ships into the lake. I managed to build a city in one of these once (pretty far away from my main cities) purely so that I could get carriers into the lake to have forces with the potential to cut off resources on far-away lands, should it be necessary.

And there was another game with 2 small inland seas and one big one where my Civ was able to use all three as natural protection and protect huge tracts of my border (almost impregnably) with very few units, plus I got to put ships within the continent. In fact, I think I *only* had ships in these three seas, none on the high seas (though I could move them between the 2 small ones because I had built a city between them).