Abandoned terrain improvement

[colossus]

In Civ2, we can irrigate a land, lay a road or build a mine, yet leave it hundreds of years unused.

Think of real life, an abandoned farm grows into grasses and wildness in a few years. We have to work it again to turn it back to farm before we can grow anything. Similar is applied to roads and mines.

So I think the terrain improvement should undo itself if the square is not used for some turns or years.

[MidKnight Lament]

I can see where you're coming from, but I think it will make too much work for the player, for very little gain/use.

- MKL

[tobyr]

First,
Improvements (other than roads or rr) OUTSIDE any city should decay after a while. For example, if a city is destroyed, its improvements should not last forever.

Second,
Letting improvements decay if no cit is using them is not a bad idea. It's not a lot of extra work for the player, rather a penatly for building improvements too early.

There is also an alternative to decay -- charge a fee per turn for the upkeep of unused improvements. If this fee extended to unoccupied roads, it would not be so important to build roads all the time! (IMO, civ2 makes roads too important.)

-toby


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toby robison
criticalpaths@mindspring.com

[MidKnight Lament]

Why should there be a penalty for buiding improvements early? Sounds to me like a rather civilised thing to do.

Improvements should only fall into disrepair if they don't get used for a certain (relatively long) period of time. This would mean that you couldn't just waltz into a place where a city once stood and use the farms they built. (Which is about the only situation I see where improvements should fall to bits.) Otherwise, it's just too much work for the player in my opinion.

You could charge fees for roads etc., but do we really want to discourage civs building improvements? The only place I see where it would be useful is to stop ugly roads on every tile, and this is pretty much solved already by not giving trade bonuses for a tile with a road.

- MKL

[tniem]

The only other place where improvements maybe could fall into disrepair is over use of farms and mines like in Age of Empires. Then when you take a certain amount out of the ground you have to rebuild the farm. The same could happen if the mine is out of resources. Problem with this is if the improvement is in use I would expect the workers are working on the improvement and keep ing it from falling into disrepair.