No more Terraform!

[colossus]

In Civ2, the engineers can do all the incredible jobs of terrain transformation:mountain to hill,hill to plain,desert to plain,etc.In reality, what mankind has been able to do is felling all the trees and turn those forest/swamp/jungle into farmland(plain and grassland).

More upsetting still is that someone has proposed to transform terrain from grassland/plain to hill to make the walled city into something as an infallable fotress. Does it make sense? Mankind does not even come close to this.

I hope that in Civ3, the engineer(or the equivalent) will do the settler's job faster, but cannot do those terraform.
[This message has been edited by colossus (edited January 31, 2001).]

[Lancer]

I agree.

[Cyclotron]

Some terraforming, like you said, seems reasonable: Perhaps deserts into plains, plains into grasslands and vice versa, and the "deforestation" terraforms you listed. But you are absolutely right, it is too powerful.

The main reason I am against CivII style terraforming is not for "realism's" sake, but for the nuclear factor. I really am never afraid of nuclear pollution; the AI seems to not handle it very well, so I just restore my territory after every global warming session with my army of engineers. Although this "fallout warfare" is kind of cool (I often nuke unimportant and remote areas just to promote pollution, which I just fix, but the AI's cities languish and starve), the actual effects of global warming should be harder to change. A grassland that turns into dense jungle because of global warming should not be permitted to be easily restored to that condition by a few engineers. Get my drift?

[Grumbold]

I agree, there are some forms of terraforming that even in 2001 remain only theoretical. These would include creating jungle, creating/removing mountains, reclaiming desert on any meaningful scale and creating hills under settlements. For the sake of the perfectionists who want all their cities to have 5 hills, 2 forest and plenty of arable land in the vicinity all of these should be eventually possible if the tech tree extends to perfect weather prediction, bioengineering and nanotech, but should remain expensive and time consuming.

CtP1/2 does a better job of phasing in different modification possibilities than Civ2 but still makes mountain moving and desert reclamation too cheap. An alternative might be to keep track of the original terrain type and only allow terraforming by one step away from base. Desert could struggle back to plains but never lush grassland or jungle. Global warming should target these changes first so the player is more likely to be affected than the AI which rarely if ever terraforms significant amounts of terrain.

Incidentally, I find it odd that Nukes push us toward global warming when we all know the theory of a nuclear winter. I'm not suggesting that you should try to offset pollution by exploding nuclear weapons to get dust in the atmosphere, but nuclear and chemical pollution levels ought to be handled separately IMO, with different disaster outcomes.

[colossus]

Yes, Grumbold.

That chemical pollution leads to general deterrioration of envuronment while nuking leads to extermination is absolutely true.

Perhaps after some nuking,there will be the message'The nuclear warfare has turned the Earth into a polluted and radioactive dustbowl.All existing lives cannot survive the environment and die out.The once beautiful planet has become ugly and lifeless.Millions of years after, pollution finally wither away.New life forms then strat to evolve...'-GAME END!

[Roman]

I totally agree that building new hills and similar excesses of terraforming should not appear in Civ 3.

[The Kaiser]

Yes there is a bit of a contradiction with the terraforming in Civ2. How can you create a hill and then get a mining/mineral bonus from it?

I know where I live there are a couple of artificial hills in the form of huge slag heaps left over from a mine that used to be nearby. The area has been turned into a park now, but if in the future they dig into the hills they would find nothing of any use.