Crossing mountain ranges and rivers

[Vrank Prins]

quote: Originally posted by raingoon on 03-09-2001 04:36 PM Maybe once a week I'll take advantage of Dark Cloud's excellent inventory of "Related Threads" and pick a dead horse to beat a signal drum on. Today it's rivers and canals.

Just one and a half month later on around the beginning of october I've started a thread on this too, It's called "Rivers & Estuaries & Seastraits & bridges". There are some ideas there for engineering troops and temporaral infrastructure as well

[raingoon]

quote: Considering that a turn is equal to 20 years or more at the beginning of the game, units are going to cross rivers with ease.

No, no, this is that old temporality thing. Same as it doesn't take 100 years to cross the Atlantic, even if it is just a trireme, etc., etc. Of COURSE the game can require units to uses bridges to cross rivers, and hey, those bridges may take 100 "years" to build. It takes 20 to 40 years or more just to build a fortification in Civ 2. You can't force game time to be persistent with real time. It's an analogous relationship, not literal. Anybody still has trouble with turn lengths being years, just put quotes around the word "years" when you see it. That helps me.

[Straybow]

Aauuuggghh! No, no, no!

Canals: Canals only served to move goods. I defy anybody to find an example of division-scale military units being moved on canals such as built in England and the US in the early 1800s.

Trans-shipment canals: Traverse by ocean-going (deep-keel) vessels requires a very much larger waterway than a "goods canal." Panama, Suez, Kiel, and maybe a couple fresh water examples qualify. Very rare geographical arrangements make these possible. Allowing cities on one-tile-wide ithsmi to become trans-shipment canals is only workable because the movement rates are so ridiculously low anyway.

Rivers: How hard is it to build rafts and small boats? That's what the river movement bonus represents, and that's how big rivers are crossed in the absence of bridges. Crossing a major river only poses a problem in the presence of an enemy force (e.g., Roman palisade and patrols along the Danube prevented the Germanic tribes from crossing in force).

Navicable rivers: Very few rivers are navicable to ocean-going (deep-keel) vessels for any significant distance inland. Compared to the typical 50-100 mile wide map tile I can think of one river that would be navicable for more than that distance. Civil War riverboats were built on the river. American revolution/1812 naval conflicts on the Great Lakes were likewise between ships built on the lakes.

Bridges: So far, bridges over deep waters have proven to be engineering challenges exceeding all possible cost benefits. NO OCEAN BRIDGES!

Mountains: Proposal to damage units crossing inhospitable terrain types has been made before, and I think it is a good idea. Deserts should be barriers, not easy passages.
[This message has been edited by Straybow (edited March 19, 2001).]