TERRAIN & TERRAIN IMPROVEMENTS (ver 1.0): Hosted by EnochF

[EnochF]

Okay, there's been some talk about this, both in the General/Suggestions section and occasionally (and improperly, I might add) in this forum itself. And since I've got a fairly small workload, I think I can handle it.

The subject of Terrain includes:
* types of terrain to be used
* suggestions for new types of terrain
* levels of detail for such landscapes as mountain ranges, oceans, deserts, hills and forests
* military aspects of terrain (defense bonuses, whether horses can traverse mountains, etc.)
* how air and space should be differentiated from ground and each other
* on which types of terrain cities can be built

Then there's Terrain Improvements:
* what terrain improvements should be used
* suggestions for new terrain improvements
* how they should be built, by public works or engineers
* how long it takes to build them
* limitations by terrain (no mines on grassland, etc.)
* whether roads differ significantly from other terrain improvements
* whether railroads should offer unlimited movement

That sort of thing. As with all other threads, this one is going to end up crossing over to other threads. For example, a vote for "listening posts" is a vote for the "fog of war" option, which crops up occasionally in the Radical Ideas and Other threads. In the meantime, though, I expect everybody's got an opinion or two to add, and I'll be collecting them all for the next round of suggestions.

[Ecce Homo]

EnochF, thanks for starting this thread. I am going to insert a summary of the terrain suggeswtions from the OTHER thread (which is endless work to summarize).

[Kris Huysmans]

<h4>No 3d terrain !</h4>
I found the model of smac a good model. But a 3d terrain needs 3d units. And because this is a hell for scenariobuilders I think 2d(graphic) terrain is the best. But areas may well have an altitude.

<h4>A complet climat model</h4>
<h5>The water model</h5>
When you make a new mountain then the sealevel rises a little. So when you make much mountains then there will be a flood in the lower parts.
Also ice caps smelting must rise the sea level dramatically.
<h5>historic evolution</h5>
The climat has changed in the past. In Italy there was much more rain in 450BC then in 1999AD, some scientists think that this is the raison of the fall of the roman empire!
So civ3 couldn't be realistic without changing climats.
<h5>The effect of irrigation</h5>
When you irrigate then the area will become more salted over a time of 1000 years. And irrigation will make also the climat more dryer(because the salt and the higher) in that area, that explains also the fall of the city of Efese. But when one area becomes dryer then another area becomes more rainy(you can't destroy water). So maybe this could be also included in civ3.
<h5>How lesser jungle how more deserts</h5>
With the cut of the rain forest, the sahara has expanded and the bodem has lost his minerals over time. So maybe this could be also included in civ3.



<font size=1 color=444444>[This message has been edited by Kris Huysmans (edited June 16, 1999).]</font>

[NotLikeTea]

Devolution of tiles:

It may be interesting to have unused tiles (not worked by a worker? Not in a city radius? I'd go for the second) degrade, and dissapear over time. If a ine is out in the winderness, sitting empty, it's not going to last millenia.

This raises an interesting situations, as I mentioned in the Technology thread. In the mid game (after discovering Archaeology), explorers could find squares that have been abandoned, and are no longer visible. "You come across the ruins of an ancient Greek farm", for example. This could add to science, or have some other effect.

Perhaps even cities that are wiped out could stay on the map as ruins for a while.

[NotLikeTea]

On another topic, I'd also like to see more climactic change, gradual, ad drastic. Deserts expand and recede. Swamps form and dry up. A major force on the change of nations.

[wheathin]

This was originally posted in "OTHER", so hopefully it'll be more useful here:

----------------

Tile Improvements

As much as I liked the CivII system, I think CivIII should be a hybrid of CtP and SMAC approaches.

PW: I strongly support a system of PW like in CtP. It is far less hassle than using settlers or formers - a large reduction in micromanagement. Easily the most important consideration.


Terraforming: the idea itself is sort of silly in the context of the historical period in the game. In CivII, my engineers (who appeared with Explosives, a circa 1850 tech) would run out of useful things to do, so I'd just keep changing glaciers into grassland and moving my hills onto rivers to max out my cities. Aside from the micromanagement it involves, the idea that this kind of work can be done with anything short of WAY FAR future tech is ludicrous.

At the very least, provide us with some sort of convincing explanation: a "Weather Control" technology would be a nice start.

More importantly, even to the extent that terraforming is possible, try to make it appropriately scaled. Clearing forests doesn't take more than a large fire or an iron axe, and so should appear early. Changing a swamp into a desert mountain requires a lot more - make the tech (and PW reqs) reflect this.


Styles of improvements: CivII has a nice selection of both tile-based and city-based improvements (Harbors and Supermarkets for example). This should continue. I prefer more of everything, (I know - it is somewhat inconsistent to want more more more but have to do less micromanagement ) so I like both approaches. I also think there should be city improvements which *allow* certain TI, and vice versa. I.e. you could not build fisheries until you had built a harbor, or you could not build advanced mines until you had a railroad connecting to your city.


Transport TI: 2 beefs. One - I like the *graphics* for this in SMAC/Civ2 FAR MORE than in CtP: the ctp system is ugly. The representation of the transit type from the center of one square to the center of another should be uniform, not change abruptly at the square boundary.

Two - don't link them to special energy/trade/etc bonuses. It just provides an incentive to cover every square with railroads/maglevs/whatever. Nothing is uglier (well, maybe combining this flaw with the number One above - ecch). These TI graphics usually look quite cool when they are laid out in single stretches between cities, but when they cover the landscape like a fungus, they are hideous. Keep it simple and clean.

Sea Transport: Railroads in CivII allowed unlimited movement points, and given the scale of a turn (1-5 years by that point in the game) it makes sense. Airlifts also allowed for a reasonable approximation of the capabilities of the modern nation to rapidly reposition equipment and goods (although I'd prefer some sort of system with limit on total number of airlifts in a turn, but not tied to any one city - in Berlin, the Allies had a fixed number of aircraft, but they could fly them all into one city 'round the clock).

So why is sea power so damn slow? Solutions:

- Shipping - Allow sea transport TIs that scale with technology (sailing ships, modern cargo, and some future hydrofoil-style-thing, for examples). A player places (or builds, if you're going to use a "sea-former" type thing) a ferry/trade route which allows for fast-faster-instant (depending on type) transport from a city/port accross the ocean. Then, you just "drive" your tank across the ocean, although it could not attack and would have a defensive value of 0 if it got caught there. Just like a road or RR, it can be pillaged/pirated and destroyed, which would constitute an Act of War.

Sea power units are still needed to protect the routes and power project, as are transports to land equipment in other locations not served by regular trade routes, or if a player is cautious and wants the extra protection that Galleons/Transports provide. Different players could have their routes cross, but I imagine they would be rapidly cut in a war.

- Bridges/Tunnels - short one-square distances could be bridged over shallow water, a la the Japanese islands and the Florida Keyes; or tunnels in similar places like Chunnel. More advanced future-techs allow for longer bridges or under-sea tunnels.


Supply Crawlers in SMAC - generally a bad idea. Too much micromanagement, and too little relevance to Civ3/human history. They allowed for huge cities to be sure, but CtP has demonstrated that there are other ways to solve this.

Aside on Huge Cities in general: I'd rather see a more developed economic system that could mimic some of these effects, but at least the game should recognize that availability of food hasn't been a determinant of city size for over a thousand years. Cities create demand for food which is almost always met. Food can be interrupted to be sure, resulting in short-term famine and decline, but long-term city growth (even over the "mere" decades of a medieval-period Civ turn) depends more heavily on other factors like employment, social policy, war, disease, peace, and immigration. The demand for food that large cities or burgeoning rural populations create *drives* agricultural innovations, money economies, and cashcropping, not vice versa.


Upgrading of TI: older TI in a square should reduce the cost of an upgrade, but should not be a pre-req (i.e. having to build a road before building a railroad). Players should be able to plop down the newest available TIs immediately on unimproved land... they'll just cost more.


That's it for now...
wheathin

[wheathin]

Further ideas about terrian:

TIs should not be available simultaneously on all terrain types / cost the same. While it is easy to build fast roads across plains and grassland, it is more effort to build them through forests, and may take more advanced technology to do so through mountains (at least, for anything more than a footpath). Mines on hills should appear before mines on mountains; farms on plains before farms on deserts.

Terrain should limit military unit movement. Some units should get terrain bonuses, and others should have certain terrains be impassable.

- Mounted units and cannon, catapults, etc. should not be able to traverse mountains.
- Maybe a unit built in a city can get a movement ability based on the surrounding tiles of the city? Thus, if the city is adjacent to two swamps, the unit could get a swamp-bonus?

Maintanence costs for TIs? The farther an improvement is from a city, the more it should cost. If you want a Trans-Siberian Railroad, you would have to build lots of small towns along the way, or pay exorbitant maintanence costs, either of which seems totally reasonable.

wheathin

[EnochF]

A suggestion for roads and trade boni:

(1) Roads/railroads should not provide +1 trade
(2) However, the Superhighways city improvement should be implemented, which would provide +1 trade for every square with roads and thus encourage road-building near large, developed cities

[Ecce Homo]

How does terrain improvement work in SMAC?

[Kris Huysmans]

The most awfull things of civ2 are in my opinion:
SuperMarkt and Superhighways I realy hate the idea that you must build improvements to use title improvements. This works very limiting on your strategy because the building of more smaller cities is then a realy idiot strategy because you need to pay the high costs of the improvements.

Also don't make the same fault of smac to make much science and money possible without Free Market because this makes Free Market a realy bad choice with all its penaties.

I don't know of puplic works is a good idea because clicking buttons and changing parameters isn't not so funny as moving your settlers and give them orders. I found well that settlers should work faster and just like smac don't need food.


<font size=1 color=444444>[This message has been edited by Kris Huysmans (edited June 16, 1999).]</font>

[Ecce Homo]

Here is some material from the OTHER thread.

ALTITUDE
for the terrain. JT

NAMING TERRAIN FEATURES
The human (or the computer) should name geographical locations. Widowmaker

Take the starting positions of the Civ's into account, so we're likely to get a Nile River in Egypt, or the Andes Mountains near the Incas. the Octopus

Who is the first to discover a region should be the one to name it. kmj

MORE EMPHASIS ON RIVERS
*Increase trade depending on the number of cities upstream
*Increase aqueduct, sewage system and power plant effect
*Travel bonus only when entering the river from a city. Crossing the river should take time.
*Armies should be vulnerable when crossing rivers.
*borders should conform to the rivers. russellw

BETTER RESOURCE SEED
Something more random, where resources are not evenly ”lined up”. Rathenn

NATURAL EVENTS
What to do about real earthquakes, tidal waves, volcanic eruptions, land creation/destruction, and even continental drift? NotLikeTea

Natural conditions like earthquakes, volcanoes, floods, hurricanes/monsoons and tornados could be incorporated into the game. Floods cause food losses, volcanoes cause population and, perhaps, other losses, earthquakes cause improvement and/or productivity losses.

Volcanoes and flood prone rivers could provide extraordinary production bonuses. Fault lines could be especially rich in super oil/gas fields. Technology and/or improvements could help to get these bonuses or reduce the danger of bad occurences. Bird

ALTERNATIVE REWARD
Instead of rewards like the Throne Room, a special resource could be found outside a city. Sieve Too

[Eggman]

Whatever you do, make sure that the various different types of tiles LOOK DIFFERENT AND CAN BE EASILY DISTINGUISHED FROM EACH OTHER. In Civ2, at a glance I could tell what surrounded a possible city site. That is convenient. Avoid at all costs terrain that looks the same (like different forests in Colonization - I couldn't tell what was what without clicking on each one). I have heard similar complaints about SMAC.

Though I am not sure this is a good idea, I will throw it out there. Perhaps we can have two different types of forest. There would be regular forest (like normal) and less valuable "scrub" forest. Some wooded areas are much more useful than others.

And DO NOT, repeat, DO NOT have unlimited movement from railroads. They make ground units way too powerful. At the end of the game, all you need are a bunch of howitzers and a railway connection and the enemy is erased in one turn. At least make me take several turns to conquer an entire continent. Otherwise, though it may be realistic to blitzkreig an unprepared enemy in a one year turn, it is just too easy from a gameplay perspective (it's not fun).

Also, consider increasing the speed of ships but giving them a movement penalty when they sail into uncharted ocean squares. Ships can now be fast but exploration is still slow, which is fine by me.

[wheathin]

I agree that moving settlers/formers around is fun in the beginning of the game when you've only got 4 or 5 of them. But when you have 30 settlers, and the process has become mindless, public works are a much better option.

I also think that the Superhighways improvement (road = +1 trade) suffers the same aesthetic problem: an incentive for a player to cover every tile with roads, which is fairly ugly. I certainly don't want a repeat of Civ1, where everything was covered by that ugly black lattice-work of RR.

wheathin

[Eggman]

Almost forgot. Like SMAC, have special terrain squares that represent NATURAL wonders on the world. The Sahara Desert, the Grand Canyon, the Nile and Amazon Rivers, Mt. Everest/Himalayas, the Marinas Trench and many more that elude me at the moment can all be represented. These squares could provide bonuses (or not) and perhaps attract tourism for some cash if you have the wonder inside your borders (perferrably inside a city radius). Plus, if done right, they would look cool.

[EnochF]

Yeah, I've been trying to brainstorm the natural landmarks of the planet... I'd gotten as far as the Sahara, the Amazonian Rain Forest, the Himalayas and the North and South Pole, but then I just shrugged and started surfing world map sites. I agree with all those suggestions, except maybe the Grand Canyon, because in global terms it's no more than a single square. It'd qualify for a "natural wonder," as discussed in my Wonders thread (it's on version 2.0 and gathering dust, everybody, go visit!), but I don't know about a geographical landmark. Remember, in SMAC, these were features that took up anywhere from ten to twenty squares.

Maybe the Tigris-Euphrates River Valley, um, the Great Barrier Reef perhaps... maybe there could be bonuses and earthquake dangers for the edges of continental plates, but I'd hate to be the programmer in charge of a Random Continental Plate Generator.