TERRAIN & TERRAIN IMPROVEMENTS (ver 1.1): Hosted by EnochF

[Gordon the Whale]

Here is an idea that developed in the Economics thread, but really belonged here, since it's about TI's. It's a little like the farm idea I posted above, but much more complete. Here are the basic components as I see them (anybody else who contributed on that thread, please correct me.)

1) Villages are the primary method of gathering resources. They are the only place to put "average" people, i.e. not specialists. However, they exist externally to the city, on the surrounding squares. They gather the materials from the square they sit on and nowhere else.

2) Cities contain only specialists. These include scientists, entertainers, and workers. (Maybe also merchants?) Workers produce Industry, which is used to process the resources harvested in the countryside.

3) Villages contain the agrarian population. If they are destroyed by an invading army, so is the population contained.

4) The food production from a tile must be approximately twice that in CivX, because Specialists (i.e. city dwellers) are now necessary from the beginning, and must be supported.

5) Villages would be built by a "Public Works" type system, rather than by a unit. They could be autobuilt by the AI or queued by the player.

I believe that is the basic idea, upon which all in favor of the idea at all are agreed. (Again, correct me) Here are additional suggestions:

1) Villages don't count toward the maximum people in the city from Aqueducts, etc.

2) Villages don't count towards any particular city, but are shared within a region. Obviously, this would require regions.

3) Villages are divided into at least two types, mining and farming. Each type will act differently, producing either more food or more resources. A farming village on a forest square could become a logging village.

4) Villages may increase in size beyond 1. When they do so, their maximum production increases, but with diminishing returns (size 2 doesn't produce double what size 1 does.)

5) The second point of size (and any more) may be of a different type, i.e., a size 1 farming village becomes a size 2 farming/mining village.

6) When a village reaches a certain size (3? 4?), it becomes a city on its own.

7) Villages must be built in a square adjacent to either the city or another village.

8) The maximum distance from the main city would be dependant upon the technology level, or perhaps whether it is linked by road, railroad, etc.


Now here are some I have come up with that are new:

1) Allow the farmers/miners/loggers to come into the city in times of war. The villages could still be destroyed, but those are quicker to build than population. The population would be saved, but the extra people in the city would contribute to disease, and you wouldn't be getting any resources from the land.

2) What about Ocean squares? It doesn't make sense to build Villages in the Ocean. 2 options I see, which could work in conjunction: Cities with Harbors may make Fisherman specialists, which each allow one Ocean square to be harvested, and coastal Villages would have the option to be a Fishing Village, which uses none of it's own square, but harvests out of an ocean square. Under idea 5, this could be combined with a mining or farming village.

3) As an extension of idea 6 above: This is the ONLY way to make a new city until the discovery of a certain advance, which allows settlers. A Settled City (Colony) starts its own region, while Grown Cities belong to the same region as the Village they grow from. This would take the necessity of production away from expansion, since one wouldn't need to necessarily build cities with settlers. There would also have to be a way to split regions… Maybe by building a provincial capital, you would get to select the borders of a new region.

I think I will also post this to Radical Ideas, since it destroys the concept of City Radii, changes the function of Cities, and adds something completely new.

[Flavor Dave]

I skimmed, I didn't read, so maybe I missed it, but what is the purpose of elevated plains?

Oh, I know realism. Well, if you want realism, play two...

Wait, I won't go there. Elevated plains actually could enhance the game, by allowing very defensible cities to grow. You get the food AND the defense bonus in these squares. I like the idea, it adds to my palette of choices.

My suggestion, tho, is to come up with the simplest solution. Mountains never have special resources except iron and gold (I think), and mountains only have grapes and coal (right?). Why not add some kind of elevated plains--it would look kinda like the plain wheat tile.

[Flavor Dave]

sorry, double post
<font size=1 face=Arial color=444444>[This message has been edited by Flavor Dave (edited July 30, 1999).]</font>

[ember]

Gordon, I have a couple clarifications and extensions to add.

1) resources and food are generated in villages, any 'trade' or 'idustry' produced in them is used by the villages to support themselves. Only extra food and reosurces are shiped out.

2) cities produce all useable trade and industry. Varisu specialist types, the normals +laboureres to start and more types later.

3) villages are constructed without resource cost. It takes the same time as a unit fortifying to move or create a village. All expenses of this are covered by the resources not generated during the move. This allows you to ship the villagers back in to your cities.

4) costal villages. Put the icon for the village on the shore, but in the costal square. The pop is counted as being there, and can be killed by bombard capable ships. Oil platforms actually house their pop in the open ocean, this is the only time that deep ocean squares are harvested up to modern times. ( I don't see why you can harvest from deep ocean squares, when your treiems can't even go there...)

5) no need to deferentiate vilage types. Use regular tile improvments, like farms and mines.

6) settlers could be used to start remote villages without using them up (colonies on nearrby islands, etc. Still a distance limit, and only costal to start.

Other points:

a) terrain types that cities becomes even more imoprtant. they don't generate resources, but different terrain types would give growth and trade bonuses, espicially river, and costal.

b) I have proposed that food affects happiness, which affects gowth, not directly.
This removes the potential cheese of puting next to all your citizens on farms to boost growth. It would work a bit, but with highly diminishing returns...

c) At the start only one city per region, but as tech advances you get to select which ones go in. Regions would then split the villages according to the closest city. You could move the border if you wanted, but there is a max # of squares within the border depending on tech.

d) I think that vilalges should never be able to grow into cities without direct intevention ( a setler, which represents an infusion of infrastructure) spontanteous cities would be bad, because you would suddenly have a shift in available resources and loss of stratigc control.

That's all for now...

------------------
"Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

[Monk]

As long as desert squares aren't as easy to cross. Also, there gotta be Dunes (hard desert), Savannah and different kinds of forests like needle trees, rainforests etc. It looks silly with those Civ2 forests near Equator

[Gordon the Whale]

That would largely be solved by the LTMV system. A traditional Civ forest would be Temperate, and probably with moderate moisture. That wouldn't happen near the equator, because everything would be hot. You'd get rainforest where it was wet.

Savanna is a harder issue. That's halfway between forest and grass, but not really in a transitional zone. Adding another otion to ANY of the four parameters would be bad, because it would make the number of possibilities skyrocket. I'd have to say that savanna would be represented by grass in Civ3, because that is closer to the biome concerned.

I believe it has been noted elsewhere that the x10 system, if adopted, would make movement more realistic. If an standard, infantry unit has movement 10, then a plain costs 10 to move across. Make other landforms cost very much more, and have movement work as a build, so that if a Hot, Arid, Barren Plain costs 40 to move across, that means 4 turns. Also mentioned were harsh squares damaging units not specially equipped for them (for instance, camels can cross desert without penalty). Harsh desert could be either a special "resource" tile, or the assumed nature of Hot/Arid/Barren. Typical deserts have plants, and could be Hot/Arid/Grass.

[ember]

Terrain:

First step is determine the form of the terrain. Form never changes during the course of the game.
These are:
Deep ocean
Ocean shelf
Glacier
Mountain.

Flat
Hills
Major Rivers

Navigable rivers cannot be in hills, so to keep things simple they will be their own landform. Otherwise it is basically the same as flat.
Flat terrain gives a food bonus, hills have a defensive bonus and allow mines.

Vegitation:
Vegitation can only be applyed to the last 3 landforms. The first 4 do not support vegitation types.


Plains
Grassland
Taiga (evergreen forest)
Boreal forest
rain Forest
tundra
desert
swamp

Combinations to note:
hill + grasland = plateau
river + grassland = flood planes, the most fertile standard terrain type.
flat + grassland = no irrigation reguired.
taiga + hills = shield, like the canadian shield or siberia. This is the best resource producing terrain.
swamp + hills, acts as fresh water lakes, these cannot be changed to anything else. (just as a place keeping way of proraming it)

Landform cannot be changed by your engineers.
vegitation can.
Allowable changes:
Grassland <--> Boreal Forest
Taiga <--> plains
swamp --> grassland
jungle --> plains
Irrigated desert acts like plains.
Irrigated plains acts like grassland.
tundra can't be changed to anything else.

Terraforming model.
Economic TI's are auto built by enginners in cities. A former type unit is fortified in a city. While it is there, it can automatically build farms and mines as well as changes the veggitation in friendly squares. You can change the terrain view mode 't', and click on squares to set their priority and change prefered. If villages are used, can only do squares surrounding friendly villages and cities. Squares do not have to be near the city the engineer is in, just connected by roads, or in the same region.

Engineers outside of cities act like normal civX, but they cannot build farms/mines. (to prevent building away from your pop centres). When acting this way they can build paths (along with most millitary units) as well as Roads, highways and RR, and military TI's

Nothing can bu built on deep ocean/glaciers.

military TI's:

bases act as both fortress and airbase, costal bases can have ships enter as well. Units can be 'deployed' to bases.
forts act as a scout unit and stop the first enemy unit to step on it. also offer some defense bonus.
sonar acts as a fort in the water.

economic TI's:
Farms / modern farms, built on any plains, grassland or desert.
irrigation, built on desert or plains, makes it act as the next stage better, whithout changing it.
mines / modern mines, built on any hills or mountains. Farms can also be built if it is a grassland/plains square.
fisheries can only be built in coneinental shelf, which usueally only extends one square from land, but some times more.

transport TI's:
Paths, built by and most military units as well, MP/2 move
roads, MP/4 move, and give a trade bonus (and allow resource sharing) when connectig cities.
Highways, modern roads, MP/8 move, more resource sharing.
Rail-roads, MP/8, take 50% longer than highways to build, but enemy units act as if on path (or road?) when using.
Tunnels, connect two squares of land under a shallow ocean square. Allows land units to cross water.
Cannal, connect two ocean squares over flat land. Can connect a city on a river to the sea if 1 square away.
When a unit enters a tunnel/cannal it uses 1 full MP and goes diredtly to the other side, units cannot rest in a tunnel/cannal. Both can only be used by the owner. Neither can be pillaged by sea units.
A tunnel is built by having an engineer on each end of the desired location. Both then build the tunnel. To use you press a key.


------------------
"Any technology, sufficiently advanced,
is indistinguishable from magic"
-Arthur C. Clark

[Theben]

Ember,
Niicce. I like it. However, I must insist that desert cannot be irrigated unless it has a river or you have modern irrigation techniques that allow water to be pumped over vast distances.
Gordon,
A forest wouldn't need 100 years to be built. It would take a few years to plants, and then maybe 20-40 to grow to a decent size.
Now we can add young, middle & old growth forests to this concoction?
I also oppose having villages grow into cities. Realistic yes, but a micromanaging nightmare.

I think I've got a workable minefield idea. Taking the "terrain causing damage to units" idea, simply state that a mined tile is equivalent to a wilderness/mountain type square, and that no unit has immunity to it. These could be placed on land, water, or space with the same basic effect. Any military unit or engineer can lay/sweep mines. The civ who laid the mines and any allies take 1/2 damage when moving through. They also cause unhappiness when in a city radius.
That's it.

[FinnishGuy]

Hey minefields as terrain improvements, that's a good idea! But I don't think they should cause unhappiness during wartime.

[mindlace]

3d + LVTM
A square is comprised of a 3x3 grid where each point on the grid has an individual Z (altitude) value for rendering purposes.

one square:

OOO
OOO
OOO

Landform is the average of Z. I recommend 3 more landform types: Shelf, basin, and trench- for underwater terrain.

Temperature and Moisture, OTOH, are computed on a rendered-square basis. This means that the vegetation graphics vary _within_ a tile.
(as a tangent, I suggest a moisture value of "underwater". This is not satisfied by the new Landform value because some subsquares will be rivers.)

Advantages: very natural looking terrain. The vegetation sprites could be very simple (forest=1 tree, for example)
River navigation now becomes simple: If a river is 2 subsquares wide, a boat may navigate it.

Vegetation underwater should be simple: 'shelf' level terrain has a high enough temperature to support kelp, basin perhaps fish, and trench, nothing. Since the moisture value is constant (underwater) it reduces variables a lot.

TI consequences
Mines could be built anywhere the landform type was hill or mountain.

Farms, however, would require that the square be leveled. You could raise or lower to level, depending on what temperature you wanted. Raise would make the 3x3 grid level with it's current highest vertex, lower would make it level with the lowest vertex.

Another appearance advantage is that roads would level out the rendering squares they crossed:

N/S   E/W  NW/SE  NE/SW
O|O   OOO   \OO    OO/
O|O   ---   O\O    O/O
O|O   OOO   OO\    /OO

Rivers, though they would have different sprites, would look similar to roads from the 3d perspective.

~mindlace

[Metamorph]

I seem to be on an abstraction kick, so forgive me if I stride off on a tangent.

I've always found it immensely peculiar how civlike games treat tiles so absolutely. That there tile is either a *grassland* or a *plains*. The entire zone, however many square miles, functions uniformly throughout it in a precise manner, producing the exact same quantities of raw materials as, say, that grasslands tile over yonder -- and exactly twice as much as the plains tile sitting right next to it. No more; no less.

If you have an engineer etc. transform that land, he works on it for years and years (turns and turns )... then suddenly one day, magically and mystically, the entire area is transmogrified into an entirely different type of area, and produces an entirely different set of resources with the appropriate quantity.

Bizarre! Why must tiles be so uniform? Why must every grassland always produce exactly twice the food of every forest or plains? There is no differential, no curvature. Either it's grass, or it's not grass.

I propose instead that we approach tile production from the other extreme. Each tile can produce X food, Y shields, Z gold, or whatever you want them to produce; that's not important now (I love being abstract ). The random world generator assigns production quantities to various tiles, grouping tiles of high/low production of various resources together (the same as it does now, only based on the numbers, not on the "tile type"). Naturally there will be proportionality limits; if a tile produces a lot of food, for example, it can't produce quite as much shield or gold or whatever.

Then the game goes back and says well gosh, look, this tile produces lots of food and very little of anything else. So I'll use a grassland tile icon to represent the general area, since that's pretty much what most of the area looks like. When the user holds the mouse over the tile, a corner of the display window will indicate what that tile's exact production is. But that's only for number-crunching. The layman can simply point and go, "Mmm, look, grassland. Good spot for new city. Lots of food."

If an engineer works the land, and is say assigned to improve its shield output, he'll slowly increase that tile's +shield, and reduce its +food. If left there for long enough, the shield output will equal the food output, and the tile will appear as a plains. If left for longer, it becomes a forest. Or whatever.

Tiles that produce decent shields and gold and little food look like hills. Tiles that produce lots of shield and little else look like forests. Tiles that don't produce a god damn thing will be desert or tundra. If an engineer is assigned to work on a desert and irrigate it (i.e. give it more food) it'll eventually look like a grassland. Someday.

If a river flows through a tile, the river will affect the tile and give it some sort of bonus to its resources. Consequently the tile type appearance will change. So if a river flows through the desert, for example, you'll likely see a strip of grassland tiles where the river is, but beyond the river will be desert. Other "specials" might work similarly.

Which I'll now take even farther: Engineers could tap a source of water and BUILD a river through land. This could have all sorts of nifty effects on tile production and tile appearance. I won't point out at this point that you can't really irrigate with sea water... We can get into water types found in rivers at a later date.

Bah, there's that tangent. Okay, so that's my abstraction: tiles are places which produce stuff, and appear like what they produce; rather than, tiles have appearances, and produce based on what they look like.

- Metamorph

[Theben]

Oh, NOW you come along with this concept. Guess what? Too late, buddy! Pack your bags and go home!! We gots other ideas!

Actually that looks pretty good. And it's not that abstract.

[loinburger]

Wow. I have absolutely no idea of what to make of that idea, Metamorph, because I want to hate it but kinda like it. It kinda reminds me of the old Commodore 64 game, Oil Barons. In that game, the computer would generate invisible pools of oil under the land, so that once you've struck oil in one square, odds are that the next square will hold oil too. That way you won't go having fertile river valleys right next to the Himilayas--at least, not very often.

THE WHOLE VILLAGE/CITY THING: Any of you ever play Lords of the Realm? That had the concept that your population was housed in villages outside of the main town, and an invading army could pillage the villages and reduce your population. I like that idea. I also like the idea of multiple workers being able to farm/mine/whatever a single square for diminishing returns. I loathe the idea of villages spontaneously turning into cities.

FUTURE TI's: What's this about never being able to turn a mountain into a grassland?!? True, no technology in our foreseeable future could accomplish this (without creating enough fallout to wipe out life on this planet), but if future techs are available I'd still like to be able to squeeze blood from a stone through ecological + geological engineering marvels. However, this is totally irrelevant to the first 6000 or so years of the game.

MINES: I still like the idea of mines increasing the damage caused by bombers + artillery, to the point that the artillery (and bombers, if they attack as artillery) can actually destroy units. Reason for this is that a unit stuck in a minefield can't move around much while the bombs are falling. I wouldn't raise too big an outcry if ANY military unit were allowed to mine a square, but I'd still like to see Engineers get a bonus at this (let's say that it takes a tank 2 turns to sweep a square while it takes an Engineer 1 turn).

Movement TI's: I've already voiced my opinions far too much on these, so I'll be brief. I just wanted to clarify my Vacuum Tunnel TI. The concept for this came to me from some science fiction book or another, so obviously it would require many future techs to be built. A Vacuum Tunnel is a reinforced tube running on the ocean floor that has had all the air sucked out of it. The unit can move at extremely high speeds through this tube (on a transport vehicle) due to the total lack of wind resistance. The Vacuum Tube can extend as far as you want and can go anywhere, through land, through water, whatever. Each section must be built by a sea Engineer, and the ends (if not located at cities) must also contain their own TI's. Vacuum tubes would provide unlimited movement, and could only be exited or entered from their openings at either end.

[don Don]

Metamorph
I said something a little like that back on Page 2, but not in that detail. I don't have time to develop the idea more, but I'd like to see what comes of it!

VILLAGES

If I said any of this before, I can't find it. So, here goes. I favor the idea of special Village TIs for other uses. For example, an inland city with shore tiles in its radius could use a village on a shore tile to serve as a port. The city could then build ships, but not port improvements (other than Harbor). If some improvements are necessary for ship production, an idea I favor, then building the improvements would confer only the ability to build that type of ship; no other ship effects (vet status, fast repair) would accrue.

I prefer the idea of special TI's rather than Supply Crawlers. A Village TI could be used to assign the resource to a city if connected via road or rail. Road would offer some partial utilization of the resources, and rail the full value. Could coexist with mine, fortress, airbase, etc. Or a Depot improvement could serve the same purpose by a different name (especially after RR).

I would also like to see a Suburb TI only for plains & grasslands. Preq: Automobile. This represents small cities economically tied to the major city (heard of SMSA?) that, in ages past, would have been cities in their own right by population size. Could coexist with irrigation & farms (these tile are 50-100 miles across, ya know). Would allow an extra "worker" in the square producing only trade (2 trade units, perhaps). This allow for much bigger cities, as we have in the real world (Mexico city would be size 49).
<font size=1 face=Arial color=444444>[This message has been edited by don Don (edited August 14, 1999).]</font>

[EnochF]

(pant, pant, guzzle a Gatorade...)

Okay, I've got a summary that includes the first 100 posts of this thread... now I've just got to work up the energy to do the last thirty or so... then I'll move on to Version 2.0... whew...