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

[don Don]

OK, I lied. I do have time to develop the idea more… I had said,

I'd want to see something a little more innovative for handling terrain use and improvement. Allow more than one pop unit to use a tile, with some kind of diminishing returns depending on terrain. For hills only one pop unit could farm at the highest productivity, but for a fertile grassland several could. Then Civ3 could actually use a linear population scale for the city size… but maybe I'm asking too much.

I think it would be better to have a scale with many steps of productivity (fractional/decimal outputs) rather than the few integer value steps allowed in Civ/SMAC.

I like the idea of Engineers (terraformers) being distinct from population expansion (colonies). However, I disagree with the whole idea of changing basic land types. A possible exception is deforestation, which could result in grassland, plains, or desert (but should reap a substantial bonus of timber/shields in the process). Reforestation should be a tech developed late in the industrial age of technology after huge tracts are denuded and the consequences hit the pocketbook!

I don't see too many examples of modern engineers turning hills into grasslands or mountains into hills, etc. We have strip-mined long ridges of hills, but not enough of them together to result in a "grassland" tens of miles across. We have dug a pit mine two miles wide on the sides of mountains, but that wouldn't turn tens of miles of mountains into hills. The cost of earthmoving is usually the most expensive phase of construction. It would take an expenditure of man-hours and machinery equivalent to all the dams, canals, and roads built in the USA to turn one hills tile into grasslands, much less mountains to hills.

[Theben]

One last TI suggestion:

Auto TI building. No, not auto-settler/engineer working the land, but have the people who're actually using the land transform it.

You place a citizen, in the City Screen, on a tile. After several turns if you haven't used your engineers to upgrade the land then the people do it instead. They'd go by you're Preference list to decide what to change 1st, up to the maximum possible changes. Perhaps flagging a tile will be necessary to indicate what should be done 1st, if different from your Preferences.

FE, You put a worker on a unaltered grassland tile. Your Preference list says 1)road, 2)irrigate, 3) RR, 4)farm (using civ2 TI's). 10 turns go by and you haven't done anything to the tile, so your people build a road. Another 10 turns and you do nothing, they irrigate. And so on. Once everything is done (up to tech level) and more time passes the people will build a village (assumes villages as city TI). If you wanted to do somthing different you'd have to "flag" the tile to change from grassland to forest or to irrigate 1st, etc. This only works as long as the citizens remains in the same tile for all turns involved.

Pros: Reduces micromanagement. Somewhat more historically accurate as citizens almost always built their living areas.

Cons: Cities would build quickly, possibly disrupting game play. Engineers may lose their importance in game. One possible solution is to only allow engineers to build things that aren't in the Preferences, so no flagging would be necessary. Another is to allow people to only build irrigation, farms, villages, and roads; everything else must be built by engineers.

[loinburger]

Theben:

I like that idea, but perhaps it could be weakened somewhat if you were to lose tax income as a result of auto-improvement. So, if a tile receives 2 extra trade as a result of a TI placed on it, but your engineers, settlers, or public works did not build that TI, then you receive only 1 trade from that improvement, since the workers will skim off the top and will become extremely unhappy with you if you don't allow them to do this--they built the TI themselves, after all. (this would make more sense if the x10 system were used, in that if 20 extra trade were produced then the workers would only give you 15 without a fight). You could give royal decrees (or whatever) disallowing workers to improve a tile, so that you can reap the full benefits of the extra trade.

[ember]

I have already proposed something similiar to auto-settle. Engineers psoted in cities (or in your reserves, if deployment is used) develop the land around your empire without actually moving them there.

I also said that the basic landform could not be changed, but the type of terrain on the land form could (with a bunch of limitatiions)

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

[don Don]

Theben,

I disagree about building roads, irrigation, etc. In general, the populace will only invest the minimum effort to make the land useful. They may clear winding dirt paths, but they won't build paved military roads. It does take some kind of effort and organization to do tile-scale projects, which means player mgmt or automated governor scripts.

Your idea really just points towards the Public Works mechanism used in CTP. Someone already suggested both terraforming units for speedy completion of jobs well outside city radii and PW for inside the city radii.

I think further development of Metamorph's idea can wait until after ver 2 summary.

[loinburger]

Will there BE more after the Version 2 summary? I'd heard it in the rumor mill that Firaxis is already hardening its code and that a Version 3 wouldn't do much good. Is this rumor valid?

[Maniac]

This question hasn't been asked directly, I think and it has to be asked now if there aren't going to be further lists v3.0. So do we want Public Works? Organize a poll here?

Yes : 1
No : 0

[loinburger]

Ember:

This is regarding villages, my idea coming from Lords of the Realm (I've spoken of something similar elsewhere, but not in any detail).

I don't know and I don't care about the economic aspects of villages--I'll leave that to you (although I am opposed to villages spontaneously becoming cities). My thoughts on villages are that a village will pop up whenever workers begin to work a square. They will be represented by a small house or something, nothing too large that it would conceal other terrain improvements. If multiple workers are working a square, the village will grow in size. Again, nothing so large that it would conceal the other TI's in the tile.

When an enemy army enters the city radius and moves on top of a village square, the villagers will remain in the village under "house arrest" (instead of being kicked off the land and made into specialists, as is now the case). The village will not be able to supply the city, though, but it can still feed itself. If the enemy army attempts to pillage the village, the city's population will be reduced and/or Refugee units will be made and/or Partisans will be formed, depending on tech + SE choices + city improvements (barracks etc.) + movement TI's (roads will help refugees escape) + whatever other factors are involved. Also, if the Civ is warlike enough, Fanatic/Partisan type units might spontaneously form when the enemy army enters the village square.

This will also address the "reservists" idea that many have been expounding upon.

OTHER THINGS WHICH ARE MADE POSSIBLE BY THIS:

Other than the obvious benefits of there being reservists surrounding your cities you being able to reduce enemy population without attacking the city directly, this system will also help the defender survive a siege. He/she will no longer be forced to support dozens of specialists who have been kicked off of their land only to starve in the city. What's more, perhaps another specialist, "reservist", could be created. If you know that an enemy army is about to enter one of your villages and pillage it, you can instead take the villagers out of their village and protect them behind your city walls as in feudal times. These villagers will make terrible defenders (if they are capable of defending themselves at all), but at least they'll be taken out of harm's way. Furthermore, the village system can be used to add more rigidity to which squares are being worked. Perhaps it takes a full turn to build the village and being output. I personally am opposed to this (villages should be spontaneously formed when population is moved--it only takes a few months to build a house, if even that), I merely mention it as something which can be added to the game if others feel that it would improve it.

[Diodorus Sicilus]

Just a scattering of comments here:

High Plateaus. If the purpose is to get some Food production out of a mountain tile, just add the historical TI of Terracing. Terraced farming was used extensively in precisely those situations, in the Far East and Incan lands.
You can irrigate with salt water, but it requires special tech advances and resource unput. I believe the Israelis have been doing it in the Negev for over 20 years now.
Rivers are both the major source of irrigation and the major transportation system for most of the game. Therefore, the movement bonus for rivers has to be adjusted slightly. Units can actually move faster on riverboats than on most roads until motorized vehicles come along (maybe x4 instead of x2 move?), and rivers extend city radii because the river boat is the ONLY way to move food and other bulk goods in quantities sufficient to be significant to a city.
Finally, the Head of Navigation should be marked on a river (waterfall icon?). Most early ships can go up river to that point (at least up to and including the Galleon or Frigate) and engineers can extend it (canalizing the river) after certain Techs are discovered - Pound Locks, furinstance.
Cities bult at the Head of Navigation get a Trade bonus because all goods have to be transshipped there from ocean to river or road and the merchants/warehouses of the city get their cut. This would also allow for 'inland' ports, like London, Philadelphia, Hamburg, etc.

[bcr3]

It's probably not worth posting this here, as it's already appeared in the Misc. Vers. 2.1, and the idea isn't all that original, but EnochF HIMSELF visited my original thread (getting Apolyton All-Stars to visit my threads is kinda cool!) suggested I post it under Terrain, so here's hoping it doesn't get buried...

This message is a condensed form of all the ideas presented on the CivIII General Forum "Nature's Wrath" thread. The basic idea is to add random natural disasters in CivIII. They were present in Civ but didn't make the cut for Civ2. Here's what we have so far:

- Specific disasters should target specific land types, i.e.: Tornadoes hit grasslands & plains, Tsunamis hit coastal squares, Landslides hit hills & Volcanoes hit mountains. Earthquakes would be either truly random or fall along predetermined fault lines.
- Certain disasters destroy specific city improvements, i.e.: Tsunamis take out ports & harbors, floods wreak havoc on aqueducts & sewer systems.
- Two levels of disasters, Major & Minor, one of which is somehow preventable.
- Present disasters as Wrath of the Gods, i.e.: Fundamentalist gov'ts get hit less often (though it seems to me they get it pretty good already...)
- New technologies & improvements which would either prevent or lessen the effects of disasters, i.e.: Seismology tech could reveal the predetermined faultlines, if used, or allow a Seismology Center improvement to warn of coming Earthquakes.
- Disasters could kill off a certain number of population points which varies depending on Major or Minor status of the disaster.
- An evacuation order which allows a city to be spared loss of pop. points (but not city improvements) at the cost of stopping the city's production (trade, shields, everything) as long as the evacuation is in effect. This order should probably become available when and only when a disaster warning has become available, thus preventing any possible abuse, i.e.: evacuating cities with 150 shields in their production boxes until Manhattan Project is finished... just a little unfair.

My thanks again to Icedan, who directed my attention to this forum as the "serious" one, and to Theben for helping me figure out the Rules to posting here.

Just to throw in my two cents, all this worrying about the conformity of land types is gonna seriously screw land customizability. Do y'know how long it's gonna take to turn tundra into, I don't know, Enchanted Forest, for a fantasy scenario? Not that I don't like realism, I just like customizing better. Just a thought.
<font size=1 face=Arial color=444444>[This message has been edited by bcr3 (edited August 22, 1999).]</font>

[ember]

While it now takes a few months to build a village, I think the one turn down time well represents the resources tehy need to build them, also it takes a year to get new fileds working and merchant routes sorted out. One turn lost is not a very big penalty either.

Villages should definatly not spontatniously turn to cities. A settler can build a city there and the villages there will be added to the city pop.

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

[Theben]

don Don,
I haven't played CtP, so aside from what people have mentioned here I don't know what the public works does. I assumed it was something built by the player in the city which then was placed on a tile. My idea would allow these things to occur over time w/o any player management. As to your other concern about people only building the minimum and the rest needs engineers/settlers, I agree, and I thought I got that through in the 1st post with my suggestions on how to keep engineers important. Yes, people won't build paved roads, but they will cut paths through wilderness; i.e. early roads as has been suggested elsewhere. So limit this idea to:

irrigation
paths
farms
villages

That's it. Possibly updated irrigation & farms but no more.

[Maniac]

From what I read about Public Works (I haven't got CtP either), you gather PW points and with a certain amount of PW points you can build a TI. I don't know what gives you PW points but I know sure they aren't built in the city as Theben says.

Is there anyone here that has CtP and wants to explain PW better?

[ember]

In CtP public works acts as a production tax.
You take a certain % of your production and convert it to PW, each TI costs a certain amount of production. In CtP the cost was very high, a mid level mine cost about as much as a machine gunner (rifleman type unit)...

You would but the TI and it would take 2 to 4 turns to build itself.

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

[Maniac]

Then it can easily be converted to the labor/resources system. Just have PW points be equal to a certain % of your labor.
With my proposal that a city size 1 city produces 10 labor (x10 system), size 2 30, size 3 60... large cities would produce more labor thus making more TI possible thus partially solving ICS.
But 400 labor (eqiuvalence of 40 shields, cost for a Riflemen and a CtP mine) is too much I think.