Irrigation

[Foobar]

I have tried to find more information on this subject on the net but I havn't been very lucky.

Anyway I was intrested in the inpact of irrigation in differnt regions of the world. From what I have read the first civilizations actually started because there was a need for a central government to build irrigation canals. I referning to Mesopotania. without irrigation this land was mostly dessert and useless but irrigated it produced a lot of food.

On the other hand seems that irrigation was seldom used in north-europe (England, Germany etc). Does this mean that it had little effect here? I think this should be included in the game because this can make the differnt civ develop very differntly. On the other hand the development of the heavy-plow seemed to have a much greater impact in north-europe than in mesopotania, egypt, italy etc.

This way the civs in hot climated will develop fastest in the early stage while the civs in cooler climates will catch on later.

If somebody has any links to the history of irrigation please tell me.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Foobar:

If you do a search of the Clash forum on "irrigation" you will find a lot of discussion. Also don Don came up with an economic model that has a lot of good stuff in the text. For example:

Unlike the terrain models used in civ-like games to date, food production on a given size plot of land depends almost
entirely on water. Irrigated desert (like the Imperial Valley in CA) is just as productive as irrigated plains, irrigated hills, or
irrigated grasslands. Dry land farming of plains (like Iowa), hills (like Appalachian foothills/Columbia plateau), and
grasslands (like Indiana) can produce almost as much without irrigation but suffers from irregular rainfall. Irrigation is
rarely practiced outside desert regions because the economic benefit is too small to justify the expense of water control
structures. All the farmer gets is insurance against minor drought; major droughts dry up the irrigation sources, too.

the rest of his model is in the second link in the thread: http://apolyton.net/forums/Forum21/HTML/000079.html

We are planning to have in the game model the facts don Don brought up - that basically irrigation is only really cost effective in dry areas (at least perhaps until modern times).

Cya,

Mark