posted July 19, 1999 11:13            

You must have discovered Railroad to use Railroad. Some for Maglevs etc... That way inferior civs can't use your hightech machines. For them RR act as roads.

My idea to avoid blitzkrieg:

Before you can use someone else his RR's, you must convert them (see The List v1.0).
OR
you must connect your RR system to his, so you can use your own trains.

Actually this whole RR-blitzkrieg discussion is pointless if you give RR a 1/5 movement bonus.
READ MY POSTS!

------------------
M@ni@c-SMAniaC
depends on what site I am.

posted July 19, 1999 14:19            

Something else. I get the feeling this thread is just Technopile and Theben discussing about their stupid Railroads and movie. According to Brain Reynolds e-mail, we should make the decisions how Civ3 works. The List contains only suggestions. So -again- LET'S MAKE A LIST OF TERRAIN IMPROVEMENTS AND TERRAIN WE WANT IN THE GAME!
About Railroads: I gave you an answer how to avoid blitzkriegs and how to simulate other civ problems with your RR system but you keep discussing with no result at all !

------------------
M@ni@c-SMAniaC
depends on what site I am.

posted July 19, 1999 17:50            

In Civ 1/2, grasslands dominate the map. In Civ 3, they should be more uncommon.

Has anybody handled the issue of resource depletion? As far as I have understood, mineral deposits are never depleted, but become increasingly scarce, until the industry no longer breaks even. How this should be simulated depends on whether Civ 3 should use "shields" or different trading commodities.

posted July 19, 1999 18:15            

About deleted resources: because eath's natural resources become exhausted, humans would be forced to get their minerals from Mars.

posted July 21, 1999 04:19            

In reality the populace improves the land they need to use. They break new ground for farms in the midst of forests, hills, swamps, or whatever. They mine wherever they discover minerals worth the digging. It does take government initiative or incentive to prospect and mine away from population centers, and in that case people working there are unlikely to engage in agriculture worth notice on the scale of this game.

posted July 21, 1999 10:04            

On another topic, I've been thinking of rivers. What is CivIII divided rivers into minor and major? Minor rivers would combine and form major rivers. Both river types would give a food bonus, and would be allowable sources of irrigation, but only Major rivers would be navagable by sea units and would provide trade bonuses.

posted July 21, 1999 14:27            

"ember: If you give RR a 1/5 Movement Bonus instead of an unlimited MB"

posted July 21, 1999 15:49            

etcetera...

--
Fortification should be something like outposts in MOOII: If you build a fortification and then settle inside it you should have a city wall.
--

posted July 22, 1999 17:14            

that is, that it looks incredibally big for a civ square a smac volcano was bigger than france and even nurmal mountains would rais straight for two squares without going down

really they are few mountain ranges that wide and mountain rainges go up and down

I thing something like smacs terrain would work (more flatter looking) as the base of the land but not the mountains and hills themselves

by base I am meaning that they would be able to show a difference between lowlands and high lands

then maybe they could use squares for the mountains and hills themselves so that the himalyas don't look like one mountain

the square terrain can be 3d too

posted July 23, 1999 11:36         

Assigning a movement penalty to moving onto a river tile and then handing out subsequent bonuses is a good idea, but I think units should suffer a significant defensive penalty for being on a river. Having a river at your back tends to wreak havoc with tactical maneouverability, and sitting on boats chugging away in the water simply presents the enemy with nice slow-moving targets. To take it a little further, units on a road/railroad on a river tile should be ridiculously defenseless - there's not much a tank can do when it's chained to a flatbed in a switching yard waiting its turn to go over the bridge, chained to a flatbed crossing the bridge, or chained to a flatbed on the other side of the bridge waiting to be unloaded and assembled. Moving armies across rivers has always been a logistical nightmare and it always will be.

posted July 23, 1999 13:28            

Also, I like ctp's public works, but it is frustrating that you can't build anything outside of your base radius. So, I think you should have the public works, but then you could also have engineers and settlers, so you could build roads outside of bases, or prepare an area for a base.

posted July 26, 1999 10:14            

Plusses:
-Less micromanagement for player. Build and forget.
-Less units that clutter up terrain, less unit types overall.
-Will not interfere with an enemy advance (as it shouldn't) but can still be pillaged.

Minuses:
-Already have crawlers, and does same job, why add to programmer workload?
-Increased per turn costs for players
-Will not interfere with an enemy advance; maybe I want them to?
-Won't be able to add to Wonders (plus: there are many other ideas on how to add other cities' production to a wonder).

posted July 27, 1999 17:30            

Rockiness/moisture/elevation,as in SMAC, really wouldn't do it for the variety we want on Earth. But change it to Landform/Temperature/Moisture/Vegetation (LTMV), and add rivers, and special resources (as in Civ2, rather than SMAC), and it would be much closer.

I combined Elevation and Rockiness into Landform because the scale we are using is much too large for resolution of individual mountains; any elevation we can see is more along the lines of plateaus. I know M@ni@c liked the idea of high altitude plains, but in terms of game play, they're pretty much the same. It works reasonably well for ocean depths, but otherwise seems pointless, since we're not using solar power for most of the game anyways.
Instead, use Landform, which determines the base mineral content (if such is used, rather than a more complex resource system. Still, mountains have more Iron than plains) and the suitability for farming. There are 3 levels, Plain, Hill, and Mountain.

Temperature and moisture would both help determine the food output of a square (you can get a LOT more food out of a hot, wet climate than a cold, dry one). The levels would be simple: Hot, Temperate, Cold, and Arid, Moderate, Wet. Temperature and Moisture would also help the Map Generator determine Vegetation.

This is what really gives the land the variation that SMAC lacked. The types could be:
nothing/Scrublands
Grass
Forest

The vegetation would be generated from the underlying terrain, for instance, Forests can't grow on a Hot, Arid Mountain, and Nothing couldn't be placed on a Temperate, Moist Plain.

Pros of the LTMV system:
1)Much more realistic worlds, where the Landforms are generated first (hopefully using some sort of Plate Tectonics thing; I'm developing an algorithm to do that.), then Temperatures based upon latitude and "wind patterns" (hopefully slightly more complex than in SMAC; Make a smooth 2-D fractal, then take it's gradient, then rotate
all vectors 90 degrees. For something more complex, actually try to take the Coriolis force into effect. Lots harder.), then Moisture based upon Landform, Temperature, and Wind Patterns (which could be discarded after the world generation is complete, and have no bearing on the actual game, or could be used to determine climatalogical effects in the late game caused by massive terraforming, pollution, or nuclear war, as well as sailing ship movement) then place the Vegetation based upon Landform, Moisture, and Temperature.

2) More land types without getting confusing. You can have a forest, forested hills, forested mountains, cold forest, temperate forest, etc. etc.

3)"Terraforming", or whatever you want to call it, can be more reasonable. For instance, changing a mountain into anything other than a mountain, especially when we're talking about big mountain RANGES, is ludicrous, regardless of whether or not you have explosives. But cutting down the forest on the mountain is much more reasonable.

4) You could also put it in the ocean, for nice variety there, too. Landforms are Continental Shelf, Offshore Deeps, and Abyssal Trenches. Vegetations are Nothing, Coral Reef, or Kelp forest (more Nothing in the ocean than on land, though, and Reefs and Kelp would be limited to Continental Shelf). Here, moisture is mostly just a placeholder in case land ever rises up, and Temperature is still used for determining vegetation.

4) If pulled off well, it could make REALLY pretty maps.

Cons:

1)If pulled off badly, it could make maps that are mostly flavorless, as in SMAC. This could (hopefully) be avoided by, rather than putting transparent textures on the landscape, actually have graphics for each combination. A hot, wet forest looks different than a Cold, moderate one, and not just because it has a bigger cloud over it! The cold, moderate forest should be pine trees, and the Hot, wet forest should be jungle. At the same time, there need to be good borders to avoid the cut-and-dried blockiness of CivX maps. For instance, I'd like to see icebergs breaking off the glacier at the coast, and a cliff where a tall mountain plunges into an abyssal trench. Also, you need to preserve the like-terrain borders, where adjacent mountains form ridges.

Which leads us to...

2) Too many graphics. 3 Landforms*3 Moistures*3 Temperatures*3 Vegetations = 81 possibilitieson land, plus 3 Landorms*3 Temperatures*3 Vegetations = 27 landforms in the water. 108 terrain tiles. Not all of those could be generated right off by the terrain generator, but with terraforming/disasters, or at least for the map maker, you'd need graphics for all of them. Then there are the border tiles... These are where you get the REAL eye candy, but I count 30 billion possible combinations across a border. (for the calculation, see the Firaxis forum.) Ludicrously many. A lot can be shaved off, (for instance, the border between a Wet Cold Plain and a Wet Cold Mountain could look the same as the border between a Wet Cold Plain and a Moderate Cold Mountain, since the difference between the mountains is only how much snow they have on the top.) but it's still probably too much to do, especially for a customizer. The borders are not a necessary part of the game, since they'd only improve the look, but they would still be nice.

3)On top of the work involved, the customizers may sacrifice some freedom, although this can largely be saved by using all user-defined special resources on a flat, boring map, as well as allowing redefinition of the terrain parameters.

Addendum: The old terrains in the LTMV system

Ocean: Offshore Deeps/any/any/nothing
Desert: Plain/Hot/Dry/Nothing
Plains: Plain/Temperate/Moderate/Grass
Grassland: Plain/Temperate/Wet/Grass
Forest: Plain/Temperate/Moderate/Forest
Jungle: Plain/Hot/Moist/Forest
Swamp: Plain/Any/Moist/Grass
Hill: Hill/Any/Any/Grass
Mountain: Mountain/Any/Any/Nothing
Tundra: Plain/Cold/Any?/Grass
Arctic: Plain/Cold/Any/Nothing

I think that's all of them. As you can see, most of the new tiles would be allowing more diverse vegetation types on a mountain, hill, or ocean.

posted July 27, 1999 19:02            

But I still think that in the beginning of the game there should be more forests then grass to simulate the world before humanity burned most forests. So switch vegetation from forest to grass should be easy.

posted July 27, 1999 19:06            

The borders, although difficult to manufacture, could still be manageable so long as the programmers cheated a little bit in order to avoid the billion different combinations. Another possibility (this may not be feasible) would be to have an algorithm designed to "mesh" the different terrains together (a jungle bordering a boreal forest would be dotted with pine trees on its edges, while the boreal forest would be dotted with jungle). This could look ugly as sin if done poorly, though (just like anything), and not being a graphics programmer I have no idea how easy such an algorithm would be to make.

An idea I've just thought of: with 'wetness' and 'temperature' factors in terrain, perhaps these could also be factors in disease and life expectancy. In Colonial times the settlers in New England would live about 20 to 30 years longer than the settlers in Florida and Georgia. The reason? Germs like it hot and wet, not cold and dry. If you system were used, then disease could play a major role in the game (cities located near jungles/swamps would experience more plagues and would need to build more hospitals et. al).

On another topic, what is the current consensus (or lack thereof) on farms and irrigation? I ask this because so many posters are requesting that irrigation be severely limited. However, farms need not require irrigation. I therefore suggest that irrigation and farms be separate tile improvements, with irrigation and farming having a synergistic effect if done in the same square. Both improvements would improve with certain tech advances, but they would improve separately.

posted July 27, 1999 21:21            

To alleviate some of the problems w/ too many tile types, allow some tiles to represent more than 1 type. FE, grasslands in more arid/colder climates could=plains. Much simpler. Con: Could create an ugly map if too few tile types.