This thread is for debating the following:
1. Map size, shape
2. Weather
3. Terrain types, modelling
4. Terraforming options and methods

The topic of discussion when the previous thread ended was the difficulty of making graphics for a new terrain model.

Summary
MAP/TERRAIN/TERRAFORMING: Co-Managed by EnochF & eNo

The population of cities are recorded as x.xxx. This allows fractional population points. The fraction has no gameplay effect until it reaches the next number. It allows groth rates to be experesed as an increase per turn. Attacks that hit population centers can now do fractional pop. points of damage. maybe 0.1 or 0.05 per hit.

The purpose of this proposal is to seperate growth from straight food production.
Growth rates can be expressed as a percentage per turn, (eg 2.5%) to give a familiar sort of look. What this means for gameplay terms is that 0.025 pop points are added every year. This gives a groth of 40 turns.

Pop is recorded as fractional points, but it is easy to convert that to a real pop number.
The formula:
Actual pop = 5000 x (pop points + 0.5)^2 - 1250
Follows the civx model exactly for whole numbers, and can give good values for fractional numbers.

Effects on population growth. All numbers are arbitray and should vary depending on SE choices and tech. This system is desigend to be compatable with the idea of villages.

I have made use of a 'happyness rating', which is (#happy - #unhappy) / # total. This gives 0 for all content, 100 for all happy, and -100 for all unhappy. This can be applied to a city, a region, a civ or the entire world.

Base growth: 10%
Happyness : + city happyness / N. N depends on SE.
villages : + 0.2% per village
medicine : + 2%
etc.

Immigration. To take into account people moving around in your civ and between civs.
The advantages of including this is that large unhappy cites will tend to slow down growth or shrink, while your smaller cities will pick up the extra people.

In civ immigration = (city happyness - civ happyness) / Y. Y depends on SE and the overall level of transportation availabble. In cty immigation tends to have larger volume than between civs.

between civs migration = (city happyness - world happyness) / Z. Z depends on SE and transport of all players. For this calcualtion government types can influence the happyness used. democracy might add 10 points, while communism subtarcts 10 points, to reflect that democracies never have had problems with too many people trying to flee from them.

Wonder: Iron curtain. Prevents all between civ emmigration. (for gameplay all cities count as average happyness level)

Ember: Sorry to tell you but I don't think your suggestions belong to this thread. Perhaps ECONOMICS/TRADE/RESOURCE MANAGEMENT might be better...

-Sphere world

-No grid system - make the map analogue

-have continents, islands and oceans be made like in the real world, with continental plates. The game timespan is to short to have them move, but they should still be there, with mountainranges and deepsee graves where plates meet.

-Evolving climate. If you start cutting down a lot of forest, deserts might grow.

-Incoorporate weather patterns, and have the different types of vegetation being made because of them (if an area is very dry, it'll become a desert).

The idea is to make the world a 20-sided polyhedron. (Forget the name - the shape of a 20-sided die.) Then make every triangular side of it out of a lot of hexagons. The only wierd bit would be the "corners."

That's about as good of an explanation as I can give without diagrams, unfortunately. It is the system used in SJG's GURPS Space, and works well there, but they have less rigorous interface requirements.

For what it's worth.

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Q Cubed
Renaissance Q • Q-of-all-trades
Thread Discussion Facilitator for Wonders

CO2 PRODUCERS - To induce solar warming.

HYDRATION FACTORIES - to increase the amount of water in the air.

AIR POLLUTION TREATMENT CENTERS - to treat the air and reduce harmful substances.

CAVE FARMING - using an elaborate setup to provide energy (light) and nutrients and farm inside caves, possibly those already deep-mined.

martinl: Interesting. Somebody has suggested a similar idea of using a cube and subdividing each face into many squares.

I would like the world generator to use plate techtonics instead of creating a bunch of land and then randomizing it.

There was an old game for the C-64. Cities of Gold, that would generate worlds this way. Only problem is that it took 20 minutes.

would like to see a dynamic terran model. Terran tiles would affect each other. Desert can expand/contract. overfarming, forest expanding. possible with a basic weather.

End result.

Plate development maps out land form.
Then place terran down and run 100-1000 turns for terran evolving for creating a world.
The reason for running 100-1000 turns is so the terran placement is stable when the players start.

Polution
Polution clean up not to be handled by settlers but by a different method? City "builds" one square cleanup.

Radation Polution (Meltdowns, nuketesting, Attacks) to be handled differently and not be allowed to clean up (or have a rad incident create normal polution and rad polution). Just an overlay on the existing terran. can cause vegitation levels to go down in the tile
Tiles downwind of heavy contamanation site, would suffer from some effects. produce less food (-10%-25%) to reflect cleanup/food disposal. Cities would have a slower grow rate(people leaving cities to find cleaner cities).
City improvements like domes, underground, would negate some effects but be expensive.

(Off topic)
Possibly have 2 levels of nukes, (tactical and city buster)

Only way to remove rad polution is time, advance tech to allow downgrade to normal polution.

Reason:
This would help reduce the use of citybusters to wipe out defenders of a city and then capturing the city.

Guess it's just Cormac, Techno and me left. (And then Eno writing bump.)

Ohh yeah....:

There can always be more terrain improvements. The only thing missing from the summary are ember's graphic's points and the polyhedron worlds...

I'd contribute in the SE thread but it's gotten too complicated for me to follow.

I have always liked the ideas of having towns. These towns would be built by formers but aside from the time they would also cost minerals/cash from the city that is going to be supporting them. They wouldn't need to be supported by the city after they are built. I see two options for towns.

1. They extend city radius. There would be a maximum number of squares a city could work.
Eg. You can only build 2 towns in a city radius, after that they have no effect, but would come into play if one of the other towns were destroyed.
These towns would automatically produce the maximum from a square, which can be set to max minerals/nutrients/cash.
Eg. This is a mining town, we maximize mineral production.
The towns could even affect the square directly around it.
Eg. All squares around a mining town produce +1 minerals.

2. Towns could be permanent supply crawlers that require no support. They can be built far outside a city radius, but in the civ's borders. Their production must go to the nearest city.

Also I would like to see larger maps. I mean big enough to finally be able to build 3 or 4 cities in italy instead of the 1 like in civ1.

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- Biddles

Anyway, Instead of the enemy just walking into the town maybe they have to pillage it, like the vikings did to northern european towns. What do people think of the towns idea and which model would you prefer?

Dalmar, I agree about the environment. If there is no 'submersion dome' facility in civ3 (or it come into play fairly late) then this would make global warming a serious threat). I think that this was done badly in SMAC, especially with planet. You could have the cleanest, most ecologically driven faction and still mindworms would pop up left right and centre.

This system encompasses villages, regions, split labour and resources, fractional pop growth, and CLAS-D combat.

CITIES

Cities represent the industrial, economic, population and military centres in a nation.

All citizens in cities are some form of specialist, even if it is "serf."
All economy and labour are produced in cities. All population growth occurs in cities.

All food and resources are produced in villages. Villages are population points that have been moved from the cites to surrounding tiles. Villages use some food to support themselves, and send the rest of the food and all resources to the region, to be distributed among the cities.

Labour is the work needed to build things. It must be used immediately.
Resources are what things are built out of. They can be stored. Stores of resources and surluss food "decay" at a rate governed by SE and structures and tech. 5 to 20 % a turn, to prevent loopholes that would alow people to stave off sieges indefinatly. You can only stave off a siege as long as your food and resources hold out.

Cities would get a happyness bonus depending on how many turns worth of food are stored. If there is a shortfall happiness takes a big penalty. In a siege a city surrenders when it would have food riots. Cities under siege are considered a region of one city and no villages.

This is the "village system model." It requires approximately 2 times as many population points as normal. You set a ratio of village to city for each region, and the new population is divided between the two areas. You can set "flags" to tell where you want new villages to form, or let the AI do it.

REGIONS

A region is a area that can easily share resources...

In ancient times a region would be approximately the size of a current city.
As time progresses the size increases in both number of cities and land area allowed.
A city sized region using these rules will be very similiar to a current city.

In a region is based on with cities it includes. Borders are drawn between regions. All villages in the region pool their resources and excess food. Efficiency depends on tranportation infrastructure. The food is distributed to all cities on a need basis, extra is used to increase happiness, (and thereby population growth). Resources are stored in cities, but the actual location only matters when regions are redrawn or cities captured.

Each city has to have its own structures, with a few exceptions (stock exchanges).
In the regional menu there are four catergories where all labour from the region can be divided. All building is done by the regional menu. Details can be found on the layout can be found earlier in this thread. There are some limits based on SE choices. Resources are used for building as needed and available.

Resource uses are:

WONDERS: Only one wonder can be produced at a time. The location is set when building is started.

CAPITALIZATION: The Labour --> Money rate depends on SE and economic structures in the region. Resources can be sold independently of cities, or traded.

UNITS: Labour is used to build units. All new units are placed in reserve, and can be "deployed" the same turn. Explained later.

The units list is a build queue. Items can be directly added or the AI can build a list based on priorities you assign each unit type. The priority of a unit is a ratio of how many of that type to build to how many of each other type. If armour has priority 3 and mech inf 2, then 3 armour will be built for every 2 mech inf, over the long term.

IMROVEMENTS: Similiar to units. When all cities in a region have a structure the priority is counted as 0, so no more are built. The destination city is chosen by the AI, and can be changed by the player.

VILLAGE PLACEMENT

Villages can only be established adjacent to existing ones and within your borders.
Borders only extend into shallow water, usually 1 square, or 2 max.
Coastal villages, while really on land are represented at sea in a coastal square. Ships can only attack coastal villages, only the one that is represented by the square they are on.

MOVING VILLAGES

moving a village takes as long as it does to 'deploy' a unit. In this time no resources are produced, but it feeds itself.

DEPLOYMENT

All new units are placed in the reserves. Other units can be sent there also. Each turn you can deploy units to cities/bases/certain ships in the region. You can also send units to other region's deploy lists. The units cannot defend or be used until the next turn, but can be destroyed. Units in the reserve list cost less to maintain than deployed troops. This is the only way to move air and missile units.

Terraform units can normally only build forts, bases, and other transport and military TI's. When they are placed in the reserves they can build farms, irrigation, mines and other economic, terraforming and transport TI's, anywhere within the region. This prevents players from using their former types anywhere not near their population, except as combat engineers. It also makes them less vulnerable to airstikes. They still can take damage when cities are hit.

POPULATION

The population of cities are recorded as x.xxx. This allows fractional population points. The fraction has no gameplay effect until it reaches the next number. It allows growth rates to be expressed as an increase per turn. Attacks that hit population centers can now do fractional pop. points of damage. maybe 0.1 or 0.05 per hit. To simulate casualties of war, lose 0.001 pop per HP lost by units supported by the region.

The purpose of this proposal is to seperate growth from straight food production.
Growth rates can be expressed as a percentage per turn, (eg 2.5%) to give a familiar sort of look. What this means for gameplay terms is that 0.025 pop points are added every year. This gives a growth of 40 turns.

Population is recorded as fractional points, but it is easy to convert that to a real pop number.
The formula:
Actual population = 5000 x (population points + 0.5)^2 - 1250
This formula follows the civx model exactly for whole numbers, and can give good values for fractional numbers.

Effects on population growth. All numbers are arbitrary and should vary depending on SE choices and tech. This system is desigened to be compatible with the idea of villages.

I have made use of a "happiness rating," which is (#happy - #unhappy) / #total. This gives 0 for all content, 100 for all happy, and -100 for all unhappy. This can be applied to a city, a region, a civ or the entire world.

Base growth: 10%
Happiness : + city happyness / N. N depends on SE.
Villages : + 0.2% per village
Medicine : + 2%
etc.

Immigration: To take into account people moving around in your civ and between civs.
The advantages of including this is that large unhappy cites will tend to slow down growth or shrink, while your smaller cities will pick up the extra people.

In civ immigration = (city happiness - civ happiness) / Y. Y depends on SE and the overall level of transportation available. In cty immigation tends to have larger volume than between civs.

between civs migration = (city happiness - world happiness) / Z. Z depends on SE and transport of all players. For this calculation government types can influence the happiness used. democracy might add 10 points, while communism subtarcts 10 points, to reflect that democracies never have had problems with too many people trying to flee from them.

Wonder: Iron curtain. Prevents all between civ emmigration. (for gameplay all cities count as average happyness level)

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.

Vegetation:
Vegetation can only be applied to the last 3 landforms. The first 4 do not support vegetation types.

Plains
Grassland
Taiga (Evergreen Forest)
Boreal Forest
Rain Forest
Tundra
Desert
Swamp

Combinations to note:
hill + grasland = plateau
river + grassland = flood plains, 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 programming it)

Landform cannot be changed by your engineers.
Vegetation 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 vegetation in friendly squares. You can change the terrain view mode "T" and click on squares to set their priority and change preffered. 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 be built on deep ocean/glaciers.

military TI's:

Bases act as both fortress and airbase, coastal 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, without 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 continental shelf, which usually only extends one square from land, but sometimes 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 connecting 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.
Canal, 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/canal it uses 1 full MP and goes directly to the other side, units cannot rest in a tunnel/canal. 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.

CLAS-D

COMMENTS
The idea behind this is to make the economic model have a more accurate and flexible representation, but mostly invisibly. Regions attampt to reduce micromanagement.
CLAS-D, which this is intended to be used with, attempts to to the same for combat.

In a semi-advanced (1000 ad+) game to an advanced (1600+) game, it should be made possible, if your social model or government allows it, to separate your civilization into separate countries or states. These areas would include a bunch of cities all within a reasonably sized region. There would not be any gerrymandering allowed however. If you want to make this game really advanced, Firaxis, you could add different kinds of governmental functions such as Congress or Parliament to be based off of this districting model.

It would help to add to civ distinctiveness.

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- Biddles
"Now that our life support systems are using Windows 98 nothing could possibly go wro...."
- Mars Colonizer Mission

This could be taken a step further than that. A civ starting in a coastal square could get production bonus' on water squares, be able to produce naval units quicker, get a combat bonus for naval battles etc.

This would have ramifications during wartime. A civ on the defensive would have a clear advantage (As it is) because they would be facing the aggressor on their own terms. The Agressor would be at a disadvantage because they are unfamiliar and not as experienced in that terrain/field.

I also believe that the other post proposed that you could choose the kind of location that you would start near. This would make it work great (but have a random option of course).

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- Biddles
"Now that our life support systems are using Windows 98 nothing could possibly go wro...."
- Mars Colonizer Mission

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