Dune Wars

Fresh Water is used for three things as of 1.5.4:

1. Adding a hammer bonus to towns
2. Required for a plot to terraform
3. Prevents spice or sandworms from adjacent plots

#1 is a standard part of the game which we are not using very much. Each improvement can have a separate yield bonus when it is irrigated. I suggested splitting the dew collector bonus into 1 normally plus 1 with fresh water; but this was voted down. We are not passing irrigation through improvements; we could, but it isn't used today.

The sdk handling for fresh water is very simple. There is a function isFreshWater(plot), which checks every adjacent plot for a feature with the fresh water flag. It is not cached. So to implement a 2 plot radius for Reservoirs, what I do is put a fresh water feature in the four vertically/horizontally adjacent tiles of the city.

I guess the benefit of a *zero* tile radius (ie same tile only) would be for #2, and #3 to some small extent, but obviously it would not affect #1.

Any thoughts?
 
The main difference is that in my implementation, nothing happens without any reservoirs. In Ahriman's suggestion, if you never build any catchbasins or reservoirs, you will still get terraforming. Which is better?

Lets clarify some terminology. Catchbasins are a building that comes at the Way of Liet tech and requires the arrakis paradise civic. It is fairly early game, you could have it by turn 100. Reservoirs are a late-game building that requires the Arrakis Transformation tech (a late-game tech) which you probably won't have until after turn 200+.

I'm indifferent about whether or not you get any terraforming without a catchbasin or not.
But that is hugely different from not getting any terraforming without a reservoir.
In my design, you start getting some terraforming from turn 100 or so; in yours you don't get any terraforming until the very late game.

The other thing we talked about before:
I think you should get faster terraforming only from the number of reservoirs and catchbasins that YOU control; you have a terraforming counter for each player.
In your previous design, it seemed like you intended for faster terraforming to happen from the number of reservoirs and catchbasins present in the world, whether you controlled them or not; a global terraforming counter.
This seemed like a bad idea to me; I should be rewarded for investing in infrastructure myself, those benefits shouldn't go equally to others who have the same civic.

The other difference is that I suggest we extend the reservoir fresh water range to 3, which will increase terraforming range even beyond BFCs.

The one bit of Ahriman's suggestion I don't like too much is removing Fresh Water from Windtraps since in the book the majority of the water for transforming Arrakis comes from Windtraps. I don't see why only Wells should have it, if we have to sacrifice something thematic to get the mechanic working then perhaps the mechanic isn't quite right.

The reason why fresh water from windtraps needs to be removed (ie removing wind traps giving fresh water to tiles *adjacent* to them) is because otherwise nearly every tile in your cities BFCs have fresh water access, even without catchbasins and reservoirs.

Fresh water is meaningless if it is on every tile, and it becomes too powerful to just spam cottages everywhere (with their +1 hammer from fresh water bonus). Also it devalues the fresh water access provided by the catchbasin and reservoir buildings.

If windtraps gave fresh water only to their own tile, fine, but that would be meaningless; they appear only on mesas and mesas can't terraform anyway.

I have no problem with windtraps providing water income, to the city that works them, but not providing the fresh

I would distinguish between the two concepts thus:
the tile yield is for drinking water for people
the fresh water feature is for irrigation and agrictulture.
Windtraps could conceivably provide enough water to drink, but not enough to also be used for agriculture; for that you need a well.
Its a fudge of course, water is water, but I think it work gameplay wise.
 
I'm indifferent about whether or not you get any terraforming without a catchbasin or not. But that is hugely different from not getting any terraforming without a reservoir.

I understand the big difference. I was asking after the small one, and you are indifferent. So I will change it to be exactly the formula you give.

I think you should get faster terraforming only from the number of reservoirs and catchbasins that YOU control

That is the current implementation. From the ""reality"" standpoint it does not seem like the global ecology should respect cultural borders, but I agree this is better from the gameplay standpoint.
 
So I will change it to be exactly the formula you give.

Thanks, I appreciate that. It may be that we need to tweak the a, b and c values later, but this should work basically for now.

From the ""reality"" standpoint it does not seem like the global ecology should respect cultural borders,

My argument from the global ecology perspective is this one:
When you are terraforming lands (before reaching the victory condition), then this is not a natural process. The reason why this terraforming happens is because your people are planting massive amounts of grass, and then trees, and setting up irrigation systems to support them and help them grow. This is a very labor intensive process, and a very water intensive process.

So this isn't somethnig where you are modifying the global climate and this is causing trees to grow. Until you reach the threshold, this terraforming is manmade. Thats the point of the 3% threshold; its the tipping point where the terraforming process becomes self-sustaining without human intervention.

The catchbasins and reservoirs are basically your storage of water that you are taking out of your normal consumption to devote specifically to growing these grasses and trees.

So the rate of growth of grasses and trees within your empire depends very specifically on how much water *you* have saved yourself to devote towards their growth. If someone else hundreds of kms away is also saving water and using it to irrigate trees in their empire, that doesn't help you.

So this is quite different from say a terraforming project where you are changing the atmosphere's content by releasing gases into it, and where it doesnt' matter where the gases come from. In Dune-style terraforming, your terraforming growth is a function of how much water you yourself are devoting into growing vegetation.
 
I like the new version alot, new religions and different symbol, new terraforming options, and other things. However still still some things that need to be changed.

I still get that glitch when my force shield gets too big.

Religions need something special in the system...

it will be nice if I could make the desert turn into seas, and trees to be grown as well, i like the new improvement and wish there was more terraforming and nice graphics as well. Like the oassis needs new graphics, it also be nice if there was some diversity on the grassland, where the color starts to change the closer i get into the center, like from red, to red-green to green, to green-blue, to blue. It also be nice if there was some small floral on some of the grassland (small plants, not trees), and give them a small happiness bonus for those who chose arrakin paradise civics and unhappiness when near arrakin spice civics.

Thinking machines is hard to find unless it giving by a wonder, however if it was a wonder, i might have already built it but still unable to make robots.

It will be nice if you can develop a terraforming system similar to like the Armageddon and the planetfall planet value system. As the planet starts to change when people start terraforming or wars are going crazy.

I still cannot be able to complete the terraforming victory when i cheat build the reserviors.
 
I still get that glitch when my force shield gets too big.

We have narrowed it down to the Oracle of Hajra wonder which causes this, but we have no idea what is actually wrong yet.

Religions need something special in the system...

Please see the religion design thread. If you have any comments please let us know.

it will be nice if I could make the desert turn into seas, and trees to be grown as well ...

Thanks for the feedback. There are two different levels of grass, and the lake graphic is new to the game. We will try to add more new art over time.

Thinking machines is hard to find unless it giving by a wonder, however if it was a wonder, i might have already built it but still unable to make robots.

Please see the "offworld trade" section of the Dune War Concepts tab in the civilopedia. It is easiest if you play the Ix civilization and build a landing stage building after researching offworld trade. Otherwise you need to trade with Ix, or build your own landing stage before anybody else. Then you can get the offworld trade contract for Thinking Machines. This is a prerequisite for all the walker units and the automated factory and research center late game buildings.

It will be nice if you can develop a terraforming system similar to like the Armageddon and the planetfall planet value system.

Actually, that is the way terraforming works today. In the last couple of posts above in this thread you can read some more details. We have decided to make the "Terraforming Counter" local to each civilization; but the more Reservoirs of Liet that you build, the faster terraforming takes place.

I still cannot be able to complete the terraforming victory when i cheat build the reserviors.

Please turn off the mastery victory condition in the "custom game" screen. I do not know how this condition is implemented but it seems to prevent any other victory conditions from even being checked.
 
I still get that glitch when my force shield gets too big.

Its a rare issue with just a couple of buildings.

Religions need something special in the system...
The religion design has not yet been implemented.

it will be nice if I could make the desert turn into seas

Deserts into seas makes no sense in the time horizon that we're talking about. It would take thousands of years to start getting seas.
We are working on having a few small lakes and some vegetation from terraforming.
where the color starts to change the closer i get into the center, like from red, to red-green to green, to green-blue, to blu

Bue and red grasses? That would just be weird....

Thinking machines is hard to find

Thinking machines are a Trade Good, they come only from getting a Contract after building a landing stage. If Ix is in the game, then they are the only faction who can choose get Thinking Machines; anyone else who wants them must trade for them from Ix.

If Ix is not in the game, then anyone can select the Thinking Machine contract as a trade good from a landing stage, and then again you must trade with the owner of the contract to get them.
happiness bonus for those who chose arrakin paradise civics

Arrakis paradise civs already get happiness bonuses from the catchbasins and reservoirs.
Vegetation and lakes will give tile yield bonuses, not happiness bonuses.

and unhappiness when near arrakin spice civics.
Terraforming occurs *only* for Arrakis paradise users. no-one else will get terraforming occurring within their borders.
 
I think I figured out the phantom fresh water bug:
*cities* spread fresh water, without any tech.

So if there is a well adjacent to a city, then all other tiles adjacent to the city will also have fresh water access.

Is there a way to disable this? Or to put it to a high level tech?
 
I still get that glitch when my force shield gets too big.

We have narrowed it down to the Oracle of Hajra wonder which causes this, but we have no idea what is actually wrong yet.

I'll have a look into this at the weekend.
 
I think I figured out the phantom fresh water bug:
*cities* spread fresh water, without any tech.

So if there is a well adjacent to a city, then all other tiles adjacent to the city will also have fresh water access.

Actually this still isn't quite it; maybe windtraps still spread fresh water, even if they don't provide it?

Note that a newly built cottage on the blue circle tile will have the +1 hammer fresh water bonus, even though it is adjacent to neither a well nor to a city that is adjacent to a well.
 

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Still not it; here is a cottage getting the bonus despite not being adjacent to a well or city or windtrap.

Maybe this is because I'm playing on my Arrakis map; is it possible that when I cleared out the out map (replacing every tile with desert) and built the Arrakis map on top of it, it didn't remove some invisible fresh water resources? How would I remove these?

Though I have also seen fresh water weirdness on regular random maps (though maybe they are explained by the city spreading, or windtrap spreading possibilities).
 

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ahriman said:
I think I figured out the phantom fresh water bug: *cities* spread fresh water, without any tech. So if there is a well adjacent to a city, then all other tiles adjacent to the city will also have fresh water access.

I have investigated this, and I cannot find anything wrong. Your screenshots show where building a village "will" have the irrigated bonus sometime after the screenshot is taken, but based on what's visible, there is no reason for it to. I agree there is no reason for the irrigated bonus right where you indicated. I also cannot find anything in the game that would make it so. I set up a few situations where the irrigated bonus should apply, and it did; I set up a few situations where the irrigated bonus should not apply; and it did not.

I also looked at your scenario map, and I did not see anything wrong. Fresh water does not magically appear and it's never invisible. I moused over your map, and I did not see any unexpected fresh water. The problem in an earlier version of the archipelago mapscript was some plots were of *type* rock or rugged, but *altitude* ocean. The game counts these as lakes and puts fresh water there; but when you mouseover, you see the fresh water.

The Desert Plantation tech causes some improvements to carry irrigation, which is slightly different than causing fresh water to appear; spreading irrigation just gives the irrigation bonus to some other improvements (specifically the hammer bonus on cottage.) To see if this is behind your problem, you might edit technologies/civ4technologyinfos.xml; find the section for DESERT_PLANTATION, find the flag underneath it which says "<bIrrigation>1</bIrrigation>" and change the 1 to 0.

Oddly, the only improvement which carries irrigation is Insect Farms. I assume this is a previously un-noticed bug in our multiple improvement rewrites. But that does not explain your situation where there are no insect farms.

I'm not quite sure what is causing your problem. Could you put up a save game where you see an "unjustified" irrigation bonus having appeared?
 
Here is the savegame that those screenshots are taken from.
It doesn't look like insect farms could explain the issue.

I am guessing that the cities spreading fresh water *is* half the issue, but the other half is a mystery to me.

Most of the time I agree that fresh water seems to be where it should and not where it shouldn't, but not always.
 

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I have explored the forums a little and explored your save game. I think I understand. Let us first be careful to use the right terminology. Irrigation is different from fresh water.

Fresh water: Certain features (including one invisible one in DW) generate fresh water in all surrounding tiles. You can mouseover to see this. In DW 1.5.4, only wells, lakes, catchbasins, and reservoirs generate fresh water. Cities by themselves do not generate fresh water. Fresh water cannot be carried. It exists only in the plot with the feature and the adjacent plots.

Irrigation: can be carried in certain conditions. If a plot is adjacent to fresh water and carries irrigation, all of its surrounding tiles get irrigation. This can cause irrigation chains extending long distances over tiles which do *not* have fresh water, and it does not cause the same effect as if the tile really had fresh water. In order for a tile to carry irrigation, you must have the tech which enables irrigation (Civil Services in vanilla, Desert Plantation in DW, search for bIrrigation=1 in the XML). Also, the tile must either have an improvement which carries irrigation, or a city on flatland. (See this link for a description of vanilla irrigation.)

The improvements which carry irrigation have the flag bCarriesIrrigation=1 in the xml. In DW, this is the well (irrelevant, since it is in the middle of fresh water), Insect Farm (presumably a bug) and Windtrap (which used to be irrelevant, but is now probably a bug.)

Knowing these facts, we can look at your save game. The only place where *fresh water* appears is next to wells, so there is no confusion here. There are many villages which have *irrigation* that you may not expect. However, in every case, you can trace a path from a fresh water plot, through cities or windtraps or insect farms. I cannot find any counterexample.

You can remove all the irrigation bonuses by using WB to remove the Desert Plantation tech. You can also break irrigation chains in WB by removing windtraps or insect farms, or cities I suppose. This will prevent irrigation from being carried.

I do not think we can/should prevent cities from carrying irrigation. Insect Farms and Wind Traps probably should not carry irrigation. You can locally make the two character change in your xml/terrain/civ4improvementinfos.xml file. Understanding the rules for irrigation, I do not think there is any other problem besides that. I will put this two character change into the next patch.
 
Apologies for imprecision over fresh water vs irrigation; your explanation here is correct.

I think you are correct about the cause; irrigation is spread by cities, windtraps and insect farms, this is the problem. Good find! I was thinking about these separately, I didn't think of the wind trap and the insect farm causing the irrigation chain.

Ideally, none of these should spread irrigation.

It sounds like stopping windtraps and insect farms from spreading irrigation is trivial.

One possibility for a way to stop cities spreading irrigation; cities in vanilla do not spread irrigation if they are on hill tiles.
So maybe there is something in the terrain files that we could change so that cities on rock, graben and badlands do not spread fresh irrigation. I wonder if cities on graben/sink tiles spread fresh water, since sinks are hills? Is it hardcoded into the "hill" property to not spread irrigation? Or is it a variable somewhere?

And a temporary fix for polar tiles not providing fresh water, why don't we make the polar ice extractor improvement (that can only be built on polar ice resource) provide fresh water (in the same way that a well does)?
 
One possibility for a way to stop cities spreading irrigation; cities in vanilla do not spread irrigation if they are on hill tiles.

Why is it important to you for cities to not spread irrigation?

And a temporary fix for polar tiles not providing fresh water, why don't we make the polar ice extractor improvement (that can only be built on polar ice resource) provide fresh water (in the same way that a well does)?

Here we have a big disagreement on how powerful the polar super-cities should be. Your suggestion makes them more powerful, when I think they are too powerful already.
 
Why is it important to you for cities to not spread irrigation?

Because otherwise:
a) Building a city next to a well gives you fresh water to up to 5 extra tiles for free (the well would already irrigate two of them)
b) The human player can exploit this, but the AI can't.
c) The value of a catchbasin is reduced if the city already spreads fresh water in a 1-tile ring.
A city on a diagonal from a well has, just from that 1 well, 12 irrigated tiles in its BFC. Whereas a city with a well 2 tiles away gets at most 5 irrigated tiles from the well.

Fresh water is not interesting if it is easily accessible.

Here we have a big disagreement on how powerful the polar super-cities should be. Your suggestion makes them more powerful, when I think they are too powerful already.

I think they are not powerful enough. While they have high population, they have *terrible* hammer output, and tend to have few buildings and can't produce any units. So they don't really use that population very effectively. I think you significantly over-estimate the value of the polar cities. They also have no access to hammer or commerce bonus tiles (like the various plantation resources), so they aren't that commerce rich either.
Now, Duneipegalo cities that can use some polar tiles, some polar desert waste *and* normal tiles, those can be very powerful cities. But pure polar cities like on an Arrakis map? Not that great. Size isn't everything....

My suggestion is also basic logic... if these polar ice rigs are providing enough water to ship elsewhere, then they should also be a fresh water source.

Groundwater doesn't get placed in polar regions, so under your design polar cities get *no* fresh water access, whereas other cities all get some at least. And logically for the polar cities fresh water should be less important.

Think of it this way; is a city in vanilla on all grassland, with no hill tiles or rivers, actually very good? It really isn't. All it has is food.
 
Fresh water is not interesting if it is easily accessible.

I think you are still confusing irrigation with fresh water. The only benefit of irrigation is the +1 hammer bonus to cottages. You had suggested that; we can also make it something different if you prefer.

Think of it this way; is a city in vanilla on all grassland, with no hill tiles or rivers, actually very good? It really isn't. All it has is food.

I think we need more opinions. The polar regions are damp sand. I would still argue against building cities there at all.
 
The only benefit of irrigation is the +1 hammer bonus to cottages.

This is a large benefit.
But you're right, I was also confusing it slightly with fresh water, thinking that the tiles adjacent to the city would terraform.
Maybe it will be fine.
I think we need more opinions. The polar regions are damp sand. I would still argue against building cities there at all.

Where do you get that from? You've said that multiple times, but its just not true; its the closest thing to a temperate zone that the planet has.
The polar regions are basically the same as the best other area, except that the temperature is cooler and there is significantly more moisture. Pretty ideal.
And its a sink (the "polar sink") so its protected from the winds too. Its basically super-graben.

Damp cool sand is still a whole lot better than dry hot sand.

And:
There are other cities scattered in the northern regions of the planet (especially near the ice cap, where water is harvested),
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrakis

Besides, it is strategically interesting to have a small area of very desirable terrain.
The AI already knows to rush for the pole; it does that very quickly, using scout thopters to transport settlers. So it is well-contested.
And there is no spice near the pole, and low hammer yields, hence the need for some hammer yields from cottages from fresh water.

I don't understand your problem with decent poles. If its just the city size that bothers you, then change the tiles from 2w to 1w1h, and let some of the various bonus resources spawn there.
 
ahriman said:
davidlallen said:
The polar regions are damp sand. I would still argue against building cities there at all.
Where do you get that from?

Please take a look at any of the maps of Arrakis, and find the small polar ice region in the middle. Are there any cities marked there? No. All the marked cities are elsewhere. If we are at all attempting to match the canonical maps, then there should not be super-cities in the small polar ice region.
 
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