Terrain improvement suggestion

I didn't notice a distinct location for game modification suggestions. If there is one, anyone that can move threads, please do so.

So, for not the first time, I've been irked because I have a city that is soooooo close to the coast, but still can't create a port. But then I'm thinking that many Ancient cities had "Docks districts" or ancillary harbors. Like Rome had Ostia to serve its maritime needs.

So how about a City Port hex improvement? The City center doesn't have to itself be on the coast, but any hex that is within three hexes of the City center that IS on the coast can have a City Port built on it. Make it available with the Sailing tech advance. Must be built on a coast hex. Because not the _entire_ City is considered to be a Port, reduce the Port capacity to just one, two, three, whatever maritime Caravan routes.

Fun idea. I think it might lead to some balance problems, though, depending on exactly what functionality comes with the Port improvement.

If you're talking about limited functionality, such as simply opening up a few naval trade routes for the city, I could see that working. Anything more than that, like enabling construction of naval units or lighthouse/harbor/seaport buildings, etc., would be too much. The choice of where to settle a city, on the coast vs. inland, is one of the biggest in the game; allowing a city to have the best of both worlds removes the importance of the choice.

yeah, although this does sound like a good idea from a historical pov, the way the game is made means it would render things quite imbalanced. the whole point of deciding to settle on the coast is to open up your city to naval attacks, which are much easier than land ones. Hence, you're sacrificing security for all the perks offered. Looking at things the way the game was designed, it wouldn't be balanced to have the perks of a coastal city without its vulnerability.

A port improvement would be nice to let ships enter the hex and therefore the city (thinking about the Manchester ship canal). Also adding a couple of gold to simulate trade at Optics/Something. Maybe for balance, it can only be built on a river that connects to the city.

They could just make it that naval units can bombard hex improvements in range with the same effect at pillaging. If they port was pillaged, all water trade routes from that city would be ended, and no more naval units could be built until the port was repaired, along with any naval unit in progress canceled, and all hammers lost toward it.

dashwinner said:

yeah, although this does sound like a good idea from a historical pov, the way the game is made means it would render things quite imbalanced. the whole point of deciding to settle on the coast is to open up your city to naval attacks, which are much easier than land ones. Hence, you're sacrificing security for all the perks offered. Looking at things the way the game was designed, it wouldn't be balanced to have the perks of a coastal city without its vulnerability.

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Balancing is easy - don't allow production of war ships

You may be interested in whoward69's Buildings - Lighthouse Near Sea mod. Description: Permits the Lighthouse to be built in a city up to one tile away from the coast provided the city can actually work a coastal tile.

Lochlann said:

If you're talking about limited functionality, such as simply opening up a few naval trade routes for the city, I could see that working. Anything more than that, like enabling construction of naval units or lighthouse/harbor/seaport buildings, etc., would be too much. The choice of where to settle a city, on the coast vs. inland, is one of the biggest in the game; allowing a city to have the best of both worlds removes the importance of the choice.

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Definitely limited. I would suggest
1) ONE sea Caravan per City Port hex. Further, that one Cargo Ship must be produced at a full-fledged coastal City (where the naval ship yards would be) and then transferred to the City Port. Any number of sea Caravans can come _into_ the City, however.
2) A player could have more than one City Port, allowing for additional outgoing routes, but that means he would be foregoing other tile improvements for that particular hex(es).
3) NO Lighthouses, Seaports, Harbors, etc. The facilities in that one hex are just too limited to sustain those improvements. Coastal resources like Fish, Crabs, Pearls, and Oil may be worked, but that requires the Work Boats to be built in a different, actual coastal City.
4) The City itself MUST be no more than three hexes from where the City Port will be built. [Most river ports at any significant distance from the sea generally involved riverboat traffic to the coast where cargo was then transferred to actual seagoing cargo ships. A Port of any kind is all about servicing those seagoing cargo ships.]

Is that limited and balanced well enough?

Instead of all of this needless balance and complicated game rules, why not keep it how it is?

Its a strategic decision whether you want to settle on the coast or not settle on the coast. One hex in this game is thousands ( hundreds?) of miles. It is not even reasonable that you would consider that part of the same city.

Yzman said:

Instead of all of this needless balance and complicated game rules, why not keep it how it is?

Its a strategic decision whether you want to settle on the coast or not settle on the coast. One hex in this game is thousands ( hundreds?) of miles. It is not even reasonable that you would consider that part of the same city.

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I grant you that it's generally a decision you must make, but sometimes, especially at the start of the game, the fog of war cloud cover doesn't let you see that, "If you only had gone _two_ hexes_ further, you would have hit the coast. As master of that City, being soooooo close to having access to the sea, I would "make it happen" by the simple expedient of building some Docks and Warehouses on that nearby coast. And eventually the City growth would inevitably fill in the area in between. (Probably with maritime service industries.)

Explore before cities then. I don't see what this would add to the game other than "But I want my city to be by the coast *and* next to that mountain? Why can't I have everything!!"

Nope, it's annoying, but - frankly - thats a good thing.

Mmmmm....I think it's a cool and fun idea, but all things considered, I think I side with the "no real need for it, it's good to force the player to make the hard choice" team. The clarifications you gave do seem pretty balanced, I don't think it would be problematic at all--except that I'd definitely change "within 3 tiles" to "no more than 1 tile away", given the huge distances represented by a single tile--but still, it seems like it's a solution that's looking for a problem. Or, rather, a solution that robs a necessary problem of its full and appropriate weight. City placement decisions should be among the weightiest in the game, and the stakes of those decisions shouldn't be watered down. (Pun not intended.)

In terms of the real-world aspect of the game, the current system can easily be rationalized by keeping in mind how much land one tile really covers. (And then conveniently forgetting that distance when thinking about ranged units. ) A city that is located 10 miles inland in real life, like Rome, could well be classified as a Civ V "coastal city", located on a coastal tile. Ostia, in game terms, would simply be a district of this city, occupying part of the city tile. It's not a perfect rationalization by any means, but any attempts to make gameplay match reality necessarily fall short.

Lochlann said:

In terms of the real-world aspect of the game, the current system can easily be rationalized by keeping in mind how much land one tile really covers. (And then conveniently forgetting that distance when thinking about ranged units. ) A city that is located 10 miles inland in real life, like Rome, could well be classified as a Civ V "coastal city", located on a coastal tile. Ostia, in game terms, would simply be a district of this city, occupying part of the city tile. It's not a perfect rationalization by any means, but any attempts to make gameplay match reality necessarily fall short.

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Decent rationalization. Would you say the same holds for London? Toronto? St. Petersburg? Not being argumentative; just curious.) By a HUGE margin major port cities are within spitting distance of the coastline. Still, some few cities evolve at a distance from the coast and tack on port facilities as an afterthought.

Liked the suggestion about the central City tile being within one tile of the coast. Makes sense.

regarding the inquiries on how much area that 1 tile represents in Civ, see this thread

http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=499093&page=2

it was mathematically determined that a Civ tile is not reasonably proportioned if trying to extrapolate a tile area relative to the planet Earth. regardless of map size, they all work out far too large for realism,especially regarding military battles.

Killlbray said:

That doesn't work for maps that wrap horizontally. it can't be just a section of the world if you can go back to the starting point by going always east or west.

Anyway why not? Clearly all these maps aren't all places from planet Earth, the smaller ones are just... very tiny planets with... uh... inexplicably high gravity...


Going further with the math, the distance between parallel sides of the hexagons is about 107.5 km (which means pre-bronze age archers can fire at targets more than 200 km away... just... wow!)

for duel maps (24 squares) that would be a planet with a circumference of merely 2,580 km (for reference earth's circumference is 40,075 km)
for tiny maps (56 squares) that would be 6,020 km
for small maps (66 squares) 7,095 km
for standard maps (80 squares) 8,600 km
for large maps (104 squares) 11,180 km
for huge maps (128 squares) 13,760 km

So to conclude, the largest map available is actually very little compared to the land of our real planet.
To be of a comparable size the map should be 372 squares wide.

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??? I just looked at my Huge game map and counted 84 tiles West to East.

Earth circumference at the equator is @24,900 miles/@40,075 km.

Dividing the measure of your choice by 84, that would make each tile @296 mi/@477 km across. HUGE tiles on a Huge map.

CaptainPatch said:

Decent rationalization. Would you say the same holds for London? Toronto? St. Petersburg? Not being argumentative; just curious.) By a HUGE margin major port cities are within spitting distance of the coastline. Still, some few cities evolve at a distance from the coast and tack on port facilities as an afterthought.

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I think you could say that the same holds for all situations in which it makes sense for it to hold. There's no real point in trying to determine consistency of these kinds of game elements, such as tile sizes or relative duration of turn/years, etc., because it just won't work. As is amply demonstrated above, by attempts to devise a scale for the Civ map. Even if scale consistency can be found and applied to both global terrain and distances from cities, such a scale would immediately become absurd when you try to match it to unit movement and bombardment ranges, things like that.

The same thing holds true in this situation. Trying to calculate distances from coastlines that can be applied to real-world cities to determine if they are "coastal" in Civ V might be an interesting thought exercise, like we've done above, but I can't imagine that any real consistency could be found in that. Just, pick a real-world city, and if it's anywhere near the coast and has a naval flavor or elements to it, sure, it'd be "coastal" in Civ V.