new improvement: Canal

muhtesem insan

Amateur Revolutionary
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Jun 14, 2010
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It bugs me to need to go around a narrow land mass when there's a just a narrow land between two sides. When there's 1 tile founding a city can be solution but most of the time it wouldn't be worth it. My proposition is a new improvement called canal, naval units can enter a land tile with canal. To prevent making huge canals all across the country i can think of two solutions.
1) canals can be built only next to coasts and lakes.
2) canals have really high maintenace costs.
 
This has been suggested many times already.
 
Then this thread is obsolete, in my defense I've made a search before posting it and couldn't find it.
 
high maintenance? but canals cause huge increases in commerce in real life!

Ofcourse, because they allow more efficient trade. It makes them worth the maintenance. This isn't easy to represent in CiV, since sea trade is free and it doesn't matter if your sea trade route is 4 tiles or 400 tiles.
 
I have been wanting a canal addition to the game since Civilization 3, but still they do not exist. Looking around the interwebz, I've found quite a few others expressing similar sentiments, but have yet to find an actual mod anywhere. So I've decided to look into it, and see if I can't create one myself. I've found some good resources (namely Derek "Kael" Paxton's "Modders Guide to Civilization 5 and the Civ 5 SDK) and it looks like it shouldn't be too difficult - should be a fun project. We'll see how it goes.

Here's what I'm thinking for canals. Any feedback is much appreciated!

-Would (obviously) be a worker improvement for a tile. Would use up the "improvement allocation" for the tile (so no farms, mines, etc on the same tile).
-Would become available with the research of Engineering (perhaps Construction?).
-Essentially the canal would allow ships and land units to use the same tile, so ships would treat it like an ocean tile while land units would continue to use it like normal.
-Units would of course not stack (so either a ship OR a land unit on the tile, but not both at the same time) - this is partly because I'm not sure how easy it would be to change that programming since there isn't any other time that multiple military units can share a tile (except for in cities, where you have to move them immediately), but also because only one military unit per tile is so core to the game.
-Crossing a canal for a land unit would be similar to crossing a river - of course it cannot be exact because a river is between tiles but a canal will be on the tile (because it's an improvement). But should work ok.
-I'm not sure if there should be a movement restriction for ships...my instinct says yes, but I'm not sure how much.
-Since a canal is treated like an ocean square, other ships can use it if the civilization that "owns" it has open borders.

To prevent canals being built everywhere and essentially turning the entire map into ocean, I think the following needs to be implemented:
-Canals cannot be built on hills or other "non-flat terrain".
-Building a canal on a forest, etc. would clear it like any other improvement.
-A canal must be touching a body of water (water tile) on at least one side. This means that a canal is restricted to a max length of 2 tiles (which can still cross quite a bit) and cannot end inland.
-Building a canal would take longer perhaps than other improvements (10-15 turns?).
-Canals would have a high maintenance cost (While I understand that canals historically have been very helpful economically, it stands to reason that they should also be expensive to maintain. I'm not sure exactly how to remedy this situation since economy doesn't translate as accuratly in Civ 5 as compared to real life).

Any other thoughts?

I think all of this should be fairly doable. What I forsee needing right now is proper graphics - I'm not sure exactly how graphics work in Civ 5, but I'm assuming I need some sort of "canal" tile graphic as well as a button for the worker build menu.

I'm really excited to see if I can actually achieve all this. Any other ideas are of course appreciated because hopefully I won't be the only one to use the mod!

EDIT: Other things to think about...
-Can canals be pillaged?
-Can canals be constructed outside of your borders (like a fort)?
-Should water trade routes extend through the canal (not exactly sure how to get the game to do this one...)?
 
I'd love to use a mod where:
- great admirals can disembark onto land
- on land, the great admiral special ability is "create canal"
- create canal can be used on any non-mountain, non-city tile adjacent to water in owned or neutral territory
- create canal converts that tile to coast/ocean, and destroys any improvements and resources on the tile (to avoid iron-on-water syndrome)

Should be fairly easy to implement (other than perhaps #1), doesn't require any other new rules, can't really be abused (great admirals are in limited supply), and achieves the goal of connecting bodies of water for naval traffic.
 
Cities and forts worked as canals in civ 4. I haven't played civ 5 for awhile, but I assume at least cities do the same thing. If forts do, too, then I don't see why we would need another improvement, just for that. If they don't, they should.
 
Cities and forts worked as canals in civ 4. I haven't played civ 5 for awhile, but I assume at least cities do the same thing. If forts do, too, then I don't see why we would need another improvement, just for that. If they don't, they should.

Cities work as canals in CiV, but I'm not sure if forts do. Pretty sure they don't or people wouldn't make so many threads complaining about the lack of canals though!:lol:

I would like to see the Great Admiral be able to make a canal or even a mined zone in the ocean (that functions just like a citadel does with it's attrition radius). I don't understand why the devs made a new great person and then made it the only great person without a tile improvement.:confused:
 
people made threads in the civ 4 days complaining about the "lack" of canals, so i wouldn't put it past anybody this time around, either. but yeah, admirals should probably have an improvement.
 
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