Tile Changing

Is there a way of changing a tile to snow?

For example, I am playing the Illians.
I construct my temple that snows tiles in a 2 radius around my city.
Someone DoW's on me and brings in a SoD.
They decide to use scorch on my snow tile and make it tundra.
Maybe, they have a Nature3 Archmage and use Vitalize to change the tile to Plains.
These types of changes are not better for the Illians who gain a bonus fighting on Snow or Tundra tiles, and +2 Food on Snow tiles. So Snow tiles are much preferred.

Is there a Nature or Ice or something I missed to return the tile back to snow?
idk. Rebuilding the temple? Something?

Malakin can scorch their Plains to Desert tiles for their double movement, bonus gold and combat advantages.
The Elves can plant trees for their Double movement, improvement and combat advantages.

I would think Vitalize would "Improve" a tile to that empire's liking, not to a set type that could be a disadvantage to the empire.

It would seem unbalanced for the Illians to not have the same advantage for their preferred tile type.

nope, I think the only permanent terraform to snow is the temple of the hand and Auric's snowfall.

and the temple is only permanent until someone comes along to change it.
Snowfall only lasts 4 turns on normal speed.

Hm. The Illians having a unique version of Nature III that brings a tile towards snow sounds like a sensible thing for a modmod to add.

Not really, grass is equivalent to snow (and better at rivers), except in regard to winterborn. And, tbh, its a very small thing just for a modmod/a very rare case anyway that I for one don't think its worth it.
Besides, most of the modmods that actually change it significantly change the Illian mechanics away from that.

That's sad.
I like bringing on the Ice Age and covering the world in snow as the Illians.
Nothing shows proof of my dominance, than white snowy tiles everywhere.
It's part of the charm of playing that race/empire.
Their Champions are covered in furs and fight like Vikings.
It's awesome. In my friendly LAN game, we decided to play the baddies this game.
I've been fighting Tebryn of the Sheaim. My mortal enemy.
My Palace grants me Law & Ice mana. His grants him Chaos & Fire mana.
I should have known from the beginning, that us both being "Evil" wouldn't be enough to form a long lasting team against the "Good"s.
His early DoW when he had the highest realtions with me than any other empire showed me his true stripes.
Capturing his city and snowing over it's lands proved my icy dominance.
Ice will defeat fire in my game regardless of my vulnerability to fire.
I just want to snow over any lands that anyone changes away from my ice world.

I know, so dramatic.

Oh, I did find another problem.
As the Illians my tech & prod went something like this:
1) Tech Mysticism for God King and Temple of the Hand. After getting enough defensive units & settlers out, Start snowing over the land for the +2 food per tile to pop up my cities.
2) Tech Ag for Farms. Typically for resources.
3) Tech Education for Cottages & Apprenticeship for the troops. Can't research at 100% without gold coming in.
4) Tech Construction for Workshops. Just not enough hills around for production.
I left out other priorities, because they are not relevant to the problem I discovered.
So, ok. What happens when I tech and build in this order?
Cities pop up from the snow and farms. I build cottages for gold, saving a few spots for the workshops when the last tech comes in.
Then. I can't build the workshops.
Why?
Because workshops can't be built on snow, I'm guessing.
wtf? So, what's the solution for the Illians?
Build my farms, cottages & workshops BEFORE I snow over the land?
Well, that's silly. Their strategy is about popping up early, not waiting for Construction tech and workshops are built, then snow over the land.
Honestly, I see no reason why the Illians can't build workshops on snow covered land. It's the most logical place for them to do so.
If exceptions like this are given to the elves or Malakim, then I can see sufficient reason to make them all a possibility.
Wouldn't it make since that the Malakim would construct workshops on desert tiles?
(Note: I haven't checked if the Malakim or elves are blocked from this yet.)

Anyway, this will probably just be logged under hopeful suggestions, but it seemed to make sense to me. Does it make sense to anyone else?

What mod are you playing? I'm pretty sure the Malakim cannot build workshops on non-floodplain desert (and this is logical, as the yield is -1f, and you can't minus what you don't have), and there are definitely no restrictions on Elves.
Edit: having tested, you are right. Try improving the land first, then building the temple (which makes sense anyway, as it takes less turns that way).

no mod yet.
Due to the tech order and the time it takes to research Construction to make workshops available, I usually have farms, cottages and the Temple of the Hand built in my first 3 cities.
So, my core cities can pop up and tech. They just can't have workshops added to build faster.
On my first game as the Illians on noble, I was getting outpaced on city building and with an early war of pyre zombies exploding on my javelin throwers, I spent most of my time building units, not settlers or buildings.
My 4th city was at a choke point and popped Iron, so I wanted to make it a production city, but I can't. It's very frustrating.
Now that I have construction, I can build the workshops first before the temple, but that seems out of order, sense there isn't the pop yet to utilize them.

plasmacannon said:

Honestly, I see no reason why the Illians can't build workshops on snow covered land. It's the most logical place for them to do so.

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Neither do I. I checked if the Illians can build workshops on snow in More Naval AI because if they couldn't I would consider it a bug. In MNAI they can build workshops (and all other improvements, it seems) on snow without problems.

I may have to check that out.
I'm still getting used to the different empires.
Since, half of my games are on a LAN with a friend, I need to do so when we both are ready to upgrade and not lose a saved game, (single or multi).

Hopefullt it isnt a modmod thing, but I used to cast snowfall - i think it's called - with high priests of winter (tier 3) to transform the tile they are on to ice, even in enemy borders. Also used to damage nearby units. I believe I've used it in Tholal's naval ai mod, which is closest Ive come to vanilla in years anyway. But i havent had time to play in awhile, so I apologize if its wrong.

Goodwill said:

Hopefullt it isnt a modmod thing, but I used to cast snowfall - i think it's called - with high priests of winter (tier 3) to transform the tile they are on to ice, even in enemy borders. Also used to damage nearby units. I believe I've used it in Tholal's naval ai mod, which is closest Ive come to vanilla in years anyway. But i havent had time to play in awhile, so I apologize if its wrong.

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Yea. That's the one. Snowfall does the most amount of damage AFAIK and it lasts for about 4 turns on Normal speed. It could have a different duration on other speeds. idk yet.

Is it possible that a snow to tundra tile might stay snow after snowfall?

BvBPL said:

Is it possible that a snow to tundra tile might stay snow after snowfall?

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No. I tested that.
I worldbuildered in 3 Archmages and 3 Ice nodes, gave them Snowfall, cast and wait.
It does decent damage to the units in the city, but unfortunately the snow is temporary.

We continued a little more on this game last night.
My 3 core cities have the temple of the hand.
My 4th city has the iron, but no snow. I captured a barb city and settled a city for a node between the two.
Then Tansuke DOW on me with his stack of HAs and Chariots.
Luckily, the force I used against the barbs was able to reinforce the 2 closest cities to his SoD along with 3 Champions from other cities.
I managed to defeat his stack losing 2 champions, 2 javelin throwers and a hunter. My 3 War Elelephants mopped up his units that withdrew.
Tan captured a barb city near me, so in a way, I'm glad he DoW on me. It gave me the change to capture it.
So, I kept my 6 cities and gained a 7th. I'm still behind Van G with his 10 cities.

I'm in the tough position of trying to settle more cities to keep up, with SoDs coming in occasionally, and having to switch away from settlers to troops.
My low prod cities (no workshops) unable to produce units fast enough, to make me not look like the easiest target on the map.
Wiping out Tan's stack last night really helped. His force is only slightly greater than mine now, but he won't declare peace yet. I think that takes 10 turns before that option is available.
Next, I'll have to build more champions & HAs to be better prepared and get my power graph higher or the Sheaim will be back again too.

No matter how this game goes, I'm going to recommend that More Naval AI mod. If at least so I can build workshops on snow.

Try using the Conquest civic when you dont have a lot of hammers to build troops with.

Tholal said:

Try using the Conquest civic when you dont have a lot of hammers to build troops with.

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Good point. Since I haven't been playing this mod long, I usually get stuck on Foreign Trade, like Free Trade from BTS.
Conquest says military units consume food. I did a quick civic change on a saved game and yea, it works like worker construction.
That should help. It's probably the strategy they are using against me.

foreign trade sucks except maybe for Lanun, go aristocracy+agrarianism.

then after you get bored with this, switch to Extramodmod for a more varied gameplay

[to_xp]Gekko;12761233 said:

foreign trade sucks except maybe for Lanun, go aristocracy+agrarianism.

then after you get bored with this, switch to Extramodmod for a more varied gameplay

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I hear a lot of good things about that combination. In my last game, I had 2 farms for two Rice resourses, so I wouldn't have received much of a bonus. Cottaged snow FP, two deer, a Sheep & a cow provided most of my food needs.
Without early Slavery like in BTS, higher pop seems to just get us to quicker.

I've always seen this as a minor issue. What if I wanted to build the City of a Thousand Slums? Or if I wanted to be a jerk to my neighbors and ice over whatever valuable resource that I couldn't afford to take at the moment.

To implement any sort terraforming is not incredibly difficult. You'll just need to add entries to spell infos, than copy and modify the relevant entries in the spell trigger python file. I would perhaps disable terraforming for the AI, because I don't think they would use it very well.

A common sense approach would be allow individual terraforming with whatever level II spell type. Ice II could allow snow and tundra.

Additionally, a spell III could be used to cycle random bonuses... Chaos III to randomly swap a pasture resource for any other pasture resource.

Ominous Destiny said:

Additionally, a spell III could be used to cycle random bonuses... Chaos III to randomly swap a pasture resource for any other pasture resource.

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Creation II does this in Extramodmod and AFAIK also in RifE.