Terrain Improvements

Post in this thread terrain improvement suggestions for CIV IV. Here are a few of my suggestions:

• Offshore Oil Platform - This should be a terrain improvement instead of a city improvement. You can only build it on ocean squares which have oil as a resource, and it supplies oil to your cities through trade routes which can be broken or pillaged by enemies.
• Wildlife Preserve/National Park - You build this somewhere in an undeveloped area of your realm and connect it with a road to generate tourism which brings in money and makes some citizens happy. It is available with the Environmentalism tech.
• Mine field - Pretty obious what it is. You put minefields to defend key areas of your empire from invaders, but you yourself can move freely over them because you know where they are placed.
• Landfill - I don't know how the new pollution model would be, but I landfills could represent a good way to eliminate pollution, or at least take it out of your cities and put it out of sight.
• Forts/Fortresses - I propose that these be done more realistically then they are now. You can perhaps build improvements within them such as barracks, in fact maybe you can use forts to build your troops instead of cities?
• Colonies - I would like to see them redone. They should extend a zone of control and have a population, and should be able to grow into cities later on. Starting out you can only construct simple improvements and units there.
• Research Station - Can be constructed in the polar regions or on top of mountains/volcanoes or in the jungle and so on. They help with research.

Hmm, most of these I think are interesting and do-able. Landfills; however, are not something that should be incorporated as a terrain imp. They could be city imps, but not terrain. Research stations: Like the idea, but I don't really think they would make much difference/make to much of a difference. You could probably just build a load of workers and send them all to build research stations and get a massive boost in science. I say just change a pop point into a scientist instead of wasting shields and the pop point for building it.
Oil rigs are almost necessary. National park should be included too, for an increase in culture and maybe a endgame score boost for 'environmental protection'.

Landfills could be a city improvement, but it seems to me citizens would be happier if the landfill was far out in the countryside. Now that I think about it, with the discovery of recycling maybe it should be possible to harvest shields from landfills?

As for research stations, I think there should be some limits on them. Maybe you can only build one per terrain type? For example, you can build one on a polar ice cap but not another one there, you can build one on a volcano but not on another volcano, and so on? And they could also be expensive to build.

how about research stations only able to be built on very specific tiles? say only 4 or 5 on the whole map (random each map of course) ... if they were worth say 10 tech point per turn, they would be worth fighting over. (perhaps even an extra bonus like free tech to first research station)

I think, to keep things simple, there should only be a few non city terrain improvements: colonies, fortresses/barricades, outposts and airfields. You should have to learn a tech for all of them, including basic colonies.

I disagree with letting colonies be little cities with improvements, a zone of control(do you mean culture border?) and population, basically a little city. If that is what you want to build near your resource, just build a regular city. Colonies are supposed to be little settlements that harvest the resource and send it back to your real cities. Now I would like to see different colonies, such as when you develop refining you get a sea unit that can build offshore oil colonies.

Mines are a good idea for combat. I don't think you should get free movement over them or be able to have city workers work the square if it is in a city radius. If you did get to move over your own mines, then everyone would just mine their entire territory. Also there could be ano landmines treaty.

A wildelife reserve/national park is a good idea, but how do you "build" one? IRL these are areas that are untampered with by man, not something man planted. I read this somewhere else but I'm not sure which thread: maybe if you left a large forest into your territory it could turn into a natural park, which would generate tourism if it was close enough to a city.

Landfils are in Sim City and are a lot of micro management so I don't think we need a civ version. I don't like remote research labs unless you are building them on some kind of limited "science resource". I just don't have any idea what that would be.

Teabeard said:

Post in this thread terrain improvement suggestions for CIV IV. Here are a few of my suggestions:

• Mine field - Pretty obious what it is. You put minefields to defend key areas of your empire from invaders, but you yourself can move freely over them because you know where they are placed.
  

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Good idea however I would also add an algorithm to randomly kill off a few of your own citizens to reflect the real damage land mines do and discourage over use.

plastiqe said:

A wildelife reserve/national park is a good idea, but how do you "build" one? IRL these are areas that are untampered with by man, not something man planted. I read this somewhere else but I'm not sure which thread: maybe if you left a large forest into your territory it could turn into a natural park, which would generate tourism if it was close enough to a city.

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I actually think this was a good idea. National parks are areas allocated by governments for protection, so making it a terrain improvement makes sense. I like the idea of trading workable tiles for happiness, too. So perhaps this is a workable mechanic?

plastiqe said:

I think, to keep things simple, there should only be a few non city terrain improvements: colonies, fortresses/barricades, outposts and airfields. You should have to learn a tech for all of them, including basic colonies.

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Well It looks like what they are going for is Most terrain improvements being like 'resource specific colonies' windmills, etc.
I'd imagine each of those 'specific colonies' requires a tech.

Because the multitude of improvements will only be buildable on limited specific tiles, the mm is minimized

Dorchester Dude said:

Good idea however I would also add an algorithm to randomly kill off a few of your own citizens to reflect the real damage land mines do and discourage over use.

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Well you would probably just make that tile unworkable (no citizens allowed in that tile, no resources collected from it.)

Teabeard said:

[*]Wildlife Preserve/National Park - You build this somewhere in an undeveloped area of your realm and connect it with a road to generate tourism which brings in money and makes some citizens happy. It is available with the Environmentalism tech.

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I agree! stongly!

In civIII I used to leave undeveloped forest tiles to keep safe live and landscapes...

those were all good ideas- maybe a space station that u can build with allies that boosts culture and science.

how about two levels of improvement for farming and mining, one for the ancient period (yes, I know eras are down the drain) and one for the industrial. How about, along with the airfield, you have an army base (had the remains of one near us until recently) that heals the ground units you put on it?

I liked in Civ2 how you could improve irrigation into farmland. Seemed more realistic to me. Irrigation is basic and good for semilarge populations of the ancient era. Farmland represents the new technologies (mainly refrigeration, but also high-capacity vehicles and farm equipment) that allow for much more rapid food growth. I would like to see farmland in Civ4.

troytheface said:

those were all good ideas- maybe a space station that u can build with allies that boosts culture and science.

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That's not realistic ;-)

what about bringing back the concept of have the possibility of changing the terrain type present in civ2?

Comrade Pedro said:

what about bringing back the concept of have the possibility of changing the terrain type present in civ2?

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No. Please don't. This weakened strategic placement of cities because in the late game you could terrraform your way to good land.

not the way it used to be in civ 2, but change the terrain so it can somehow produce more shields or more food....

I think we should have a literal "Great Wall"

After playing Guild Wars, I'm so damn tempted to have a Great Northern War. A behomoth of human construction that literally crosses through entire continents.

Good for period scenarios/modpacks anyway.