Freshwater Lakes

Sometimes you get a bit of ocean thats trapped from the actual ocean and you can put ships on it when a city is on an ocean lake.

However you cannot do the same with freshwater lakes and it might be a good idea to allow this to happen. You could say move ships between lakes with cities between two lakes acting as a kind of lock. You could thus think of lakes strategically aiding moving, defending and attacking. Also maybe create a unique resource for freshwater lakes as they seem devoid of any. Maybe a lady of the lake resource with a sword rising out of it, fish and etc

"What you're King because some strumpet hit you in the head with a scimitar. That's not basis for a system of government"

Great idea, it could be added as an improvent, like the pillars and hand thingie (sorry I haven't played long enough to remember the names yet) then tie it into events and random events to do the sword thing (and other less desireable things should you leave the True Faith of Apple Isle (for those real pagan trivia buffs out there))

but you know you can use forts like canals too, I think only two spaces wide but when I've needed to, go city fort fort city fort fort city, and you can bisect an entire landmass and sneak up on somebody with battleships...because NOBODY ever expects the Inquistion!

Even those who DID expect them didn't expect them to come in battleships. Talk about surprise.
The Church of England's Inquisition was similar - they came WITH Battleships to go with the tea and cake. "Cake or death? Cake, eh? Well, how about a nice game while we enjoy it?"

Actually FfH disabled the ability for a fort to act as a city, and thus Naval vessels cannot move onto a Fort Tile any longer. So the only way to dig a canal is with a City, and that obviously only works if the path is 1 land tile wide.

The Lanun pirate cove can also act as an artificial freshwater lake but has the 3 tile distance minimum.

I've seen larger lakes more than a tile in size, although bigger than maybe 6 tiles in total, have those water resources in them. However I think the game sees these as a small landlocked sea.

If I remember right, in Civ 3, you could sometimes have a fish resource in a one tile lake.

Still, I find these annoying sometimes because on Pangaea maps, I often end up with a one tile lake or two next to my starting settler, usually when I am on the coastline. This is on small maps with pressed coastlines though since I like playing that type.

Its also annoying that you can't build ships on the larger freshwater lakes. I had one game where my opponent was down to his last city on the east side of a lake, I controlled the west side, but north and south were protected by other player's closed borders. Despite controlling the lake itself, I couldn't send anything other than mages and a captured War Tortoise across the lake, and the Tortoise wasn't strong enough to take out the entire city by itself

xienwolf said:

Actually FfH disabled the ability for a fort to act as a city, and thus Naval vessels cannot move onto a Fort Tile any longer. So the only way to dig a canal is with a City, and that obviously only works if the path is 1 land tile wide.

Click to expand...

Is that a 0.31 change? I've moved ships with forts before in 0.30. Cannot remember how and what technology was needed for it though.

It was a fairly recent change. Either a .30 patch or .31 possibly.

It's probably something that needs to be fixed then. The issue with the lakes I mean.

I think there is a value somewhere in the .xml files that sets the tile maximums for lakes. Can't remember where I spied it though (maybe I'm thinking C3?). If you can find it and set it to zero, would that solve the problem?

Off the top of my head it's 7 tiles to be freshwater. There's an extra food on those tiles - 's why Spain on a Lake was so good for the Cuban Isolationists game, since Isabella is financial and starts with Fishing, making lake tiles amazing in the early game (they get an extra boost from harbors too, if you're also costal).

Yes, that would solve the problem. I also can't recall precisely what it is called, but it is set at 20 (iMinAreaSize or something like that...)

Setting it to 0 (or probably 1 actually) would indeed prevent that "problem" (personally I don't see it as one - the lake is too shallow for ships) but it would mean that those single-tile lakes would cease to be sources of fresh water and lose their food bonus and so on.

That freshwaterlakes are completely unacessable by ships in any case is not exactely right.

If as Lanun you make your City a costal paradise (which still works with forced 3 Tile gaps in between since you can pillage those coves with ships or waterwalking units and build new coves then next to those new bodies of water. Even though terraforming Cities so they can have acess to ocean for Lighthouses and getting 2-3 Coves in Freshwater after terraforming has become some kind of hard puzzle game / needs alot of consideration before starting to place coves, especially if more than one city next to one another is concerned. ) you can acess the Freshwaterlake if the City has access to oceans.

And the number of tiles seems to be something between 7 and 10 if i remember correctly from my last Lanun game (which is allready two or three weeks ago). But i also think you have to have a certain width / broadness. If you just lay a 1-wide canal ist stays freshwater i belive (i think only the extremes are counted for the whole body of water not individual sections. But that observation could be wrong)
If you try to fill your whole fat cross with freshwater without land to separate it will at one point turn into an ocean. But most exept a few land-bridges can be water without turning ocean if done right.

If you want to test what i said you can do this in 10 Minutes in the World builder with Lanun. But thats the way it is. (And it should be fun with Arcane Barges in those Lakes. Though it hasn't been necessary in my games.)

BeefontheBone said:

Off the top of my head it's 7 tiles to be freshwater. There's an extra food on those tiles - 's why Spain on a Lake was so good for the Cuban Isolationists game, since Isabella is financial and starts with Fishing, making lake tiles amazing in the early game (they get an extra boost from harbors too, if you're also costal).

Click to expand...

She isn't financial.

The reason for the "spain on a lake thing" is because spain is the only BtS civ that starts with both fishing and mysticism, meaning they can use freshwater lakes or seafood to rush a religion.

The global define LAKE_MAX_AREA_SIZE set if an area water is fresh water of not (9 by default) . But the the <iMinAreaSize> that define when you can build a boat is set to 20 for each boat . This is this setting you need to change to be able to build ships in water area with size <20 , and you need to change that for each unit . Perhaps setting it to 14-15 would help , but the problem if set them to 1 is that the AI will build a lots of boats in this small lakes (... remember me some civ III games) .

Tcho !

Ah, thought I'd got the wrong tag there

@Monkeyfinger - you're right. Been a while since I either read that thread or played Vanilla

One thing I don't like about the fishing boats in general is that the AI doesn't know how to use them if they're set to be built everywhere. It would also be nice to be able to build them if the city is on freshwater.

It always bothered me that a City has to sit right on the coast to be able to build a Lighthouse, Shipyard, etc. Shouldn't it be enough to have an ocean tile in the City's 'fat cross'?

Oddly, when I play Lanun I often build my capital inland, planning to cut an exit with a Cove, while with other civs I look for a coastal location.

In my modmod, I'm returning the ability of Citadels to act as cities (canals) and allowing Water Elementals to carry naval units as cargo, letting you move ships across small stretches of land between bodies of water. Unfortunately, you must unload all the ships cargo first, and without an SDK change all the cargo dies when the duration expires. This would be more useful if you are a summoning trait civ. (I'm planning to remove the trait, and give extra duration as a bonus to several promotions (dimensional and equipment, maybe channeling 3), but that will require more SDK changes)