Mountain tile bonus / usage

Hi,
I am annoyed by mountain tiles in the BFC.
They should at least provide some health or happy faces to a city after a certain advanced tech (Ecology or something).
On account of providing fresh mountain air, springs (clean water) opportunity for recreation (skiiing, hiking) and so on.
Maybe a system like forests giving health.

I also think that they should be accessible tiles for workers, which subsequently can build a Pass (at a hefty turn investment, similar to forts maybe). Once the Pass is in place, other units are able to move onto that tile.

Maybe link the two suggestions together.
Passes can be created after Engineering. Mountain tiles with Passes on them create 0.5 health & 0.5 happy after Ecology. (Or you can build a "Skilift" city improvement! )

Any thoughts?

mh

I actually agree that mountains can also be used, but I do not think yet of its benefits.

Mountians can definetly be used. they just aren't, I don't understand why.

Frankly I want more types of terrain and terrain borders:
Navigable rivers
Un-crossable rivers/white water
Bridgeable rivers narrow sections
Ford/shallow rivers

Cliffs

Moorland/outcrop regions (in Britain Northumberland, Dartmoor, large amounts of Wales, Most of Scotland)

I'm not being precise here, just more terrain types, I accept that there are three types of hill at the minute, grassy, rocky, and dusty? Maybe this is enough, but I certainly want cliffs, and allow mountains to be passed and worked, and allow scouts and explorers to climb them.

More terrain types, too:

Plateau(from plain to plateau: similar movement cost, plateau to plateau: similar to plains)

Fault line(impassable)

if you make mountains usable, you ruin any chance of natural choke points, I won't disagree about changing the yields on them, but the game isn't reality so it has to make some compensations,

and as far as platueas etc, it might look really funky on most random maps, I agree hand drawn they could be great, and it would be nice to get a canal-making thing (there are several mods which turn land into water) to act as navigatable rivers, with BTS, you can use forts + cities to do the same thing, but it's a mighty pain in the butt and ends up looking like crap.

Lady Wandbender said:

if you make mountains usable, you ruin any chance of natural choke points,

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Not really, I suggest mountains are only passable after a considerable commitment of work force and techs.
This will prevent large stretches of mountains being criss crossed by roads, because one pass is really enough to travel a mountain range. You have to make sure you can defend it, of course.

mh

mostly-harmless said:

Not really, I suggest mountains are only passable after a considerable commitment of work force and techs.
This will prevent large stretches of mountains being criss crossed by roads, because one pass is really enough to travel a mountain range. You have to make sure you can defend it, of course.

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Though it should be possible to level it and cover it entirely with railroads by later industiral/early modern era. Terrain chokepoints make a lot less sense once you can airlift.

Un-crossable rivers/white water

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This could be used for white water rafting.

Lady Wandbender said:

if you make mountains usable, you ruin any chance of natural choke points,

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Mountains can be usable in some ways without failing to be strategic chokepoints. If they slow up unit movement drastically, for example, or if they take forever to build roads through in the ancient age. You can still get strategically useful chokepoints in earlier Civs, just from narrow straits or stretches of one-tile-wide continent.

I won't disagree about changing the yields on them, but the game isn't reality so it has to make some compensations,

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I'm inclined to think they should take forever to work, so that it's not worth doing until late medieval or so, but give you a goodly amount of production when mined, possibly needing a certain tech to do so. I think completely useless tiles are both painful from a gameplay point of view, and contrary to the spirit of a 4X game.

and as far as platueas etc, it might look really funky on most random maps, I agree hand drawn they could be great,

Click to expand...

I'm not sure I see a simple way of doing this other than giving each square an elevation, as in SMAC; which could be interesting, I have no strong feelings about it one way or the other.

and it would be nice to get a canal-making thing (there are several mods which turn land into water) to act as navigatable rivers

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Oh yes.

, with BTS, you can use forts + cities to do the same thing, but it's a mighty pain in the butt and ends up looking like crap.

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You can do it in Civ1 by building cities on adjacent squares; this is one of those arguably game-breaking tactics, because if a city is too tough for your land forces, you just build a string of size 1 cities and move your battleships up to its gates, and the AI does not realise this.

It would be interesting to be allowed to move onto a Mountain Tile, and the amount of time your unit has to stay on that tile, before it can move again would be based on certain Research Tech's.
The default might be 4 or 5 turns, with there being 2 or 3 Research Tech's that reduce that delay by 1 turn each.

We should probably bear in mind, that HILLS in CIV could be anything from a Hilly Area, to something close to near-mountainous... whereas the Mountain Tile are like the Rockies or Mount Saint Helen et al.

[EVIL EDIT]
A possibility of dying before you can get off the mountain to another tile.... hehehe