River & Canal ideas

I'm not sure if this has ever been suggested but I just had a couple ideas while playing and wanted to see if they were feasible.

First, would it be possible to create canals as tile improvements, but with the production cost rising in relation to the tile's distance from the ocean? For instance a tile on the water cost 'X' to canal, but the next tile inland would be '2X, then '4X', and so on to account for the massive effort needed to dig so far inland.

Second, is it possible to modify naval units to be able to travel on rivers? Definitely not the enormous ships like battleships or carriers but I see no reason why smaller craft like a transport or a caravel, maybe even a galleon can't sail up rivers.

About ships travelling on rivers, it would be difficult to implement, cause rivers are not tiles on their own, but just flow between tiles.

Building a canal with fortresses would be possible, although some limits should be defined in order to avoid huge canals that go from China to Portugal. For example, in addition to increase cost with the increasing distance from the coast, a length limit could be (just an idea) 4 tiles.

Forts as canals is a standard feature in BTS.

I was wondering how long it would take to get that answer lol....

Yes, I am aware. However, I don't like the way it's implemented in that I feel it is too limited/condtional.

My vision of canals is that of a unique improvement that can be built over more than two squares (or three with a city), and on any kind of terrain except mountains. I agree there needs to be a maximum limit, 4 or 5 tiles sounds right since the construction costs would be tremendous assuming my initial concept of X, 2X, 4X, etc...

Rivers should factor into the canal system as well and you should be able to dig canals to extend/connect rivers to oceans or even other rivers.

I think the biggest challange would be having this new "Canal" square serve as both a land and a water tile.

Right now Land Units cannot go on Water, and likewise Water units cannot go on land (except in cities and forts).

If you simply turning the land square into a water square (thus making a canal), thats one thing, but I would assume that you would want your land units to be able to cross as well.

Also I only think they should be 2 or 3 tiles at the most. I dont think that anything larger than that is realistic.

Well that's kind of along the lines of what I was asking regarding feasibility. I know a bit about programming but I'm by no means expert.

I had imagined the improvement itself to look like a river tile except completely straight and artificial looking. Except this improvement would modify the existing tile to be passable to water units, or realistically certain classes of water units.

Kind of like the same way the fort method works in BTS but an altogether different improvement with commercial instead of defensive bonuses. Perhaps an additional bonus to the tile. These could be built on hills since canals use systems of locks to traverse gradients.

To be honest I was really thinking in terms of both my ideas as being part of altogether improved river system. I find that although rivers provide pretty decent tile bonuses, they lack almost all significance in the broader sense of your civilization. Egypt is perhaps the best and most well-known example I can think of out of many in terms of civilizations whose entire existence depended on rivers. The Nile was used not just to grow crops and feed people but also to transport the stone necessary to build many of the pyramids and temple complexes, to bring resources from far inland (relatively) quickly into the global ocean trade network, even carry entire armies to the front quicker than they could do so via land. It still serves some of these functions to this day even.

The canal part is accually a pretty feasable idea.

They used a little cheat to get ships to move into forts. They didn't let ships move into tiles that have forts, they made forts imitate cities, and, as a side effect, ships can then move into them.

That wouldn't work very well for canals as they don't need the other things that you would get from them acting as cities. That said, it still should be possible to get ships to move into land tiles that have a certain improvement. The main work code of this kind of change would be an SDK change in the CvUnit.cpp file, specificly the canMoveInto function.

If you think you can do it, or even just explain how, I 'd love to try it out.

This is a great idea! I'd really like to be able to use canals so I'll keep an eye on this thread

Complex said:

If you think you can do it, or even just explain how, I 'd love to try it out.

Click to expand...

Well I don't really have time to mod this, but if you want to do it yourself, your first step is to get the SDK installed and a dll compiled. Once you got that going, it would be alot easyer to explain how and where to add some code to do what you are wanting.