Rivers and Sailing

[IcyFrozen]

Rivers have formed the center piece of many major nations throughout history. Egypt relies on the Nile, Brazil on the Congo. Canada and the US on the St.Lawrence and the US also on the Mississippi. This is because a river is a means of moving quickly and transporting goods.

That being said why has the 'rivers count as roads' bonus been removed from Sailing? Better yet why can't sailing be split between Fishing and Sailing? Sailing allowing the production of first level sea units and to use rivers as roads (double movement on hexs with a river border, when moving to another tile with a river border) and Fishing allowing the creation of Fishing Boats etc.

Seems to me the importance of rivers on the early stages of nations is being vastly ignored.

[Camikaze]

Because roads cost money. Rivers creating trade routes would perhaps be more accurate, but perhaps the bonus they'd provide would be too big.

[utgotye]

Originally Posted by IcyFrozen

Rivers have formed the center piece of many major nations throughout history. Egypt relies on the Nile, Brazil on the Congo. Canada and the US on the St.Lawrence and the US also on the Mississippi. This is because a river is a means of moving quickly and transporting goods.

That being said why has the 'rivers count as roads' bonus been removed from Sailing? Better yet why can't sailing be split between Fishing and Sailing? Sailing allowing the production of first level sea units and to use rivers as roads (double movement on hexs with a river border, when moving to another tile with a river border) and Fishing allowing the creation of Fishing Boats etc.

Seems to me the importance of rivers on the early stages of nations is being vastly ignored.

The only thing I can think of is that you could make it so following the path of a river allows you to ignore terrain, making it so you have no move penalties because of hill/jungle...etc.

Also the Congo River is in central Africa which, last time I checked wasn't anywhere near Brazil.

[Nyanko]

Originally Posted by utgotye

The only thing I can think of is that you could make it so following the path of a river allows you to ignore terrain, making it so you have no move penalties because of hill/jungle...etc.

Also the Congo River is in central Africa which, last time I checked wasn't anywhere near Brazil.

Would be a good UA for a future civ imo. Maybe Songhai and make that "River Warlord" name actually have something to do with rivers again

[strijder20]

Also the Congo River is in central Africa which, last time I checked wasn't anywhere near Brazil.

Op is referring to the Amazon.

[The_Quasar]

Brazil is rather the exception because of the Amazon and it's huge tributaries the Orinoco, the Rio Negro and others... after all, the Orinoco is, iirc, the 3rd largest river in the world, by flow-rate (the Congo river is, again iirc, the 2nd)...

This would be difficult to put into a game because of the advantages it would give to anyone who started by it... you would have to give it something extra and then it would be likely to be OP.

[Lord Olleus]

Rivers give vast amounts of gold, and make farms between civil service and fertilisers worth building. If you've ever had a start without any rivers, you'd see just how hard it is to make any money at all.

[duxup]

Rivers still give big bonuses with gold and food. I recently took a pair of cities along a big spiderweb of rivers (made that early invasion hard). I puppeted them and turned those things into damn fine virtual gold mines.


Having said that yeah they're not quite the bonus historically but to do that would likely imbalance things.

[joncnunn]

As to movement: Because crossing a unbridged river is indeed slow in real life.

You do get a +1 gold working river hexes though.

[krc]

Originally Posted by joncnunn

As to movement: Because crossing a unbridged river is indeed slow in real life.

Appeals to RL are rarely convincing when talking about Civ.... The Romans bridged the Rhine (in the course of a single season campaigning) whenever they needed to go fight Germanic tribes. Most armies have been able to put pontoon bridges in place pretty quickly. On the time scale of years, rivers aren't really an obstacle.

[TyBoy]

Indeed that logic can be applied all over the place to movement in civ games. Think about the RL time implications of an ancient era showdown between an archer and a warrior in some hills. It's one of the things that goes to the wayside when you make a war game that covers 6000 years. The movment penalty for rivers proportional to the penalty for rough terrain vs. flat terrain seems fine.

There's a lot they could do to flesh out trade in this game. It has obviously been a huge driving force in human history and the handling in civ is pretty simplistic. It seems like the kind of thing that might not be good gameplay though. I can see the hassle outweighing the benefit pretty easily. As far as rivers in particular, they're already very strong on the basis of the 1 gold per adjacent tile and the extra food between civil service and fertilizer. They don't need any more help for their own sake.

When looking at history and the importance of rivers you have to keep in mind that in the real world there are rivers of a useful size just about everywhere. Anywhere it rains there are rivers all over the place collecting that water. On civ maps rivers are a lot less common. Maybe that means they wanted to make them unrealistically uncommon for gameplay reasons, but also have to underpower them so that doesn't create gamebreaking problems. Another way to interpret it might be that the rivers on the map are only the biggest rivers in the world and there are countless small ones all over the place. In that case the benefit seen from the river is not the benefit of having a river nearby, which is huge, but the difference in benefit between having a merely average river and one of the largest rivers, which might not actually be all that big a deal. I don't know. There are scale problems between the actual world and civ worlds that make it hard to make good correlations.

[Ajuga]

How about cities that are connected by a river will form trade roads? Yet at the same time will not create an actual road that units can travel over.
That seems fair.

[duxup]

Originally Posted by Ajuga

How about cities that are connected by a river will form trade roads? Yet at the same time will not create an actual road that units can travel over.
That seems fair.

That seems fair. Didn't they do that in IV?

[joncnunn]

Originally Posted by duxup

That seems fair. Didn't they do that in IV?

Yup with Sailing rivers made trade connections in IV; the only thing I can think of is they didn't want to add a maintenance free way to get trade routes in civ V for most civs.