Helping With a Bad Start: Inured to Terrain

We all know that sometimes a starting location is particularly bad, and that there should be some way of counteracting the effects of an inhospitable starting location. Wandering to find a better location puts you behind in the tech race, and makes you vulnerable to hostile barbarians. Quitting the game and simply starting over feels like a cop-out to most players. There should be a way to make a bad starting location more workable.

So how about making it so that if a civ starts out surrounded by a large number of unproductive terrain tiles, they are granted the ability to use those tiles as though they were a more productive terrain? To use a couple of real-world examples, the Inca were quite proficient at growing food on (and even irrigating!) their mountainous homeland. And traditionally Arabs survive better in the desert than other peoples because they understand the desert and know how to find water there.

There's nothing inherent about simply being an Inca or an Arab that grants these abilities; it came about through conditions these peoples faced in their history. So they should not, for example, simply give the Inca civ the ability to irrigate mountains. Instead, it should all depend on starting location. Say if a certain (high) percentage of your first city's radius consists of inhospitable terrain, then your civ becomes inured to that terrain and can now use it more efficiently. If you're mostly surrounded by mountains, you are granted the ability to irrigate mountain squares. If you're mostly surrounded by desert, you are granted more food from desert squares. Thereafter, any time the terrain you're specially inured to comes up as your empire spreads, you can use it in the more efficient manner, because your civ has learned how to handle it.

And this inurement would only be for the terrain you start with. In other words, if you are a jungle people, then you get no special help trying to spread into the mountains. And it can't be learned later; if your civ has lived mainly in the forests for half the game, don't expect to spread into the desert and then become an expert in using the desert. And it's not about where your capital is, per se, so moving your capital wouldn't inure you to a different terrain. It would depend entirely upon which terrain surrounds your original city.

That sounds like a neat idea, if they could work it out.

I don't see what would be so hard to work out about it. There are a finite number of available terrains, and a known constant number of squares for the radius of a city. (Eight, nine, twenty, or twenty-one, depending on whether you count the square of the city itself, and whether you count just the initial radius or the whole potentially workable radius.) All they'd have to do would be:

1) Identify the types of terrain that are inhospitable. (I'd say mountains, desert, jungle, marsh, and tundra . . . have I forgotten any?)

2) Assign a particular inurement trait for each one, such as allowing irrigation for mountains or granting bonus food for desert.

3) Set it up so that each terrain's inurement trait (we could probably find a less highfalutin name for it . . . that was just the first thing that came to mind) would be activated if and only if a certain pre-determined number of the squares within the radius of a civ's first city consisted of the same kind of inhospitable terrain.

Simplicity itself, eh? Of course, I'm no computer programmer, so I have no idea how difficult all that would be to actually program. But I can't imagine it would be that difficult for a group of professionals.

This idea is not bad.
It would be rather easy to program, as well. The identification, whether a certain ability has to be given to the nation in question, I mean.

But, it leads automatically to nation-specific abilities (which I would like, but I am unsure about if this is in their concepts).

Commander Bello said:

But, it leads automatically to nation-specific abilities (which I would like, but I am unsure about if this is in their concepts).

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Only on a case-by-case basis. A nation would only acquire that ability if it had the right conditions at the beginning of the new game. The basic theory is that the ancestors of the civ have lived for so long in terrain that most people would find inhospitable that they've learned how to make use of it where newcomers wouldn't be able to. Like I said, it wouldn't make sense to grant special abilities directly to certain civs, like letting the Inca (and no one else) irrigate mountains or giving the Arabs (and no one else) the ability to grow more food in the desert. What about games where the Arabs start off in the middle of a huge grassland surrounded by a mountain range? That's why these abilities are linked so firmly to starting location. The abilities would only exist to compensate a civ for having a poor starting location that would otherwise slow down their growth and make it harder for them to compete.

Loaf Warden said:

Only on a case-by-case basis. A nation would only acquire that ability if it had the right conditions at the beginning of the new game. [...]

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Yes, but even the chance of a nation to get it's specific abillity requires the concept to be implemented into the game. That's the point - even if it would happen only for one nation every three games.

Commander Bello said:

Yes, but even the chance of a nation to get it's specific abillity requires the concept to be implemented into the game. That's the point - even if it would happen only for one nation every three games.

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The use of any of the ideas we're discussing would require the concepts to be implemented into the game. I guess I don't understand the nature of your objection.

Loaf Warden said:

The use of any of the ideas we're discussing would require the concepts to be implemented into the game. I guess I don't understand the nature of your objection.

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If you would've read my posting #4, you would have seen that I second that idea, I just doubt that nation-specific abilities are going to be implemented.
My reply was just to make clear THAT it would have to be implemented, even if it would happen every third (or whatever number) game.

Commander Bello said:

If you would've read my posting #4,

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I did, thank you very much. One wonders how I could have responded directly to it otherwise. If your precise meaning was not immediately clear to me, don't just automatically assume that it's because I didn't bother to read what you said. There are other potential causes for misunderstanding, especially on the Internet.

I just doubt that nation-specific abilities are going to be implemented

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I doubt it, too. I doubt that any of the ideas I've posted are actually going to be implemented. I doubt that most of the ideas we discuss here at all are going to be implemented. But if enough of us promote a certain idea (since we are, after all, the primary target audience of their new game), that may influence them to consider that idea. They want to please their consumers, after all. Naturally the people of Firaxis are the ultimate judges of which ideas would work, and if they decide the idea wouldn't fit in with what they're trying to accomplish, they won't use it, end of story. But just because they probably won't use a given idea doesn't mean we shouldn't discuss it. That is, after all, why we are here.

Sorry, I was distracted while answering and somehow got the impression, that another person was responding to my 2nd answer.
So, I had no intention to be confrontative in any way.

As you've read, I second your idea, expressing my doubts about the implementation of that feature was just my personal opinion and was not meant to disqualify either your idea nor it's poster.

i dont see why the original idea has to be implemented as a nation-specific trait.
why not as a tech advance that only the qualifiying civs get.

RoddyVR said:

i dont see why the original idea has to be implemented as a nation-specific trait.
why not as a tech advance that only the qualifiying civs get.

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Aside from slowing down your research time by giving you an extra tech to go for (thus counteracting in a small way one of the reasons for implementing the idea in the first place), I don't really see what difference it would make. In either case, it would be something that only the qualifying civs would get, so why, specifically, does it matter whether it's a tech instead of being granted automatically?

a easy and transparent system is needed so that u dont to be a crack to understand it.
something like the terraintyp mostly found in ur starting position gets an extra food and irrigatabel

In general, I like the idea, but by mid game, this would be a powerful advantage. Perhaps this "automatic tech" could be researchable by other civs eventually.

I have had an idea somewhat along these lines. That is that terrain types can influence how quickly you get certain techs and, in some cases, whether you get that tech at all!
For example, if your initial cities are on flood plains, marsh and/or jungle, then you would have an easier time obtaining techs which relate to containing and controlling disease, and havresting food from these locations as well! Living in mountains/hills would increase the chance of getting industrial techs related to quarrying, stonecrafting, metalworking and mining-not to mention terraced farming! Living in desert terrain would give you access to engineering/construction techs especially relevent to living in hot and dry climates, and the discovery of hidden water resources! Also, techs related to units who operate well in desert terrain!
In addition, starting terrains should have a particular influence on how your civ traits evolve! So, for instance, if your starting position is REALLY crap, and you start wandering around looking for better spots, then you might become expansionist! Wheras building lots of cities on grasslands and floodplains might make you Agricultural! Anyway, just a few thoughts!!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

Yours

I like this idea, but only if the bonus is inherent to the civ, like mountain farming to the Inca, or desert living to the Arabs. The easiest way to implement this is to make a civ specific tech advance like was used in CivII:ToT fantasy scenario, where some of the civs started with their own unique tech for city design; so the merfolk have a city form that looks like an underwater castle, the Bird-people(Buteos) have a city form like the top of a mountain, etc. Doing it as a tech advance that that civ starts with means that it doesn't count against its tech development during the game.

But, any bonus a civ gets in one terrain type should be somewhat balanced by a loss of production in another terrain type, otherwise the game would be too unbalanced in that civ's favor. So, for example, the Incas should get a mountain production bonus of some kind, say two food and one trade(because they were so good at trail building in the mountains), but lose one food production in grassland. Also, the computer algorithm for random placement should place the Incas in an area rich in mountains for its starting position.

Other possible positive civ terrain modifications:
Indonesians: jungle +1food +1shield +1trade(with road)
Arabs: desert +2food (camel & goat-herding/ date-growing)
Mayans: jungle & hill bonuses
Eskimos: tundra bonuses
Aborigines: desert bonuses
Yoruba: jungle bonuses
Ethiopians: mountain bonuses
Pueblo Indians: desert (& hill?) bonuses

Doing this would add a lot of flavor to the game in my opinion, making each civ a unique challenge to master in pursuit of a win.

Would it not also be possible to do unique city designs for each civ ala CivII ToT?

Alafin Bahahotep

If you give bonuses for starting terrain... would you also give minuses for opposing terrain? An arab in the tundra would not likely survive (nor an eskimo in the dessert)

To paradigne:

the answer is yes, as a closer reading of the text would indicate. I simply didn't take the time to suggest what some of those would be in addition to stating which terrain might be "improved" by starting as a certain civ.

However, tundra is already a pretty crappy terrain so to hinder production there would perhaps not be much of a balance to the bonuses Arabs would receive from improved resource extraction from desert.

Alafin Bahahotep