Water is important

I'm the first to argue that gameplay is more important than realism, but, having said that...

One thing that bothers me as "unrealistic" about the Civ games is how relatively unimportant water is, especially early on. Several things about water are unrealistic in Civ (all have probably been mentioned in other threads, although never all in one place):

(1) City sites: In reality, major civs developed in fertile river valleys for the most part, or on coasts. The Nile, the Tiger-Euphrates, the Yangtze, the Hwang-Ho (sp?)... the Meditteranean coast... etc. In Civ, plains and grasslands are plenty fertile for city founding (even if no river is nearby) and rivers/coasts don't offer enough of an advantage in terms of trade/food/production (particularly trade).

(2) Sea Travel Speeds: In reality, for much of history, travel was much faster by ship than overland. In Civ, early ships don't move much faster than land units, and don't move at all faster than land units over roads. In Civ 3 (before C3C) you couldn't even build any boats until Mapmaking, but roads were available from the beginning, so by the time you get galleys, you already have built roads throughout your empire, so its faster to move units via land than via sea.

(3) Sea Travel Safety: In reality, the speed benefits of travel by sea were offset by the dangers: ships, even entire fleets, were often lost in storms, even when close to land. In Civ, you can avoid the dangers of sea travel simply by not ending your ship's movement on the wrong kind of tile.

(4) Sea Trade: In reality, ocean-going trade can be partially disrupted by piracy or the action of hostile military ships. In Civ, military blockades are either 0% or 100% (and are quite hard to do, given the number of ships typically required), while piracy (privateers) doesn't affect trade at all, only being able to attack actual units.

(5) River Trade: In reality, trade can occur up and down rivers. In Civ, if two cities are on the same river, you must still build a road connecting them in order for them to trade.

(6) Navigable Rivers: In reality, parts of some rivers are navigable by ocean-going ships. In Civ, this can't happen.

(I'm sure there are other things unrealistic about the effects of rivers & seas in civ... I can add to this list if people point out other things)

The point of this thread is to ask whether these things bother other people and to see what suggestions people have for improving them. Try to keep in mind the gameplay-related consequences of suggestions: more realism isn't an improvement if it makes things less fun.

Naturally, i wouldn't have started the thread if i didn't have a few suggestions of my own

#1: currently, rivers through deserts become floodplains, and a very fertile. Rivers through other terrains should also increase the fertility (+1 food, perhaps). To balance this, maybe the fertility of normal terrain would have to be decreased somewhat. Isn't it a little strange that a city in the middle of grasslands can feed itself (and even have a surplus) even if none of the surrounding terrain is irrigated?

#2: limited increases in ship speed might help, but this can't be taken too far without hurting gameplay (from a ship-to-ship combat standpoint). Personally, I'd allow ships and harbors to show up earlier in the tech tree, and maybe delay road building untiol discovery of some tech.

#3: at very least, give ships some chance to be lost at sea if they move through the wrong tiles, not just end their turn there (the chnaces would have to be decreased a little relativet to the current odds, of course). Currently, a galley can safely cross two tiles of sea/ocean - I think crossing even one should involve a little risk. Also, I'd have a (much smaller) chance that early ships can be lost even when in the proper terrain. This could be related to random events (the topic of a differnt thread) such as a hurricane or even just a major storm.

#4: This one's tricky, and might require a major overhaul of the trade system (as many have suggested elsewhere). Does anyone have any ideas that don't involve complete changes to the way trade is handled?

#5: This one's easy: two cities connected by a river should be able to trade just as if they were connected by roads or harbors.

#6: Another tricky one, since rivers currently don't go through tiles but between them. Maybe major river should go through the middle of tiles (and be navigable to certain ships) while lesser rivers would remain along the tile edges.

personally i think these are all good ideas.

one way to do #4 is to have trade routes like in CTP with the same type of piracy, however this would alter the trade system. i think privateers should take away a small amount of gold per turn they are in another civs territory. the amount of gold could be determined only by the commerce in pirated civ's cities with harbors. otherwise their could be another 'random event' type action with some percentage of happening when the privateer ends its turn in other borders where the privateer takes away a larger amount of gold in one turn rather than a percent each turn

a more complex addition would be to require a privateer to return to a friendly port to actually return the gold to its civ. each privateer could stockpile only so much gold at a time. this would help the problem of a pirate hiding off in some remote location and stealing gold away without ever being found

In civ 2 rivers went through the middle of tiles and (iirc) they counted as a road when a land unit moved along the river to represent the faster movement by boat.

Also throughout history the cource of rivers have changed by floods (should there be a flooding disaster?) and by man made influences. Rivers have also been made wider so trade ships can go farther upriver. I think river modification should be a worker action.

Yes, I'm not sure the change in rivers from Civ 2 to 3 was necessarily an improvement. Other than being able to offer a combat advantage for defending across a river, what other good things come from having rivers on the tile edges instead of the tile centers? Civ 2 didn't have navigable rivers, but it certainly could have... it'd be much simple to do it with middle-of-a-tile rivers rather than edge-of-tile ones.

judgement said:

(2) Sea Travel Speeds: In reality, for much of history, travel was much faster by ship than overland. In Civ, early ships don't move much faster than land units, and don't move at all faster than land units over roads.

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Yes, something has to be done about the movement rate of non-land units.

On a tiny map I can take my destroyer 10 turns to get around the world. On a huge map it would take about 26 turns.

I would have the movement proportional to the map size. For instance a destroyer with 9 sq on a standard map, and 12 on a huge map.

I will extend this to both sea and air units. An operational range of 8 on a Huge map doesn't seem that strategic.

#4: What they should do is make it be so that if there is an enemy sea unit within a radius of "x" (maybe 2 squares) into a harbor, there is a [number of tiles occupied by enemy units]/[number of total tiles in that area] chance that the unit will be caught. Maybe you can add a % chance that it won't be cought to this, or something, espcecially when the trading civ is more advanced than the blockading civ. Also, the same thing applies to pirate ships, except the pirate ships would take gold in the meantime. I like the idea of ships, especially the pirate ones affecting trade because that will make good players in Civ4 actually build a NAVY, unlike in Civ3 where Navy is an optional kind of thing, or a good thing if you're guarding your large island (like I had in my last game, I had battleships covering all squares vertically, making my country virtually impenetrable. Plus I had tanks surrounding my border with tiny Japan. Oh, and I and Persia were the only 2 people that had access to Uranium, and just before I was about to take out Persia and have complete world dominance, I ended up getting a CULTURE VICTORY!!!! HAHAHAHA!!!!)

judgement said:

I'm the first to argue that gameplay is more important than realism, but, having said that...

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What makes you think that?

I like some of your ideas, but there would have to be some major changes in gameplay to accomidate them.

I think he's just very arrogant.
What you have to do when you come to poster's like these is just ignore those posts and think "God, what's with this guy?"

I've always assumed that there were a lot of small rivers and creeks not shown. The rivers shown were just the major rivers. Grassland tiles are the ones that have a decent amount of small rivers and plains are the ones that don't.

It would be pretty cool to have major, navigable rivers that cut through the middle of tiles. Perhaps they could not be crossed at all until engineering was discovered. Whatever tiles represented these could make quick and dirty tile images for tiles or even dredged rivers.

It would certainly add something to the game to have major ports that are not right on the coast.

Bore drilling should be availiable. I build on any island on a many island map and the majority of cities get stuck at size 2 or 3. I can understand some islands not having water, but 90% of the map hasn't got fresh water even in bores, thats just dumb. If you've got a snow capped mountain on the island then there WOULD be a stream or fresh water supply.

Irrigation is important to increase the farming bonus, but howabout farming with limited water. Crops are grown in many countries on very limited water reserves. One tile cannot be alone in its properties, the other tiles surrounding it should be taking into consideration because of the effect.

Also what about changing tides, river courses, farming etc and the effect on the landscape. I the map area is untouched by AI or Player then the land shouldn't be the same for 6000 years. One would expect that the desert might stay a desert, but a forest should become a jungle, or swamp or some such overgrowth.

I really miss being able to increase Sea squares as it could be in CTP. I also miss the prospect of populating the ocean floor with cities, but that may be too much. I mean, they took it away from CTP again.

I liked it better when rivers ran throught a tile, allowing an increased movement bonus, and there is a point to be made about early sea vessels having such low movement compared with roads (six with a horseman on land compared with three). Maybe just have roads double movement instead of triple it early on until some tech is discovered.

Maybe a cheaper harbor would be enough for a river traderoute.

For changing tides and stuff, I think there was a thread on global climate effects which I believed covered this.

Finally, I think building canals should be allowed, which has been done since the ancient age.

I especially agree on #2.
Sea travel was much faster than land travel. News would often reach far off colonies before making it inlands to the towns there.
And when railroads are discovered sea travel is pointless by civ standards...

yes water shell be important, but its in civ3 to, a desetplains for example, the trade bonus. etc.having a startcity at a river side boosts ur entire game.
seafaring should be redesignt, faster and depending on range etc.

but one aspect i missed in the 1st post.
its unrealistic that one small lake deliver water to a endless irrigationsystem. ther shell be a kind of resource system that a riversquar delivers a special amount of water.
like a 5 sq river is able to deliver water for 20 sq´s a 10 long for 40 and ,

I think the game should be made so you have to have a navy or else you would be disatvantiged. I think they need to incoperate piracy and other things that you would need a navy to deal with.

#6: Another tricky one, since rivers currently don't go through tiles but between them. Maybe major river should go through the middle of tiles (and be navigable to certain ships) while lesser rivers would remain along the tile edges.

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As far as I see it, all the rivers on the civ map should be considered major rivers.

#5: This one's easy: two cities connected by a river should be able to trade just as if they were connected by roads or harbors.

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I agree

"I think the game should be made so you have to have a navy or else you would be disatvantiged. I think they need to incoperate piracy and other things that you would need a navy to deal with."

I agree. From what I've seen a large navy is rarely needed unless playing on an Archipaelago or 80% water Continents. All you really need are some transports, a carrier or two and maybe a battleship or sub.

Nate128 said:

I agree. From what I've seen a large navy is rarely needed unless playing on an Archipaelago or 80% water Continents. All you really need are some transports, a carrier or two and maybe a battleship or sub.

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To make the game more realistic you should need a navy, especially in the early ages. Piracy was a big thing then, and someone without a navy was a sitting duck.

Maybe they should have barbarian camps but instead of land units and a very few sea units, the camp could just build sea units. (Privateers, for example.) The camps would be called a pirate's hideout, or something. This would make sea units much more important in the game.

I would like to be able to pay the pirates to either 1) stop attacking me, or 2) to attack someone else.

One of the reasons you usually don't need a large navy is the fact that the AI doesn't build one. Your transports aren't really subject to much threat, so you don't need too much escort.

What I would like to add is Merchant Ships, a bit like the old Caravans from Civ 1 and Civ 2, but only for naval trade. I know that some of you may start mumbling about micro management, but a large part of a navy's responsibility (esp. subs) can be the sinking of large amounts of cargo vessels, crippling a country's trade and production, and even cause starvation. If there were loads of Merchant Ships on the oceans, we would see large convoys with escorting ships and there you would have a good base for any civ to maintain an impressive navy.