Sane Terrain

[el_hidalgo]

Sane Terrain

This simple XML mod changes some terrain properties in an effort to add some sanity to the terrain system. Here are the changes:

- Cities can only be founded by fresh water or coasts. This better reflects the realities of history. It also means no more useless AI cities in the middle of the Sahara. In game terms, this change means fewer cities to bog down your computer. And obviously the AI needs all the city placement help it can get.

- Tundra yields no food, except along rivers. Tundra cannot be farmed. (What would you grow anyway? Lichen?) Rivers in tundra provide no commerce bonus (they are frozen too much of the year to be of use in commerce).

- Snow: Guess what? You can't found cities here. Why would you want to, unless you are a stupid AI opponent?

- Flood plains: removed the -40 health penalty. Why are flood plains so unhealthy? In games terms I guess it's there for balance, but it doesn't model reality very well, as far as I can see. It makes sense for jungle, but not for flood plains. Besides, flood plains occur only in deserts, so they already balance out an otherwise lousy environment for a city.

- Forests: they don't grow in tundra. Here is the dictionary definition of tundra: "A treeless area between the icecap and the tree line of Arctic regions, having a permanently frozen subsoil and supporting low-growing vegetation such as lichens, mosses, and stunted shrubs." Treeless being the operative word here. So how does it make sense for forests to grow in tundra? That's insane.

 

[keldath]

nice one

 

[Xenomorph]

I just renamed "Tunda" in my game to "Taiga."
That seemed to solve the forest problem.

 

[el_hidalgo]

I just renamed "Tunda" in my game to "Taiga."
That seemed to solve the forest problem.

That's not a bad solution. The only problem is that 'taiga' implies forest, but the underlying terrain can't technically be forest since in Civ4 forest is a feature rather than a terrain. But I do think tundra + forest is a good representation of taiga, since soils in the taiga are so poor.

 

[frekk]

Yeah I think the forest in the tundra thing is really just supposed to be representative of boreal forests, which have very poor soil (the carpets of needles dropped by the pines acidify the soil when they decompose) and lousy growing seasons. Boreal forests aren't really tundra, since the operative definition of tundra is indeed the land above the treeline, but they aren't well-represented by forested plains or grassland either.

And if tundra were just real, true tundra, there would be only a thin strip of it on any map, the broad swath you usually see looks much more like the boreal belt plus the tundra.

You can see in this map that the treeline is very far north:

http://maps.grida.no/library/files/treeline_in_the_arctic.gif

It would be unreasonable to have all plains and grassland supporting metropolises in areas like, for instance, the entire southern half of Hudson Bay, nor would it be reasonable to have anything but huge forests in this area.

 

[Headlock]

Sane Terrain
Besides, flood plains occur only in deserts, so they already balance out an otherwise lousy environment for a city.

While i agree with all the other ideas, i think your reasoning here is flawed - flood plains doesnt neccessarily mean just desert.

e.g. : The lands between the rivers of the North China Plain would constitue a flood plain- the rivers have shifted constantly over the millenia, and the floods have been critical to rfarming in the region.

This applies to any large, extended, relatively flat area surrounding a large river that is regularly inundated (& in human terms, intensively farmed). It does not require deserts as such. The critical requirements are a large meandering river, few if any hills/mountains immediately near by, and large scale seasonal flooding.

Further examples would be the missisippi basin, the dabube, rhine, irrawaddy rivers, etc, ect.

Please note this is only a comment for accuracy. So i would suggest that you make floodplains occur on grassy areas as well. If possible, i would also suggest that floodplains are a minimum 3-4 tiles, with hills etc at least 1 tile removed from the river.

Good work, I likey

HDK

 

[el_hidalgo]

Thank you kindly! I completely agree with you about flood plains not being just in the desert. But putting them on other kinds of terrain would result in a huge food output for those tiles, which some people would think is fine but others might think it creates gameplay balance problems (especially if the health penalty is removed). That's why I didn't touch that one, illogical though it is.

While i agree with all the other ideas, i think your reasoning here is flawed - flood plains doesnt neccessarily mean just desert.

e.g. : The lands between the rivers of the North China Plain would constitue a flood plain- the rivers have shifted constantly over the millenia, and the floods have been critical to rfarming in the region.

This applies to any large, extended, relatively flat area surrounding a large river that is regularly inundated (& in human terms, intensively farmed). It does not require deserts as such. The critical requirements are a large meandering river, few if any hills/mountains immediately near by, and large scale seasonal flooding.

Further examples would be the missisippi basin, the dabube, rhine, irrawaddy rivers, etc, ect.

Please note this is only a comment for accuracy. So i would suggest that you make floodplains occur on grassy areas as well. If possible, i would also suggest that floodplains are a minimum 3-4 tiles, with hills etc at least 1 tile removed from the river.

Good work, I likey

HDK

 

[Roads]

I don't usually get hung up on RL reasoning being applied to games because I think the only real reason to do something in a game is because it is either fun or interesting. That said I really like your idea for sane terrain. I was disappointed when I started to download it and saw it was in .rar format. Could you possibly put it in .zip format?

 

[Xenomorph]

Why? Rar has better compression. Just download WinRar, it's free.

 

[Roads]

I guess I'll pass on the .rar I'm a bit skeptical of .rar from quite awhile back when I was modding Oblivion. When trying to download the program I end up only finding buy sites or trial package sites.

Having only dialup, the idea of better compression is appealing. Honestly tho many of the files now are so large now that unless the compression is triple or something on that order the download file would take a long time anyway. I usually get a friend to download anything that takes over a couple hours.

Like I said before I think hidalgo has a good idea and I'll probably look at making the changes myself.

 

[Ninja2]

Just use 7zip, it'll decompress a .rar just fine.

 

[Roads]

Thanks Ninja2, got it and it looks good.