1SDANi
Sister Lady
- Joined
- Oct 27, 2014
- Messages
- 2,931
Found it, I loved the idea when I first read it and later wanted to find it but couldn't remember the thread. One thing that stuck out was the use of malaria to control movement and settling instead of jungles, and so I searched malaria and found it.
After my previous, very disorganized post, here's a concrete proposal of what the terrain and yield system would look like in my ideal world
Soil cover types:
Grasslands
Representing humid grasslands
Uses current grasslands terrain, perhaps a more vibrant green color
Base 2 food
Farm can be built without access to water (rainfed agriculture), pastures can be built if there are animals
Prairies
Representing dry grasslands
Needs new terrain art, a yellower version of the current grasslands
Base 1 food
Farm can be built only with access to freshwater (rivers, lakes, or irrigation) or when there is a crop resource to improve, pastures can be built if there are animals
(note that there's no extra hammer from the prairies)
Steppes and Shrublands
Representing cold, subarctic, and alpine grasslands; and semideserts and shrublands.
Colors: Steppes a grayish green, shrublands a paler (sandier) version of the current plains terrain
Base 0 food
Farms can be built with access to freshwater or when there is a crop resource to improve, pastures if there are animals
They can differ in the resources they allow (for example, spices and incense should only exist in shrublands).
Desert and Tundra
Representing real deserts and sand dunes; and tundra
They both use current artwork
Base 0 food
Farms and pastures can't be built at all, no food resources should be allowed on these terrains (not even deer)
Forest cover types:
Forests, Rainforests, and Taiga
Representing, respectively: deciduous, mixed and temperate forests; tropical humid and cold humid cloud and rain forests; alpine forests and boreal forests (taiga).
Uses current artwork
Adds 2 hammer indistinctly of forest type
These three forests types can grow only over grasslands, prairies and steppes
They differ in the resources they can have
Woodlands
Representing savannas and other sparsely forested ecosystems, including shrublands.
Needs artwork
Adds 1 hammer
These forests can grow only over prairies, steppe and shrublands (not grasslands)
- All forest coverings can be chopped down, and all are treated equally in terms of what technology is required for chopping. Forests, Taiga, and Rainforest all provide the same amount of hammers when chopped down, woodlands provide a lower amount of hammers.
Water covering:
Wetlands
Represents swamps, marshes, mangroves
Wetlands can occur over all soil cover types, except desert and tundra, and can happen even when there is a forest covering.
Adds +1 food
Wetlands can have any of these food resources on them: cattle, pigs, deer, rice, wheat, corn, fish, crabs, clam. They can all be improved (with farms, pastures, fishing nets, the latter built by workers, not working boats). Cities and towns can't be built here (except for the Egyptians, Aztecs, Khmer, Thai, Indonesians, and Dutch).
- Wetlands can be drained (at the expense of the extra food resource they provide, and making any seafood resources disappear), perhaps with the "machinery" technology.
Glacier
Represents ice covering
Can occur over any terrain type
Brings food down to zero
Makes all improvements impossible, it's impassable.
We completely do away with jungles as they are now, but a mosquito resource could be added in certain regions to represent malaria, dengue - the largest causes of human deaths in history, and the one reason why some rainforests are perceived to be inaccessible "jungles". This mosquito resource can't be cleared until some later tech is discovered (as biology does now with jungles). Mosquitos can only occur in rainforests (flooded or not) and in any flooded terrain in tropical and subtropical regions of the map. Mosquitos make the tile impossible to improve and cause high damage to any unit passing (perhaps so that in two or three turns the unit dies). These tiles can't have any animal resources.
Relief features
As existing: plains, hills, mountains.
Plains can have any of the soil cover types, any of the forest coverings, any of the water coverings.
Hills can have any of the soil cover types, any forest covering, and ice, but not flooding. Hills reduce one food and provide one extra hammer in comparison to plains.
* I'm thinking mountains could accept having metal and rock resources, and could then be mined/quarried. Forest covering should also be possible.
I would advocate for a new terrain improvement, forest gardens, that allows ancient civs to farm rainforests without chopping them down (after some technology is discovered), providing +1 food. So far as I know, this was not practiced in temperate or cold regions, but happened widely in Central and South America, and I'm pretty sure that also in Southeast Asia and Africa. So I would restrict it to rainforests. With environmentalism or similar civics, this improvement could be done on any forest covering type.
terrain that does not allow improvements, seems like wetland is exactly right for that. Improvements could be enabled with a later tech (Hydraulics?) to bring them up to par with grassland.
