Bridges?

[Meester]

As a way of crossing 1 water tile with land on either side?

Workers would have to build a bridge on either side of the expanse to get this improvement to join up in the middle. Could it work?

A bridge could collapse if someone pillages one side of the bridge.
Units die as they plunge into the water unless they can walk on water or theres a ship beneath with space in its cargo hold to rescue some of the units? Such an improvement would have to allow ships beneath it of course and maybe only certain types of water faring vessels to travel beneath?

I just havn't heard of bridges being implemented in Civ4 before

 

[Alzara]

It would be a BLOODY BIG BRIDGE

But definately feasable in fantasy. I'm not sure about how it would work as a feature though.

Al

 

[MagisterCultuum]

It would not be easy.

You would have to change the tile to land to let the land unit pass, and probably make it act as a city so chips could still move through. You would probably want to make it look like water though, and (using python) make the tile revert back to water when it is razed.


I don't think you could have a build command require multiple workers, and even if you could it could be tricky to decide where to built it. I'd be more inclined to make something that Workboats build, requiring land on both sides. (Sort of a reverse Pirates Cove )

Realistically, large bridges really would require some boats to be used in the construction. These boats might have to be sunk to provide a foundation, so having the spell kill the boat makes lots of sense. The smaller bridges that wouldn't necessarily require boats to assist are already in civ (sort of), automatically added to roads that cross rivers after a certain tech (I forget which, but probably construction). These larger projects sound like something that would require the Engineering tech.

It might have to work through a spell instead of a normal build in order to make sure that there is land on both sides. (If the targeting system was still in I'd add Sureshot's old terraforming spells that let you turn water to land. I may need to figure out a way to do this still...)

You could have a the same python code as turns the tile back to water perform a check that kills non-water-walking units on a bridge at the same time, but I probably wouldn't bother. If it changes to water, then non-water-walking unit will be kicked of to the nearest land tile (probably determined randomly) anyway, although perhaps not until the end of the turn. I think it makes sense for your soldiers to be able to frantically swim to the shore though.

 

[Meester]

I don't consider the bridges over rivers to be to that grand

I was thinking of Golden Gate Bridge type constructions over a channel.
Would also add a bit more strategy being able to invade/explore territory easier over channels and connect a bunch of islands that are close together for example.

 

[Alzara]

It's a nice idea. Would make for interesting Archipelago empires. Still BLOODY BIG BRIDGES though

Al

 

[MagisterCultuum]

I've always considered the scale of the maps in FfH to be much smaller than in vanilla/BtS, so it isn't that unreasonable. It is still beyond the capacity of ere workers though.

I'm considering adding them to my modmod, but they will have to be built through a (python) spell that sacrifices the caster. I might make his spell available to workboats, but that might be overpowered, at least unless the spell also has a high tech requirement and costs a considerable amount of gold. It might be better to make this a spell available only to Great Engineers, who would of course need a boat to carry them there.