Cannals
- Thread starter Toltec
- Start date
searcheagle
Emperor
Not in Civ 3 I'm Pretty sure. I think you are prohibited from placing a city within one square of another city. Now in Civ I and II that WAS a possibility.
dresdor said:
xerox
Chieftain
I think that you are correct - I remember being highly disappointed early on in CIV3 when I tried to create adjacent cities. But, I think it should be allowed - look at St. Paul & Minneapolis Minnesota as an example - or, maybe cities should not be allowed to be placed within 3 tiles of each other and then the city could grow into those 3 tiles (not just the culture but the actual city and all of it's benefits, like increased food/trade/production and the ability to connect adjacent water bodies). This would be a more accurate portrayal of how 'twin' cities like St. Paul/Minneapolis and Baltimore/Washington came into being.
thestonesfan
A Client of Ron Kuby
Canals are badly needed, but they should be enormous undertakings.
CivEconomist
Chieftain
The toll idea could be implemented by adding value to your RoP agreements when owning canals, better modes of travel, instead of just the size of your territory. This would in effect garner more income due to the computer being willing to pay more for your RoP even if you have a smaller total territory
DBear
unbeliever
This is a silly thread. If you want canals THAT bad, just build a line of cities. 
You can't build a city right next to another city like you could in previous civ games. That won't work any more.
Oh, and Dbear - you need to shorten your sig.
Oh, and Dbear - you need to shorten your sig.
Bjorn Bjornson
Libertarian
I gotta bump this. Lol hasn't this been wanted since Civ2 or earlier? It's stupid to have one tile seperate oceans and have to build a city there (not so bad in Civ2 but with cultural boundaries that ended up being a real pain)... not too mention you were stuck if the isthmus was 2 tiles wide! 
It would be cool if there was a way to gain income from owning the canal, etc. also, that's extra though!
It would be cool if there was a way to gain income from owning the canal, etc. also, that's extra though!
searcheagle
Emperor
Canals are also needed if some already built a city and the borders already took up the isthumus, which leaves no room for a city to act as a canal.
brinko
witness of the past
indeed indeed,
they should require many workers and lots of cash. and a maximun amount of 2 should only be built. i dont want to see any country looking like a circus.
sorry for posting a new thread on this....
they should require many workers and lots of cash. and a maximun amount of 2 should only be built. i dont want to see any country looking like a circus.
sorry for posting a new thread on this....
mikehunt
Warlord
my idea for a canal would be have it 3 or 4 tiles long at max and it has to go straight up and down or staight left and right (for game balance reasons). and you have to have a land based unit garisoning the entry and exit points in order to use it (like in the board game version of Axis and Allies where you had to conrol the countries on both sides of the suez canal to be able to use it)
Illuminatiscott
Chieftain
c-mattio said:
There was a canal built by roman-occupied egypt that connected the nile river to the red sea, mostly for allowing roman trade with india and china. It was destroyed by the arabs, though, to prevent any christian ships from ever using it.
Illuminatiscott
Chieftain
all this talk about bridges and canals, what about dams? they could change the land on a long but narrow course; drier downriver, wetter upriver, with a coastal tile right behind the dam. ?
mastertyguy
I'm tired!
Even before, there were canals. Last year, in history class, I heard of a Persian emperor who built a canal to attack Greece, something like that.Illuminatiscott said:
I agree that civ4 (or civ5) should have canals. They make the game more realistic as well as adding strategic depth. I've always disliked the idea of a city magically connecting two bodies of water when built on an isthmus. If you can have that, how come you can't have a canal on its own? Intuitively, it seems like that should be easier. However, I also agree that they must be limited in some fashion. There have been several limitations proposed, but I think most of them are impractical, as they introduce mechanisms that are otherwise unknown in civ world. I'm thinking of the "pay to move" and "limited length" canals in particular.
My suggestion (someone else who I can't remember also thought of the idea) is that a canal reduce the productivity of tiles it is built on. A 1/4 or 1/3 reduction seems fair. In addition, as many have said, canals should be very time consuming to build, perhaps consuming a worker like a colony does. Canals should only be allowed on flat land, not hills or mountains. They should not be allowed to split and join like roads, although they can be diagonal; each canal segment can only connected to two other tiles, with those other tiles being either a canal, a body of water, a city, or a dead-end. Perhaps it takes more than one move point to move on each square, simulating the limited capacity and the action of locks. A ship in a canal should be completely vulnerable, of course, like a ship in a city if the city is captured. In addition, you should be able to bombard or pillage a canal, potentially trapping ships within.
Someone suggested giving a canal tourism value as a way of indirectly modelling the economic benefit to a canal holder. Another person suggested that canals would become too strategically powerful, leading to war. I think both of those issues can be addressed directly by my suggestion in another thread that rights of passage be negotiable per city as well as for a civ as a whole. That way, if your canal is in the city radius of Kiel, you could charge other civs gobs of money for them to pass through the area around Kiel without giving them carte blanche to go to Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, etc.
My suggestion (someone else who I can't remember also thought of the idea) is that a canal reduce the productivity of tiles it is built on. A 1/4 or 1/3 reduction seems fair. In addition, as many have said, canals should be very time consuming to build, perhaps consuming a worker like a colony does. Canals should only be allowed on flat land, not hills or mountains. They should not be allowed to split and join like roads, although they can be diagonal; each canal segment can only connected to two other tiles, with those other tiles being either a canal, a body of water, a city, or a dead-end. Perhaps it takes more than one move point to move on each square, simulating the limited capacity and the action of locks. A ship in a canal should be completely vulnerable, of course, like a ship in a city if the city is captured. In addition, you should be able to bombard or pillage a canal, potentially trapping ships within.
Someone suggested giving a canal tourism value as a way of indirectly modelling the economic benefit to a canal holder. Another person suggested that canals would become too strategically powerful, leading to war. I think both of those issues can be addressed directly by my suggestion in another thread that rights of passage be negotiable per city as well as for a civ as a whole. That way, if your canal is in the city radius of Kiel, you could charge other civs gobs of money for them to pass through the area around Kiel without giving them carte blanche to go to Berlin, Munich, Frankfurt, etc.
Actually, I changed my mind. Canals should be able to connect to any surrounding water or canal tile. Networks of canals exist in the real world, and the above model for canals has already limited the power of canals enough. I think preventing them would be more of a problem than allowing them.
Abaddon
Deity
Canals would have beem groovy. Why do they keep missing obvious things 
Any chance ciV will see this?
Any chance ciV will see this?
Dutch Canuck
Khan of Flatlanders
Canals have been a terrain improvement missing from day one (CIV I). I suspect that the actual implementation would be tricky - I am not a game designer by profession so I can only speculate. I think simplicity in the initial implementation is the key to success with this.
My general ideas:
Canals, bridges and tunnels all have potential, but the scale of CIV is at the city level, so these new improvements should represent larger than one city tile mega-projects (e.g.: Golden Gate bridge, causeway bridges to Key West, St. Lawrence Seaway, Suez and Panama Canals) and not smaller more localized projects (Holland tunnel in NY city, London Bridge, canals around a city like Amsterdam). It's all about a practical playable scale for CIV IV.
1) In order to discourage oversized continent spanning canal networks, there should be a high cost/build time, and a maximum number of tiles improved with a canal feature based upon game map size... Say, Duel maps are zero as they be too small for practical reasons, while for huge maps we set the limit to a total of 20 squares (the game designers probably have a better handle on the numbers). Economics should be a big limiting factor if not the only factor!
2) Canals should be costly for naval units to use: something like a move cost of 4?
3) No canals through mountains or hills (hills in CIV are actually huge and not just lumps of land!).
4) Canals should be built by workers and are connected to body of salt water by a build protocol similar to how irrigation is built from touching fresh water or rivers.
5) Canals could be available with Engineering, and halve the construction time with Gunpowder.
6) The presence of a canal (regardless of length) in a city "fat cross" could bestow upon that city +1 Trade route.
The next regard tunnel and bridge mega-projects:
7) With a special "build to" button, a worker could be made to build a road tunnel through a mountain and hill tiles. This would be the only instance a unit passes through a mountain tile until the tunnel is finished. Later a similar button could exist for building a railroad through said tunnel. The time to build should realistically reflect the difficulty of the terrain. Probably even more costly in time compared to canal building!
8) Tunnels should have a maximum length too, to avoid the unrealistic/ridiculous, scaled to game map size.
9) Tunnel construction should effectively require Gunpowder - I can't think of any major tunnel building possible before then.
10) Workboats could have a "build bridge" function so as to be able to span 1+ coastal tiles (only) from one city to another. Must start adjacent to a city (at least one city at one end). Again maximum scaled to game map size.
11) Such coastal bridge building shouldn't be available until Industrialization (or later).
12) Bridges could accomodate railroad improvement as a later step? (Otherwise they function as just a road over water.)
13) Canals, tunnels and bridges should be pillagable! And while all three affect unit movement in some way, only canals should have the trade benefit - if any benefit at all.
The "chunnel" concept is a special case I think. Maybe that should be National Wonder for a coastal city somehow?
Cheers
My general ideas:
Canals, bridges and tunnels all have potential, but the scale of CIV is at the city level, so these new improvements should represent larger than one city tile mega-projects (e.g.: Golden Gate bridge, causeway bridges to Key West, St. Lawrence Seaway, Suez and Panama Canals) and not smaller more localized projects (Holland tunnel in NY city, London Bridge, canals around a city like Amsterdam). It's all about a practical playable scale for CIV IV.
1) In order to discourage oversized continent spanning canal networks, there should be a high cost/build time, and a maximum number of tiles improved with a canal feature based upon game map size... Say, Duel maps are zero as they be too small for practical reasons, while for huge maps we set the limit to a total of 20 squares (the game designers probably have a better handle on the numbers). Economics should be a big limiting factor if not the only factor!
2) Canals should be costly for naval units to use: something like a move cost of 4?
3) No canals through mountains or hills (hills in CIV are actually huge and not just lumps of land!).
4) Canals should be built by workers and are connected to body of salt water by a build protocol similar to how irrigation is built from touching fresh water or rivers.
5) Canals could be available with Engineering, and halve the construction time with Gunpowder.
6) The presence of a canal (regardless of length) in a city "fat cross" could bestow upon that city +1 Trade route.
The next regard tunnel and bridge mega-projects:
7) With a special "build to" button, a worker could be made to build a road tunnel through a mountain and hill tiles. This would be the only instance a unit passes through a mountain tile until the tunnel is finished. Later a similar button could exist for building a railroad through said tunnel. The time to build should realistically reflect the difficulty of the terrain. Probably even more costly in time compared to canal building!
8) Tunnels should have a maximum length too, to avoid the unrealistic/ridiculous, scaled to game map size.
9) Tunnel construction should effectively require Gunpowder - I can't think of any major tunnel building possible before then.
10) Workboats could have a "build bridge" function so as to be able to span 1+ coastal tiles (only) from one city to another. Must start adjacent to a city (at least one city at one end). Again maximum scaled to game map size.
11) Such coastal bridge building shouldn't be available until Industrialization (or later).
12) Bridges could accomodate railroad improvement as a later step? (Otherwise they function as just a road over water.)
13) Canals, tunnels and bridges should be pillagable! And while all three affect unit movement in some way, only canals should have the trade benefit - if any benefit at all.
The "chunnel" concept is a special case I think. Maybe that should be National Wonder for a coastal city somehow?
Cheers
Doctor Penguin
Chieftain
- Joined
- Apr 19, 2007
- Messages
- 6
I kind of see two different types of canals that you are talking about. The first is more of an economic and land transport system (The Grand Canal, The Eire Canal, inland canals in England, etc.). These are not intended for ocean going vessels and behave more as a prototype of railroads, allowing more efficient transport of goods (and maybe ground units). I think that this should be something that could be built like railroads, but using earlier technologies (maybe Construction?), only more expensive, requiring continual upkeep and limited to flatlands.
The second type is specifically associated with Ocean going vessels (Panama Canal, Suez canal, Kiel, etc.). This should require more modern tech (explosives, perhaps?) and should be able to connect two unconnected ocean squares.
Personally, I think there should be a distinct distance limitation on both of these; based on the real-life examples available. The ocean going one shouldn't go more through more than one or two squares. The trade one would perhaps work best as a city enhancement, per Dutch Canuck's suggestion above.
The second type is specifically associated with Ocean going vessels (Panama Canal, Suez canal, Kiel, etc.). This should require more modern tech (explosives, perhaps?) and should be able to connect two unconnected ocean squares.
Personally, I think there should be a distinct distance limitation on both of these; based on the real-life examples available. The ocean going one shouldn't go more through more than one or two squares. The trade one would perhaps work best as a city enhancement, per Dutch Canuck's suggestion above.
And...there should not be too many restrictions, except they should not be able to be made too quickly. Maybe something like...
One worker, One flat tile to Canal conversion = 18 Turns.
Two workers reduces the time by a quarter.
Hilly terrain increases the time by a half.
Consider the length of time and resources required to build the Worlds Great Canals: Suez, Panama, Kiel, Erie, Saint Lawrence Seaway, Cape Cod and China's Grand Canal, to name a few. These all took a huge amount of resources in their day.
And, also, the importance of canals should diminish over time, with the exception of the World Wonder Canal (Panama?), which should always keep some intrinsic usefulness and cultural value.
sorry for re-sounding what a lot have already said...
One worker, One flat tile to Canal conversion = 18 Turns.
Two workers reduces the time by a quarter.
Hilly terrain increases the time by a half.
Consider the length of time and resources required to build the Worlds Great Canals: Suez, Panama, Kiel, Erie, Saint Lawrence Seaway, Cape Cod and China's Grand Canal, to name a few. These all took a huge amount of resources in their day.
And, also, the importance of canals should diminish over time, with the exception of the World Wonder Canal (Panama?), which should always keep some intrinsic usefulness and cultural value.
sorry for re-sounding what a lot have already said...
