Civ 5 needs a Canal Improvement.

[jaideniv]

I think workers should get a new improvement - the canal improvement. It could be unlocked at a later technology (engineering, for example), and I think it's a very necessary addition.

Think about it. You're playing on a map and you want quick access to both sea sides of the land. But the only way to do that is if you build a city on the 1 hex of land between the sea. You waste a settler in the process. You give up on improving necessary resources, in favour of placing a city on the single land hex rather than near the resource you want to improve. You add to unnecessary increased culture cost of new policies, you increase unhappiness and it potentially causes tactical placement of future cities to change, thanks to the "no new city in between 4-hexes of another" rule.

With the canal improvement, you can build it on that 1 land hex, saving you from the repercussions of placing a city just for that purpose. Of course, if placing a city on the 1-land hex tile is beneficial to you and your empire, then great. Otherwise, it just seems as a tragic waste to me.

The canal improvement could only be placed on a single piece of land with 2 sides of coast adjacent to it. Since it provides a good tactical movement, you would need a significant amount of turns to finish it. Also, foreign Civs can use the canal with open border treaties. I was also thinking of 2 possible ways to use it: 1) No movement penalty with embarked/naval units and you just pass straight through 2) Embarked/Naval units expend all their movement when passing through a canal (which means all your movement will end on the actual canal improvement, even if you have more to spare), and you can move again the next round. If 2) is implemented, only one unit of each civ can remain in the canal.

Please post your thoughts in the comments, and leave suggestions

 

[Putmalk]

Is this a suggestion to Firaxis, or for modders? If it's the former, then we need to move this to Ideas and Suggestions. If it's the latter, then it's probably not possible yet without the DLL.

 

[jaideniv]

Is this a suggestion to Firaxis, or for modders? If it's the former, then we need to move this to Ideas and Suggestions. If it's the latter, then it's probably not possible yet without the DLL.

I guess both xD Thanks for the other suggestion, I'm new to the site

 

[trystero49]

If we gave ships the CanMoveAllTerrain promotion and then restricted it's ability to move on all terrain (and ice) except for terrain with the Canal improvement, could that work? Is there a way to give a unit the ability to move differently on one improvement than the other? (I would assume so; roads work this way, do they not?) I suppose we would need Lua for this; it's doubtful that there's an XML tag called <ShipsCanMoveThroughCanalsLOL!Love,Firaxis>

 

[TBBW]

I think there are a couple of ways this might be accomplished with the code we have at our disposal, but a more advanced coder will have to figure out which is the most appropriate:

1) In NiGHTS, I've seen Workers make new types of tile improvements, so have a tile improvement that acts like a city in that one respect?

2) Add a second MoveRate to your boat units from BOAT only to BOAT and HEAVY_BIPED. This would allow any boat to portage any distance, of course, but is a possible solution?

3) Create a whole new set of boat units that are actually land units. There's already code out there to have embarked units defend normally. As far as the code were concerned, they'd default as land units and you'd give them embarkation and fast sea movement ability (and slow land movement). Similar problem as the above solution, however, in that it allows unlimited portage. If you slow land movement to 1 max per turn, that'd deter folks from portaging across a continent with a boat.

 

[3335d]

Your 1) is wrong, they are already great tile improvements, but yes you are right about new improvements being possible.

I've wanted canals for a really long time. Make them extremely costly to maintain though, and give them upgrades throughout the eras to allow modern ships to pass through. This is actually a problem with real-world canals - for example the Panama Canal was built 100 years ago and is so narrow that the largest ships of the modern day can barely get through it. Because there's really no limit on the size that you can make a ship (except one's financial and "hard" resources, as well as their sanity) canals should have to be upgraded. Make them available at engineering, and then improve them with techs like physics, gunpowder, dynamite, and combustion.

 

[TBBW]

Your 1) is wrong, they are already great tile improvements, but yes you are right about new improvements being possible.

I think I see how it might be done from ...\XML\Units\CIV5SpecialUnits.xml:

1) Create a unit named Canal using the SpecialUnit_CarrierUnitAI and set it's SpecialUnitType(s) to your list of boat units only.

2) Set the Canal to Land only, no embarkation.

3) Give it a non-animated graphic (when Fortified) to mesh with ground tiles.

I think that would allow you to load units into your Canal, then unload them the next turn. Meanwhile, other units would be unable to enter that square, it wouldn't destroy a road through the square, and would be able to benefit from other tile improvements such as Fortifications.

 

[filli_noctus]

Question for the Lua coders, is it possible to write a script that triggers when a unit is selected and changes tiles with a canal improvement to be passable by the active unit by altering the <water> tag or changing it to a different (possibly custom) terrain type? What effect would such a script have on CPU load and would it trigger on AI turns?