[GS] Do you use canals?

[Sostratus]

The fact that a city 3 tiles from the coast can build a harbor and build ships I think definitely makes them less relevant. Also obviously that I often don't need a ton of boats, so there's not a lot of other uses for them. Still cool to have, and every now and then you do get a nice spot where a canal can really open up an exit from an inland lake, or a path around the ice, but still pretty rare to find a spot for them otherwise.

This is a good point- any city that can connect to the sea via canal can also built a harbor on the sea directly. I wonder if harbors being allowed non adjacent to a city was a good move in the long run- especially with vulnerability to ship attack, there’s almost no upside to actually being on the coast save the extra adjacency. (Which you pay for by taking on an extra ring of ocean tiles.)

 

[9gkj548hkm20vk79dj689bnj4]

very situational, like if I founded a city on the wrong side of a peninsula and have to dig through it. they are not, however, useless.

 

[tedhebert]

To be very honest, I'd completely forgotten abour the IZ bonus

So no, I only build one if it allows for smoother naval trafic. I DO like them when
that is the cas, though !

I'll try and keep in mind the IZ bonus in the future, it might entice me to build a few more !

 

[Disgustipated]

Almost never build them. If the naval game was more important, maybe I would find a need to have more cities able to get naval units out. But currently there is no need. I make enough coastal cities this is not a problem. As for the adjacency, I forget about it too, I generally just use aqueducts to boost IZ adjacency. Still, there is the rare time when it can actually allow bypassing a long continent traverse, so the option is very welcome indeed.

 

[UWHabs]

This is a good point- any city that can connect to the sea via canal can also built a harbor on the sea directly. I wonder if harbors being allowed non adjacent to a city was a good move in the long run- especially with vulnerability to ship attack, there’s almost no upside to actually being on the coast save the extra adjacency. (Which you pay for by taking on an extra ring of ocean tiles.)

Harbors have definitely evolved to be a little weird. Like, they're partly there to be a coastal fortress, build your navy, and go that way. But then they're also partly meant to be a trading post for your empire. But then, they're also allowed to be built on lakes, which in many ways doesn't make sense for either purpose.

So yeah, Harbors being allowed to be built away from the city in some sense is a great change to the game, because I do think it's really nice to be able to go non-coastal yet still have access to build a navy. But on the other hand, as mentioned, it devalues naturally coastal cities, especially since probably 90% of the time I'm going to want a harbor in the city ASAP to make those water tiles useful.

And because of all of that, they definitely reduce the use of canals. But then again, that's not necessarily a problem, since I also feel that if you had too many canals in a game, or had too many multi-tile canals, that kind of makes a little mockery of the game. The scale of the game is already pretty weird to think about, so having a 2 or 3 tile canal I do think would be a little excessive, even if it would be useful at times.

 

[Archon_Wing]

The problem is that in comes at steam power and is sorta expensive.

 

[acluewithout]

I haven’t built Canals but they’re on my list of things to play with. I’ll get to them eventually.

Being most useful for just proving additional IZ adjacency isn’t such a bad place to be for canals. Perhaps they should give the same bonus for CHs and Harbours? Or maybe just fine as they are. I can’t decide really.

I’m otherwise okay with Canals just being for fun.

@Sostratus I think disconnecting Harbours from City Centres was a good change overall. I particularly like how you actually end up with two levels of Harbour - a free “low tech” Harbour just by settling on the Coast, and the advanced for real Harbour after you research the relevant tech which comes later but you have more flexibility with placement. But yes, separating Harbours from Coastal Cities also introduces some oddities, which is sort of evidenced by FXS repeated tweaking to incentivise Coastal Harbour Cities (first extra Harbour adjacency for CC, then extra housing for Coastal + Harbour + Lighthouse).

I think the whole extra gold from mobility is more of a mess. It’s a good idea in principle, because it incentivises Railways and Canals based on playing the map rather than just flat yields etc. meaning you’d just spam them. But for me the mechanics just don’t click, and so it’s just not something I ever leverage except just by luck.

 

[Sostratus]

By the way, I see you're running CO2 recapture. On Deity, I can't remember of a game where I could reach that tech in time to stop GW, usually the world is already under water, sometimes making more natural canals than necessary

Stop Global Warming? Why would I want to do that?! I want those Maori to sink back into the ocean form whence they came! (And I did succeed in flooding several of their cities this game.) CO2 recapture is super OP for generating absurd diplo favor, which is why I use it.

Additionally, Trade Routes traversing through a Canal gets a boost in trade route yield so they have that benefit as well.

It's only like +1 gold. Which is better than none, but i find that traders have a nasty habit of sailing to a harbor, walking overland around the canal, and then re-embarking at another harbor. Maybe Its just me.

I'll try and keep in mind the IZ bonus in the future, it might entice me to build a few more !

There are some pretty neat tricks you can do by settling one tile in from the coast - like AQ to a mountain +Canal to the sea making an easy +5 spot. Or sometimes a city on straight (vertical) shoreline can put 2 canals to the shore and then you can drop an IZ int he middle for +5. (A diamond of Canal-City/IZ-Canal.) This works really well if you just send a contingent of military engineers in ahead of them so the canals only take a few turns. If you are japan then you get a lot more gains this way.
Handy for when i settle on otherwise empty areas to get access to some oil or coal or something, so the city can actually be useful.

 

[Abaxial]

Harbours are not built away from a city. They are built away from the city centre, but all districts are part of the city.

 

[kaspergm]

I wonder if harbors being allowed non adjacent to a city was a good move in the long run...

I think this is one of the single best elements of Civ6. When that's said, the notion of melee ships that can attack coastal cities but not cities placed one hex inland is just stupid. As if naval raiders actually use the actual ship to hammer in the walls, or whatever.

The whole idea of naval vs. ranged ships need to go away imo. Ships should be able to engage in melee combat with each other, and come the age of canons, they should be able to perform ranged attacks on each other or bombardments on cities. If a city comes down to 0 health, any unit should be able to conquer it. This should also count for land units. No more nonsense where 5 archer units have taken the city down to 0 health but can't conquer it.

 

[Uberfrog]

I always thought that canals in Civ were a solution looking for a problem.

I mostly still think the same, but there is undeniably something fun about creating networks of canals, even if their gameplay benefits are limited. It's nice to get the IZ adjacency bonuses though.

 

[King of Prussia]

I like canals. Their importance will grow if the AI built a proper navy. Much like encampments grow in importance when the threat of a strong invasion is greater. They gave encampments secondary benefits to help make them more attractive. I dont recall all the adjacency boosts, but giving more gold to harbors and CH makes sense.

 

[GIO888]

I like canals. Using Gedemo's maps there's loads of lakes, and its fun to link them all up and have inland ports making battleships late game!

 

[steveg700]

As IZ bonus only. Otherwise they are useless adds to the game. Never understood the hype about them.

Totally agree. If the canal were just a feature of the tile that we could place districts/etc on top of, they’d be great. (Look how many European cities had canal networks dug into them).

perhaps if naval trade and combat mattered more, and these things didn’t come so late, then connecting up bodies of water would make more sense.

(It would also be nice if barbarians couldn’t sail through your canals!)

Well, the hype wasn't about getting massive yields or adjacency bonuses. It was simply that people wanted to be able to get their ships from one side of a land mass to another without sailing them all the way around. It's not really a convoluted meme. Pretty straightforward. But in practice, Civ mentality forces us to place a valuation on space and production. Actually, canals give bonus gold to trade routes, but gold generation is already taken for granted, moot value there. A lot of times when I would be able to drop a canal, I wind up just realizing I'd rather save the spot for anything else--a farming triangle, an aerodome, a spaceport, a neighborhood, a wonder, etc.

There does seem to be a disconnect between expectations and execution. As you say, handling them like railroads would have allowed for passage through districts. Often as not, the flat-land requirement renders canal arrangements unfeasible, as does limiting them to a single tile. I daresay the Panama Canal wonder was a mistake, and players should just be allowed to build chains of canals and locks as they please.

Honestly, a lot of my frustrations with canals comes with how trade routes work. Even using canals, railroads, tunnels, and even wonders like Panama Canal or University of Sankore, I still can't create a financial mecca that will draw in trade routes from AI allies. I'm not sure what drives the AI to choose the routes it chooses, but since it tends to only make routes to cities on my borders (notably, those on coast) I suspect a lot of it amounts to the AI not making a great effort to scout its allies' territories so it can fill in its map. It may never have a complete route they can take.

 

[Sostratus]

Honestly, a lot of my frustrations with canals comes with how trade routes work. Even using canals, railroads, tunnels, and even wonders like Panama Canal or University of Sankore, I still can't create a financial mecca that will draw in trade routes from AI allies. I'm not sure what drives the AI to choose the routes it chooses, but since it tends to only make routes to cities on my borders (notably, those on coast) I suspect a lot of it amounts to the AI not making a great effort to scout its allies' territories so it can fill in its map. It may never have a complete route they can take.

They removed all the stuff from civ5 where you could make serious coin for having lucrative destinations. There's still a fair amount of it present - great merchants, wonders - but I agree that it is supremely frustrating that the trade route system is basically "get yields independent of everyone else." Even the gold income from foreign routes is just based on how many districts they have. There is very little depth, because you cannot specialize into trade or really do anything beyond use up route capacity. (For all the people that will comment on the roads thing, i get that, but that's a minor facet beyond the early game.)

 

[Isengardtom]

I never have. For IZs I use dams and aqueducts and keep around stone quarries if I have them.

there’s not many maps where they are super useful

 

[Jkchart]

I love using them. I don't get to every game I play, but I enjoy making maximum effectiveness of them when i can.

 

[Xandinho]

I can count on the fingers of one hand how many matches I have built at least one, they are very situational and do not have much impact on the match. Seriously, I think the inclusion of the canals was more of an incessant request from the fans than a real need for the game. Perhaps the problem is not the canals themselves, but because the naval combat almost insignificant in the game?
I can't complain about dams, which is really a good and useful inclusion.

 

[shaglio]

I build them very rarely. Not because I don't like them, but because either A) the geography doesn't call for one or B) the perfect spot to build one winds up being a hill. I have never once considered the adjacency bonus when contemplating building a canal.

 

[Sostratus]

Perhaps the problem is not the canals themselves, but because the naval combat almost insignificant in the game?

Naval combat + the balancing of late game. In regular balance, units like battleships are, even excluding the resource requirement, pretty "meh" for a capital ship. Compare to civ5, where ranged naval ships were quite deadly: these units could get 3 crucial promotions for +33% against land units each. And they could start with 2 of them. Not so in civ6, where there is only a single +7 (~33%) vs land units available, and it's a second level promotion.
Even if naval fleet action against the Ai is pointless, players would still have a massive incentive to sail such a strong unit around the map to brutalize their enemies. To compare against fighting units like infantry, it would be sort of like if a freshly built Battleship was just like the Minas Geraes at 80. (In terms of what a civ5 BB with 30 starting XP would be like.)
People would build canals to get those ships into lakes and bays so they could open up the big guns. When you add in how constrained strategic resources are this time around - deposits give 2 or 3 each when civ5 had deposits giving 6 and 8 - and the naval justification just isn't there.