[GS] Do you use canals?

Canals are one of those things that I don't often build, but when I do, it's always super useful. A well-placed canal can save 10-20 turns for naval units and occasionally it'll be the only way to circumnavigate the map.

Building an entire district just to get an addition +2 on an IZ is a waste of time and production. Germany and Victoria England make it more viable to do that, but I doubt the math still adds up.
 
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People would build canals to get those ships into lakes and bays so they could open up the big guns.
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..or out - playing with one of my brothers, I got an inland sea start (random map) as Phoenicia and felt like having a permanently chronosphered fleet (C&C: Red Alert reference). Now I'm spamming railroads all over the land to melt ice (I can't help thinking of Populous while raising the water level. :old:) until all water can be canalized.
 
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.)
Plus, route capacity is just how many cities that have lighthouses or markets, which just rewards wide-settling further.
 
Building an entire district just to get an addition +2 on an IZ is a waste of time and production. Germany and Victoria England make it more viable to do that, but I doubt the math still adds up.
Assuming you use craftsmen card (any IZ focused play style will anyways) and spam coal plants-
That +2:c5production: becomes a net of +8:c5production:. Now, canals are not the cheapest district- but, they should never cost more than 2.5 military engineers (170:c5production: each) or 425 total:c5production: for Germany, and a mere ~106:c5production: for Britannia.

Being able to transfer in production from other cities like this is what makes setting up “green districts” like canals and dams so attractive- it’s actually similar cost efficiency to building a factory to cover that one city with the full +6 powered aura. If you think about it as 8 production on the tile, equal to a fully built up encampment and buildings, it’s not so bad at all. And if it touches more than one IZ, you effectively get double or triple the output for the same price.
 
I've been disappointed by canals and don't understand why they come so late.
Historically, we didn't wait for steam powser to dig canals, they could be perfectly fine with engineering or mass production.
But the most annoying feature is that their requirements are very difficult to meet, and even if you plan a canal at the beginning of the game, chances are a ressource will pop on the tile. It's almost as frustrating as the requirements for polders when R&F was released.
 
Canals can ve very cool in certain maps to cut corners, but most of the time I end up looking for the 1 tile narrow space, if any and build a city and use it as canal.

Now, if only we had navigatable rivers, canals could be a whole different level of useful.
 
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Now, if only we had navigatable rivers, canals could be a whole different level of useful.
On the one hand, rivers on tile edges makes for nice natural borders and dealing with graphics (since the tile itself is free of obstruction.) They made this change in civ4 i think and are pretty pleased with it.
On the other, the fact that we can't do anything with boats+rivers is unfortunate, given how unbelievably huge river shipping etc is and was. I'm not sure how to make it work while keeping the upsides of rivers on edges, though.
 
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Yeah, adjacency bonuses are a neat idea in some respects, but I would like to see rivers impact trade more than just giving hubs a base yield boost.

Even with rivers just running along the edges, it would still be possible for ships to move across them to riverside cities, essentially the naval equivalent of the airlift ability.
 
On the one hand, rivers on tile edges makes for nice natural borders and dealing with graphics (since the tile itself is free of obstruction.) They made this change in civ4 i think and are pretty pleased with it.
On the other, the fact that we can't do anything with boats+rivers is unfortunate, given how unbelievably huge river shipping etc is and was. I'm not sure how to make it work while keeping the upsides of rivers on edges, though.
In civ2 rivers (amidst tiles) worked the same as (prebuilt) roads: from the beginning of the game exploration was quite natural: preferred along river valleys (without terrain movement penalties) ...
Civ3 changed that, with the new defense bonus for being attacked over river and movement malus for crossing river ...

I love both & miss the absent. :(

.
 
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I remember canals literally saving my ass in two different MP matches, so no, they are not useless.

That said, I would like them coming earlier and maybe being improved at steam power with less restrictive placement and some minor bonuses.
 
less restrictive placement and some minor bonuses.
Aqueducts give +2 housing no matter what; dams give +3 housing and +1 amenity no matter what. The canal is just a canal. Even if it gave you +1 amenity or +2 housing or something to feel like the whole tile isn't being thrown away. It's not like you couldn't throw some of those little procedural neighborhood buildings into the canal tile.

One thing they could conceivably do in a future game is allow you to place a canal without a full connection so you could chain them over several tiles. Then you could have a "Lock" building at steam power, and require a lock to be built on a flat tile canal to enable you to place one on an adjacent hill tile (so you could go one elevation step at a time - water-flat-hill-flat-water.) Or something along these lines - it's very frustrating when a big lake chain is separated from the sea by a hill.
 
Not a lot of the time but when I do it's glorious
 
@Sostratus This has been an entertaining thread. Thanks. And I like your posts.

Quibbles aside, I actually think there's something very solid in the current IZ and Canal mechanics. I had a long essay-post a million years ago about how Civ doesn't really capture the feel of an Industrial Revolution. I think it does moreso now. It's not just the more hammers, it's also the way you build those hammers makes you feel like you're building little Industrial Hubs.

I mean, I don't think Civ's mechanics actually align with what really happened in the Industrial Revolution and the impact and societal changes that happened. It's not like the Industrial Revolution resulted in humans moving to Canal based economies. But so long as you don't think too hard about it, it does sort of capture the feel more now; and the Industrial Zone Tetris game that is created is genuinely fun, particularly because you are putting your puzzle together over multiple eras.

One other thought. At the moment, Civ 6 basically gives up on doing anything about global trade. You get Trade Routes (which is a sort of Wide mechanic, i.e. more cities = more trade routes). But then Trade Routes really only give you yields, and those yields are always based on things that have nothing to do with trade itself - they're based on Districts, Alliance, Policy cards etc. Real Canals and Railways just don't have much they can logically do within those sort of mechanics. Canals and Railways do have the potential to tie more into the "play the map" mechanics, and change how you interact with the map. But it doesn't really pan out that way because the game just doesn't get to that level of complexity that cutting through distances really makes that much sense.

I hope that makes sense. Maybe an example. I mean, Civ would never let you have a situation like the Suez Canal crisis. Losing access to a particular canal just wouldn't have that much impact on your economy - your Traders don't need to use any particular routes to get from A to B, you can't actually block traders (only pillage them), and the only thing trade routes are providing is yields - you're not going to lose access to some key resource because a trade route is disrupted.

I'm unsure whether Civ should really ever go down the route of having more mechanics around trade and commerce, and trying to capture more the nuance of that area. It's not EU IV. And even if FXS wanted to do that, maybe it's too hard. I mean, FXS's track record here is poor - silly Corporations (Sids Sushi) and "Executive" units. Just rubbish if you ask me. To make Trade be more, er, real, I guess, you'd really need to tie Trade to particular routes or nodes, it would need have more to do with resources, and you'd need to look more seriously at how trade creates efficiencies, supply, demand etc. to create value. That all just sounds too hard to me, and maybe just too much micro. I'd much rather FXS concentrate on more Governors and Trebuchets.

Sorry. Someone put the ramble slider to max. Anyway. Love the chat on this thread. I'm happy with Canals.
 
I hope that makes sense. Maybe an example. I mean, Civ would never let you have a situation like the Suez Canal crisis. Losing access to a particular canal just wouldn't have that much impact on your economy - your Traders don't need to use any particular routes to get from A to B, you can't actually block traders (only pillage them), and the only thing trade routes are providing is yields - you're not going to lose access to some key resource because a trade route is disrupted
I almost feel like the game needs some kind of special trade value lever, outside of just making everything gold, that can sort of represent a common denominator of "there is lots of opportunity here for mercantile activity." And then you could (metaphorically) see it "pool" at certain spots, like ports or railway junction cities, and then individual cities would want to send traders to those spots. IDK how it would work off the top of my head, perhaps some combo of pop+infrastructure+ routes (trade or city connection) stopping at the city create the "pool" and then traders themselves are the arbitrageurs that allow a given city to access it. This would probably pair best with the idea that traders are actually locked to their city, and instead opening more and more routes per city, they just make the trader himself get more output. (Think of how civ4 or civBE had a fixed number of routes per city that scaled.)

But somehow it would be nice to feel like the expense of the panama canal linking two oceans was worth it for the trade benefits.
 
I almost feel like the game needs some kind of special trade value lever, outside of just making everything gold, that can sort of represent a common denominator of "there is lots of opportunity here for mercantile activity." And then you could (metaphorically) see it "pool" at certain spots, like ports or railway junction cities, and then individual cities would want to send traders to those spots. IDK how it would work off the top of my head, perhaps some combo of pop+infrastructure+ routes (trade or city connection) stopping at the city create the "pool" and then traders themselves are the arbitrageurs that allow a given city to access it. This would probably pair best with the idea that traders are actually locked to their city, and instead opening more and more routes per city, they just make the trader himself get more output. (Think of how civ4 or civBE had a fixed number of routes per city that scaled.)

But somehow it would be nice to feel like the expense of the panama canal linking two oceans was worth it for the trade benefits.

Like I said, I'm not sure it's really worth the effort for FXS to do much more with the trade system. But... if they were going to do something, I think the key thing that's missing is tying trade more to the map.

Currently, it literally doesn't matter where your Traders (as in route or destination) beyond some routes are more vulnerable to barbarians than others, and in some situations you may trade routes to run across continents. Sure, you may want to route to a particular City because it has better yields, or you route through other Cities because of Trading Posts and or "efficiency", but it's always pretty marginal. You never need to send your trader to civilization X to maintain your supply of Iron etc., and you never need your Traders to pass through eg the Panama Canal because going some other way just wouldn't be economical.

I think what would be better would be having specific "trade nodes", and needing to run your Traders through those specific nodes. You could then sort of have a bit of game around being the one to found each node (perhaps one per continent) and later on controlling the node. Perhaps you could then also have some sort of mechanics tied to needing access to certain trade nodes to have access to certain resources etc.

But like I said, maybe something like that is just not worth the effort.
 
On the one hand, rivers on tile edges makes for nice natural borders and dealing with graphics (since the tile itself is free of obstruction.) They made this change in civ4 i think and are pretty pleased with it.
On the other, the fact that we can't do anything with boats+rivers is unfortunate, given how unbelievably huge river shipping etc is and was. I'm not sure how to make it work while keeping the upsides of rivers on edges, though.
They (devs) could make it work by dividing the mishmash of strategical decisions and tactical/operational moves into separate strategical (ordinary) turns and tactical/operational (in-between) turns, where tiles (and movement) would be treated differently - effectively halved..
Strategical (ordinary) turns
- hexagon (pentagon) tiles allowing 3 (2) units per tile
Tactical/operational (in-between) turns
- hexagon (pentagon) tiles split into 6 (5) triangles allowing 1 (1) unit per node​
 
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I've been exploring the use of them on the trade front and believe they are somewhat useful there for additional gold between continents. I think they are fun and interesting incorporating them for defensive (or offensive) ship power projection as @Victoria has stated. But the real reason to always explore building them is to exploit the production value when placed right with aqueducts etc. I have been trying to build the super production spot centered in between dams, canals, aqueducts and even the Panama Canal (?) Does this count as a normal canal I am wondering. I've, unfortunately (?) have always won games before having the chance to build that wonder with the others.
 
Does this count as a normal canal I am wondering. I've, unfortunately (?) have always won games before having the chance to build that wonder with the others.
The Panama Canal tile itself (the tile you place, the wonder tile) does NOT count as a canal. The two canal districts it creates, though, do count. I’ve used that fact to make fun IZ adjacency art before, including a +18IZ as Japan.
You can see examples of this linked in my IZ guide.
 
I think one undiscussed way that canals, tunnels, and railroads help with trade is allowing longer distance routes. Often, I find that one city in the AI’s territory is worth way more than others, and the infrastructure tiles help all my cities stack toward that one. Or sometimes, they help reach an ally so that you can get the alliance boosting trade route sooner. This doesn’t come up in every game, but in particularly large empires it can help.

On the trade note, I really wish the franchise would consolidate the trade systems. Trade routes are an excellent system, and I wish that trading resources were incorporated into the system. I understand they want the diplomatic element, but there’s currently no meshing between the two systems. If trade routes were required for a negotiated exchange to occur, canals, railroads, and tunnels could potentially become vastly more important, as well as guarding routes. Imagine if you needed to maintain a route from a colony to your main empire to keep that supply of oil active! Or a transcontinental route to buy luxuries from distant empires!
 
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