Is there any way to melt Ice?

[Onionsoilder]

Alright, so several abilities in FfH2 allow you to upgrade most undesirable terrain. Spring can turn Desert into Plains, Scorch can turn Snow into Tundra. Is there any way to melt the ice that covers the top of the world?

 

[Charybdis]

Alright, so several abilities in FfH2 allow you to upgrade most undesirable terrain. Spring can turn Desert into Plains, Scorch can turn Snow into Tundra. Is there any way to melt the ice that covers the top of the world?

The ice feature that stops people from moving onto it near the poles? No. The ice 'terrain' (like snow or tundra) you can vitalize, would think you can scorch too tbh.

 

[Onionsoilder]

The ice feature that stops people from moving onto it near the poles? No.

Yeah, that's what I was talking about. Guess you can't though...

 

[mimic]

Mulcarn would have a fit...

 

[openair]

If you were able to melt the ice with scorch, logically, all you would end up with is another ocean tile.

 

[Onionsoilder]

If you were able to melt the ice with scorch, logically, all you would end up with is another ocean tile.

Which is good, if you're Lanun. Which I am in my current game. Which is why I'm asking.

 

[Broken Hawk]

World Builder.

 

[cvlowe]

Somebody needs to make an "Ice Breaker" upgrade for ships!

 

[Emptiness]

filler filler

 

[Neomega]

It would make sense that a mage with water walking and scorch could melt ice. Probably near impossible to teach the AI to open trade routes with it.

 

[Corlis]

Or just give the ability to Fireballs

 

[Domingo]

I personally recommend a warm island song.

 

[MagisterCultuum]

In a couple of my versions I created an Ice Breaker boat (available at engineering) that could remove ice from a tile temporarily. The TempFeatureType was set to -1, so it went back to Ice after a small random number of turns.


I'm not sure how much I like that though. I'm thinking in future versions I may instead try letting Workboats after a certain tech get a promotion that lets them move impassible and giving them a build order that removes the ice the same way normal workers can remove jungle. I may then have ice near the poles move around a refreeze randomly. I might merge in [MODCOMP] Blizzards (Age of Ice Style) and combine the spread of sea ice with that mechanic.




Letting Scorch work could also be a good idea, but water walking alone would not let a mage move through an impassible feature like sea ice.

It could be interesting if we could allow at least certain land units walk on sea ice, but maybe make it break and kill them if there are too many units/too heavy units/whatever.

 

[Neomega]

Letting Scorch work could also be a good idea, but water walking alone would not let a mage move through an impassible feature like sea ice.

couldn't that be changed pretty easily as well?

 

[MagisterCultuum]

Not that easily. Promotions (in FfH, not FF) cannot let units move impassible without giving them the full flying ability, which also won't let them use roads.

Another approach would be letting Ice be passable, but requiring resistance to Cold damage to pass though. It would basically work just like Flames. Features that require resistance always require 20% resistance, so Magic Immune, Magic Resistant, Cold Resistant, or Winterborn would make it passable to units of the right domain or with water walking/flying. Currently no water unit can get these promotions, so it wouldn't make a difference for them. Water walking could be made to give cold resistance, but then it would be the best counter to Blizzards. However, it would mean that Flying units could no longer pass over the ice (without a promotion to give resistance to cold, that is). It would also mean that cities could work ice tiles for full yields, unless the feature were given negative yields to balance that.

 

[Jabie]

Couldn't Scorch be rewritten to melt ice provided it isn't adjacent to the edge of the map. That would maintain the terraform function, yet still give polar caps at the North and South Poles. This'll make polar "mana-grab" port cities a little more useful. The Illians could allowed to work Ice for food instead.

 

[Nor'easter]

If you want to play without the polar ice caps you can select Custom Game and choose the World Wrap to be Toroidal rather than Cylindrical. Unfortunately, that doesn't work with Tectonics maps (my favorite), but seems to work with most other map types.

Regardless, I do agree that having a spell that melts ice would be nice.