Land management in FfH

[bdmarti]

so part of what needs to be done is make terraforming harder.
2. This process should also consume the unit as a penalty for what you are doing. as of now there are zero consequences for doing this. you are manipulating the balance of nature for your own selfish needs, and nothing bad will ever happen... In a sense you are building a farm on plains when you terraform it to grassland. perhaps make the world unit druid (forgot its name) be able to do this without consuming him.

I like this for slowing down the rate of terraforming, especially when higher level terraforming spells cost such valuable units.
I think that a hero or two with the ability to not sacrifice themselves would be nice.

As a twist, I might also suggest that casters of the veil can sacrifice other units, rather than themselves, provided there is a sufficiently powerful unit in their stack.

One other idea might be to make the vitalize spell exclusive to one or two heros and to make a new spell the 3rd level nature spell:
Balance of Nature -- This spell swaps the properties of the target plot with the properties of the caster's plot.

In this way, you could move grassland or hills around, but you couldn't make new grassland.
Deserts, forrests, and plains are covered by other spells, so you can make those if you like.

The ability to "move" hills around like this is also interesting.

The ability to swap the best plots of your neighbor with the worst plots on your border is also interesting.

 

[Silverkiss]

The ability to swap the best plots of your neighbor with the worst plots on your border is also interesting.

But that should be considered an act of war.

 

[Chandrasekhar]

Might be interesting if you could swap resources. Interesting, but I wouldn't like it much.

 

[KaNeaGE]

what if terraforming was bound to a civic or religion. for instance what if the only way to terraform to grass is to be FoL and under Guardian of Nature civic. OO could use slavery to artificially build rivers. RoK could use Arete to create hills.

All should be able to terraform into plains by default.

Im not sure what the Order or AV should get special, if anything.

 

[Chandrasekhar]

I really don't think the three early religions need any more relative boosts...

 

[mervvyn]

I'd be interesting to see how the following worked out for cottages:


Cottage: -1(Negative improvement!)

Hamlet: -1, +1

Village: -1, +2, 0.25

Town: -1, +3, 0.25, 0.25 (The area is too crowded!)

+1 from Arcane Lore to all of the above.
+1 from Medicine to all of the above, also removes the health penalty.
+1 from Unquestioning Obedience to all of the above, also removes the happy penalty.


This makes cottages useless at first, but still worthwile to build and work (especially on flood plains with financial leaders - 23 after a single growth is pretty good.

Massing cottages on all tiles will not only leave you short on food, but also start hurting the happiness and healthiness of the city once they grow up.

Techs eventually remove all the penalties, but the current cottages could only ever be reached by Order civs. Further, I'd like to see some specific civs get special cottage bonuses - say, the Luchuirp might get an additional +1 hammers (silly 15-images-per-post limit!) at all levels.

I'd also like to see this suggestion tried out - it doesn't completely nerf cottages but spreads their power out over the tech tree a bit, which seems to be a good idea. This isn't to say that other improvements don't need a step up, but I would tend to disagree with proposals looking to drastically reduce the power of cottages.

 

[Good Sauce]

This suggestion was already shot down. the AI wouldn't understand how to use it. They'd never build cottages, or if they did, would never work them.

 

[Unser Giftzwerg]

damn ISP. It's good to see some nice responses to this thread. If my connection remains stable I might be able to reply to some of them.

 

[Keldan]

I don't know if someone have already said it (i'm at office so I don't have time to read all the thread), but there is two things I think they will be good :

* special improvement for some civs : as the Ljosalfar build farm and cottage in forest, it will be great if some civs can build farm and cottage in desert, jungle, tundra and snow (with consequent bonus to balance the natural bad production of the tile)

* spell/abilities to change the tile : as vitalize take a desert or a tundra and change it to grassland, it will be cool, for use of previous improvements or scortched earth strategy, if there are spells to change grassland into desert and tundra (at least change grassland to plains)

And this is not directly related to the subject of the thread, but it will be nice if there is different king of druid. A druid is a guy with divine+sorcery+summoning, but only in nature sphere. I think it cool give more flavor if there are druids in other spheres, like the dwarven druid with earth.

 

[Keldan]

Another draf idea : having "super worker", non combat unit, who can buld improvement and with spells to terraform the land (create/destroy hill, vitalize/scorch/freeze the land, build forest), following the same rule than spellcaster (different level of channeling, mana required, etc/)

 

[AlazkanAssassin]

What if instead of nerfing terraforming, we made it less relyable by providing a counter to it?

Metamagic spell: "Regress Lands"

All teraformed terrain within a certain radius of the caster (or selected tile)
return to their original terrain type.

Scorch, spring, vitalize, bloom, tsunami, would have their effects countered and the terrain returned to the original state of the tile.

This will likely be unfeasable because of the requirement to store data on the original terrain of every tile.

natural growth such as forest/jungle spread, forest advancment (new/forest/anchient), and chopping/clearing should be left out of this spells influence as these changes could be consitered to be non-magical in nature.

If forests were reverted as well it would add substantial liability to the Ljosalfar cottage forest spam strategy (wait, maybe that's a good thing)

for the area of effect for this spell I would make it rather substantial, normally just the tile the caster is in,
spell extension 1: casters tile and surrounding ring,
spell extension 2: extend it to 2 surrounding rings, thus 25 total squares affected!

All improvments should be left as is, with regular effects, even if the new tile type does not support them. This might lead to a few minor abuses (I want my cottage on a plains hill dangit!) This should be because the improvments were not magically contructed, and thus unaffected by the metamagic.

The data storage required for this could be coupled with another idea I heard a while ago that the world should start out in a more glacier/tundra state and gradually warm up over the first hundred of so turns.
Basically, the map generator makes a map, which is stored into the extra "history" location. An expanded version of kael's pregame mapchecker would then modify the whole worlds terrain to be colder. Every turn, some squares (determined by whatever algorithm would work) would be melted into their originally generated terrain type.
The data stored in this history would never be altered from the original map creation. (except by armageddon spells, if desired)
When regress lands is used, the land would revert back to whatever it was supposed to be after melting.

 

[Silverkiss]

I think that you should be able to turn grassland into plains (another spell, diferrent from this fancy one Alazkan proposed (but I support his idea)), heck I want Hills/Plains with mines in my most productive cities lol

 

[Sureshot]

ya ive been wanting that for a while, i dont bother building genesis because it would ruin all my plains/hills cities and mines