Making Ferries on coastal tiles

Hephaistos

Chieftain
Joined
May 24, 2004
Messages
35
Location
Belgium
Hi,

I was just wondering of this idea has been posted before. I couldn't really find it in the search results.

Personally I hate having to ferry units across small/narrow bodies of water, for example between two islands. I find it annoying because of the many mouse clicks you need to make (load the unit, move the transport, unload the unit, sentry the transport and many times it's spread over two turns if it's not a city to city transfer)

So my suggestion is the following:
Make it possible for a workboat to create a 'road' on water.
Making the road destroys the workboat as to make it more costly.
Limit this ability to coastal squares. Maybe limit the distance as well.
These roads can be destroyed as can any improvement.

Problems with this approach:
What with units that end their turn on water? (how to kill them for example)
Will the computer or automated units use these roads and do we want this to happen?

It's just an idea, input would be appreciated.
 
Ok, I think I know how to do half of what your asking

Create a new route (bridge) in the \xml\misc\civ4routeinfo file

change all land unt to inlcude <featuremakespassable>feature_bridge<featuremakespassable/>
opps looks like the one is mod spefic case i just look and could not find the tag in may game asset folder, though i swaer i saw it somewhere, may take python coding to add

and change work boats to can built feature_bridge in the units file.

As far a getting the AI to build or not build i don't know

So thought i had the fix but can't remeber were i saw <feature makes possible> tag could be part of a mod?
 
Is it possible to park a series of transports, and then just move the units across using normal movement?
 
I've been thinking about the different ways it might be possible through XML to make coastal tiles that could be crossed by land units, since I want navigable rivers that don't completely block land passage. I'll look into the possibilities of using routes for this and hopefully get back to you.

As for how the AI would handle it, there's no telling whether they'd actually build coastal routes, and if they did they'd probably misuse them (like building them everywhere, or in completely useless locations). However, you would probably want to set it up so that land and sea units had the proper AI tags (in UnitInfos.xml) to attack each other, since there'd be the possibility of them crossing paths.

So thought i had the fix but can't remeber were i saw <feature makes possible> tag could be part of a mod?

Routes and features aren't quite the same, so I don't think such a tag would do what you think it would. Also, "makes possible" and "makes passable" are two very different functions. :p

I believe <FeatureMakesPossible> is a tile improvement tag, which sets what feature an improvement can be build on, e.g. Lumber Mill on Forest.

Is it possible to park a series of transports, and then just move the units across using normal movement?

Yes, but that's time consuming and tedious (each move between transports would take a whole turn, I think), which is exactly what Hephaistos is trying to avoid.
 
Is it possible to park a series of transports, and then just move the units across using normal movement?

The other way around works better: load a transport with units, move it to another transport, and load the units on the other transport. You'll need to check on the transport name (if it is named) or the moves left to figure out which transport to load the units again.
 
So my suggestion is the following:
Make it possible for a workboat to create a 'road' on water.
Making the road destroys the workboat as to make it more costly.
Limit this ability to coastal squares. Maybe limit the distance as well.
These roads can be destroyed as can any improvement.

Well, I fiddled around with the XML a bit (there are a lot of new tags in BtS that I've never used before), and as I expected it looks like the approach you've outlined won't work without changes to the SDK. Even if a workboat is used to build road on water as per your suggestion, land units cannot make use of it because they cannot enter coastal terrain -- unless you tag them to be able to move on all terrain, in which case they'll be able to move on coast without roads as well. :p
 
Why don't you do it as an "airlift" mission? This would require a city.

There is a ferry building and units can move from ferry building to another ferry building within say 3 squares. Unit has to end movement and then next turn can be ferried.
 
even having a worker create a "road" or "railroad" over water wont work. You can actually place roads and railroads across water and it'll draw a bridge there on the map (in worldbuilder), but land units can still not walk across it. I've tried, sorry I wish it worked like that.

In this case to actually make it work like you want it to, you need to do as Sierra Fox said earlier. This will require at least a little python/SDK work.

As for just getting navigable rivers, the way I'm getting past this in my mod, is having the river 1 coastal tile wide, its on a huge map, so proportionally it still looks fine (the Mississippi and St. Laurence rivers are the only two that are actually navigable on the map). In a couple spots a city/fort will dip out into it as to barely connect to the other side... obviously whoever controls the city/fort can still navigate completely through the river, any enemies or non-opened borders nations cannot.

The ferry would be a nice idea, except I don't think you can limit the range of an airlift.... without just as much python/SDK as the preferred method.

Shiggs
 
I sure hope someone is working on this. I only play on continent maps because I hate loading and unloading boats soooo much.
 
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