Navigable rivers

Menocchio said:
They're super cool, though I wish there were more buildings or improvements you could stick down on them. Trying to have a proper urban city beside a navigable river is a labour of love without much of a wage to show for it.
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Agreed, modern doesn’t even have a double-adjacency quarter that can be formed on water.

I have found a few huge navigable rivers but only gotten one for myself (without conquest) once as hat-Egypt. The main reason I’ve never tried Shawnee, that one game it would have worked I had almost no places for their UI (I had gotten a good city state UI), and was already enough ahead that it didn’t feel worth contunuing. I will definitely reroll my tecumseh game until I get a sweet river.

I do want to see better river formation (starting from mountains, merging into navigable) and minor rivers to affect district graphics.
 
I don't like navigable rivers. I mean, they're cool as a feature, but they're currently really weak. Natural yields you get from improvements on navigable rivers are poor compared to what you can get from mines and woodcutters. They complicate districting because you can't really build a lot of things on them. Sure, you can build bridges, but they unlock so late. Worst of all, no resources spawn on navigable river tiles. The only nice thing you get from navigable rivers is that they're susceptible to flooding, which improves yields. I also agree that they're not very common in the game. This is fine as I usually I'm not interested in settling on a tile adjacent to a lot of navigable river tiles, but the other day I was playing as Hatshepsut's Egypt, and I was having so much trouble getting a decent map where I could get more than one city next to a navigable river.
 
Shawnee shouldn't have their unique ability tied to nav river. It should be fresh water but Mississippi should have nav river bias.

Shawnee should have a 1st tier tradition ignore and stealth vegetation for all non siege and non cav units. Maybe balance it with a negative defend penalty and/or nerfed starting infantry.

Mississippi should have +1 movement tradition on nav rivers.
 
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Zaarin said:
. . . there were no Navigable Rivers in my territory, not sure I even knew where there was one on my continent. At any rate, if a leader unlocks a civ, I think they should always be able to play that civ optimally, regardless of what civ they start as.
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This is my biggest gripe with navigable rivers so far. Considering that I was one of the people persistently posting about how we needed navigable rivers ever since Civ V, it almost feels Ungrateful to complain . . .

I have been playing without Mods, almost entirely on Continents Standard size maps, and in a dozen games played through the end of Exploration and 3 games all the way through Modern Age, I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times I've seen a navigable river long enough to put 3 cities/settlements on. Even rivers long enough for 2 decent-sized settlements are not that common - in my latest game, just starting Modern Age with the entire map visible, there are exactly 3 navigable rivers long enough to put 2 settlements on and nothing longer.

So the question that springs to lip is: where are our Major Rivers? Where's our Danube, with every capital in southeastern Europe on it? Where's our Mississippi or Amazon or Nile or Volga stretching across a large chunk of a continent?

If people complain about a lack of big bonuses from navigable rivers (and I agree with them), I suggest that any such bonuses are not amenable to good game play if there are only navigable rivers around long enough to hold a tiny fraction of our settlements of any size instead of the majority of the world's large cities as in Real Life.

The place where a navigable river empties into the sea should be a location for a major Metropolis: look at such historical examples as New York City, London (up the tidal reach of the Thames) or Alexandria, Egypt - the combination allowed the cities to draw resources, especially Food before railroads, from a huge area compared to settlements without the river access. In the game, since the access only extends a few tiles inland in most cases, the Mega Bonuses do not apply - but they should.

Having, depending on the map, at least the equivalent of 2 Major Rivers on each continent that can each hold 3 or more settlements with room to spare between them, would allow two things that I think would be major pluses to the game:

1. Bonuses could legitimately be linked to the number of tiles bordered by the river, so that the Major Rivers provide serious advantages to cities on them and those advantages are potentially available to more than a single Civ on the continent, which is about the best we can do now.

2. Canals - which are a major lack in the game now - could be added by Exploration Age to allow navigable rivers to be extended or linked by canal - potentially allowing naval trade routes to cross a continent or land mass between two oceans and allow extra bonuses to Sea Trade that are available to cities far inland.

With that, starting bias towards Navigable Rivers would really mean something, and some potential Civs could be given appropriate Uniques related to the navigable rivers. After all, the Viking/Norse/Rus navigated the Russian Rivers from the Baltic Sea to the Caspian, establishing trade routes almost entirely river-borne that linked the Chinese 'Silk Road' end points (at cities along the eastern shore of the Caspian) with western Europe, while the Erie Canal that linked the Hudson River with the Great Lakes started New York City's explosive growth in the 19th century. It's a shame to leave those kinds of dynamics out of the game.
 
I noticed that you cant build ships on a lake. Its weird I tried it and had the ship technology and it still wouldn't be able to build it.
 
Navigable rivers are really strong with the god of the sea pantheon. Unfortunately, it doesn't carry on into the exploration age, but at least you unlock river specific warehouses to replace the boats with.
 
MACKA0ili said:
Navigable rivers are really strong with the god of the sea pantheon. Unfortunately, it doesn't carry on into the exploration age, but at least you unlock river specific warehouses to replace the boats with.
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I tried this a few games, mostly as Egypt, and found that my city on the river was about as strong as usual, but then became little more useful than a food town in later eras, as you mention, which really undermined the extra growth the food allowed. It feels like having half a town of extra food and no more production than otherwise.

Maybe nav rivers should be +2 adjacency to make inland trade towns comparable to coastal ones, and deltas insane.

I do really like the ideal of longer rivers allowing for more inland food travel from towns, maybe tiles on the river should count only 1:3 toward the 9 tile distance.
 
Noble Zarkon said:
Probably helpful for the AI lol
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If you can code "don't build ships on lakes" logic into the game itself, you could code the same logic into AI. Actually with the current architecture (as far as we know from the files exposed for modding) you could use exactly the same code (as a function and check it from AI decision trees).

So, putting this restriction on the game itself instead of putting it on AI doesn't make any sense.
 
Taefin said:
I tried this a few games, mostly as Egypt, and found that my city on the river was about as strong as usual, but then became little more useful than a food town in later eras, as you mention, which really undermined the extra growth the food allowed. It feels like having half a town of extra food and no more production than otherwise.

Maybe nav rivers should be +2 adjacency to make inland trade towns comparable to coastal ones, and deltas insane.

I do really like the ideal of longer rivers allowing for more inland food travel from towns, maybe tiles on the river should count only 1:3 toward the 9 tile distance.
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I'm kind of surprised that there's no major/minor adjacency dichotomy in VII, it makes getting even a "great" district location (like a bend in a navigable river for a food/gold building set) feel kind of underwhelming.
 
evonannoredars said:
My no. 1 desired change for navigable rivers, other than improving the fractal map to have more rivers (and inland cliffs), would be allowing them to fork - or even better, also form deltas. It'd make them much more visually interesting imo, as they are a bit uninteresting otherwise. It'd be neat to see cataracts added too.
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Deltas would be awesome, overall more attention to coastal terrain would be wellcome.

I really like nav. rivers, but so often they are only 3 or 4 tiles long and that's it, I think this is yet another area where the lack of map options is showing, I'd love an option to choose the likeness of mayor long navigatable rivers appearing on map. Also, adjacent complaint, minor rivers shouldn't dissapear if I build a district on top of them.
 
ehecatzin said:
Deltas would be awesome, overall more attention to coastal terrain would be wellcome.

I really like nav. rivers, but so often they are only 3 or 4 tiles long and that's it, I think this is yet another area where the lack of map options is showing, I'd love an option to choose the likeness of mayor long navigatable rivers appearing on map. Also, adjacent complaint, minor rivers shouldn't dissapear if I build a district on top of them.
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There is a unique (conquistador) unit for Spain that gives (if I recall correctly) 50 gold per tile of navigable river when activated. Maybe it's 100. In any case, you are looking at 200 - 400 gold in most cases. I did play a game where there was a six tile navigable river, but I realize that this kind of thing is rare. In any case, 400 bonus gold in Exploration is not exciting.
 
queenpea said:
There is a unique (conquistador) unit for Spain that gives (if I recall correctly) 50 gold per tile of navigable river when activated. Maybe it's 100. In any case, you are looking at 200 - 400 gold in most cases. I did play a game where there was a six tile navigable river, but I realize that this kind of thing is rare. In any case, 400 bonus gold in Exploration is not exciting.
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I got over a thousand on gold with that Conquistador. That navigable river was insane.
 
I once had a Navigable river of 9 tiles. Thought i was going to get 450 gold with a Conquistador, ended up being 600 due to 3 tiles of small rivers attached.

The Navigable part was attached to a lake, which had another 2 tile Nav river to the ocean so it was 14 sailable tiles inside my Distant Lands continent
 
aelf said:
I got over a thousand on gold with that Conquistador. That navigable river was insane.
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Okay, I went back to the save to take a look. My memory is faulty.

First, it was an Abbasid Alim, not Conquistador. Secondly, it gave me influence, not gold. I got 900 influence on a 16-tile navigable river, which is still insane, though.
 
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