Passable and workable mountains.

[Naokaukodem]

Unpassable mountains would have been nice in Civ3 where you could have big ranges of mountains blocking the way, but still be able to move stacks in valleys or in-between, especially with how corruption worked for city planning. (more variety instead of "circling the capital")

With 1 Unit Per Tile (1UPT), I think unpassable mountains, while still nice theoretically, can be very annoying while moving units, especially in choke points. Plus, mountains chains have grown so much that they can prevent you to settle all simply, especially with the 4 tiles minimum distance between cities. Not to mention some city locations, at least in Civ6, can be very bad while you already lack space with wonders and districts on the map, as oppposed to too much farms in Civ5.

So, there should be at least ways, to travel through and work mountains.

Sky resorts in Civ6 should already be workable, giving gold on top of tourism. The Incas scheme should be the norm, because you know, if one civ can do it, the others can to, it all depends where they spawn. (and there's a lot of Unique Abilities -or features, like religion- in Civ6 I would like to be the norm, because it would make the game more interesting all simply)

Mountains with interesting resources should be workable.

Not all mountains are brown from the bottom to the ice, and all what can be called a mountain has not ice.

Grassy/wooded mountains should appear also.

In reality, hills are terrains that are located between an altitude of 50 and 600 meters, while all what's above 600 meters is called a mountain. Firaxis could use this in an altitude engine to help display the correct feature at the correct altitude. As you see, not all mountains are unpassable/lifeless/icy. More, it often happens that they have very fertile valleys between them, as opposed to being icy "chains" or picks with high altitude between them. (passes)

In Civ5 and Civ6, all mountains are the Himalayas, and all mountains chains Himalayas with no passes whatsoever. I know i'm resorting with realism when I wouldn't have seen it a problem in Civ3, but hey, I'm sure the same type of differenciation would have been profitable to Civ3 too.

 

[Alexander's Hetaroi]

Well passable mountains do become a thing, at least with mountain tunnels, in the modern era.

Should there be ways to do it earlier? Probably, but I don't think I'd make it for everyone. It could be a city-state ability or a charge on a Great Person.

Grassy/wooded mountains should appear also.

I was hoping for more tropical looking mountains near rainforests and the center of maps in the base game. At least similar to the ones we got in the Pirates scenario, so I do agree with this.

 

[Marla_Singer]

With 1 Unit Per Tile (1UPT), I think unpassable mountains, while still nice theoretically, can be very annoying while moving units, especially in choke points. Plus, mountains chains have grown so much that they can prevent you to settle all simply, especially with the 4 tiles minimum distance between cities. Not to mention some city locations, at least in Civ6, can be very bad while you already lack space with wonders and districts on the map, as oppposed to too much farms in Civ5.

So, there should be at least ways, to travel through and work mountains.

To solve such a problem, dropping out 1UPT would make better sense than making mountains passable.

It's been about a decade I'm struggling to understand what people love so much about 1UPT so I'm certainly biased, but making mountains passable so that we could make it easier to move units in a 1UPT context seems like thinking in the wrong direction.


Now, as told in another thread, we could also explore new solutions such as going fully gridless. See here how it could potentially work in a turn-based Civilization environment:
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...ething-in-between.674982/page-3#post-16254660

In the mountain context, that would mean you could easily differenciate valleys from peaks and therefore move your units in line in the valley without being able to make them going over the top of mountains. You could even work the valleys as tiles generated around the cities for mining or animal husbandry. On the other hand, mountain ridges could behave as natural barriers limiting your city radius as that wouldn't necessarily make sense to be able to work terrains beyond them.

There's no doubt that going gridless would require smart thinking to adapt in the best way all Civilization concept for the better without losing out the soul of the game, but it's not necessarily impossible. If I'd be Firaxis, I'd at least work on a proof of concept and see how it would go.

 

[Chekko]

They should at least be passable by lighter units, then I think they should give out some production and some mountains can have mining resources on them. I think it would be cool if it was possible, but expensive and/or time consuming to build tunnels earlier because mountains can really screw your game. Also, Scouts should be more of a scout than a weak soldier with extra movement. Why can't it pass mountains? Why can't it be in some sort of watch tower 'stance' on hills to get extra sight for strategic purposes?

 

[Saxo Grammaticus]

Workable mountain tiles I can definitely get behind. As you point out, there is a mountain-valley dynamic present in many parts. This took on a security element in Byzantine Anatolia, where often the local population was expected to pasture in times of peace and close the gates during raids, whereas the army would focus on attacking looting armies on their way out. In short, productive or pastured mountains (perhaps with a terrace farm up there).

As for passable mountains, perhaps there could be mountain passes where large chains had tiles set aside for high (but finite) movement cost. These tiles could be traversed by trade but carry an attrition penalty for armies that are caught there, like Civ V's Carthage.