Peaks / Mountains in Civ IV

[RobS]

I'm new to Civ 4 and I'm surprised that mountains remain impassable for the duration of the game. I find that somewhat unrealistic, especially in the latter stages of the game. How do other players feel about this? I suppose someone's modded that by now, but I wonder why the vanilla game doesn't allow roads and railroads to be built over mountains. Seems to me that in addition to making roads take a very longtime to build over mountains, there could have also been added a "maintenance fee" of some sort and perhaps a requirement to keep a worker stationed atop the square(s).

 

[sealedinterface]

I'm new to Civ 4 and I'm surprised that mountains remain impassable for the duration of the game. I find that somewhat unrealistic, especially in the latter stages of the game. How do other players feel about this? I suppose someone's modded that by now, but I wonder why the vanilla game doesn't allow roads and railroads to be built over mountains. Seems to me that in addition to making roads take a very longtime to build over mountains, there could have also been added a "maintenance fee" of some sort and perhaps a requirement to keep a worker stationed atop the square(s).

To clarify, they're peaks, not mountains. Peaks represent the world's highest physical points, where few dare to climb. Expecting a large team of workers, let a lone armed troops, to climb up and around a peak is just too ridiculous. In gameplay, peaks in this game serve the purpose of breaking up the land, so that inland areas aren't one empty mass of a flat area. We simply treat peaks as a means of restricting enemy movement (such as to force combat with a stack of doom), and as unworkable tiles to mix up city spacing. Unless you're using custom land generation or a custom scenario, peaks only appear in smaller clusters, so they aren't usually a huge obstacle to unit movement. By the endgame, you'll typically cover most of your controlled land area with railroads (10x movement speed), and they become even less of a hassle. In general, I find they're more of a problem for captured cities settled in close proximity to peaks then they are for movement.

You mentioned mods, and yes there are almost certainly mods out there that allow troop and worker movement, and road building on peaks. I usually play with Realism Invictus (highly recommend once you get the hang of the base game), and that mod allows for transport helicopter units that can fly over peaks. I haven't tried it yet myself, but supposedly you can use helicopters to deposit a worker unit on a peak to build a railroad, making the peak no longer impassible.

 

[RobS]

To clarify, they're peaks, not mountains. Peaks represent the world's highest physical points, where few dare to climb. Expecting a large team of workers, let a lone armed troops, to climb up and around a peak is just too ridiculous. In gameplay, peaks in this game serve the purpose of breaking up the land, so that inland areas aren't one empty mass of a flat area. We simply treat peaks as a means of restricting enemy movement (such as to force combat with a stack of doom), and as unworkable tiles to mix up city spacing. Unless you're using custom land generation or a custom scenario, peaks only appear in smaller clusters, so they aren't usually a huge obstacle to unit movement. By the endgame, you'll typically cover most of your controlled land area with railroads (10x movement speed), and they become even less of a hassle. In general, I find they're more of a problem for captured cities settled in close proximity to peaks then they are for movement.

I figured that they were considered peaks, but considering the scale of the game, even a single square represents a sizeable area wherein in real life mountain passes would have been made. This is certainly true for the modern age.

Although I'm new to Civ IV, having played for perhaps a month now, I have seen numerous examples in early games which I eventually abandoned, where one or two of these "peaks" have blocked off large parts of continents. This happens frequently, not infrequently. In my most recent game, which I just abandoned this morning when I started to lose badly, my Romans started on the west end of a large continent, which tapered to a choke point which blocked off the remaining eastern 2/3 of the continent. Here is a picture:

It is absurd to think that even in ancient times people would not have established mountain passes in cases like this. (Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants comes to mind.)
In my opinion, and as I stated in my previous post, roads over mountains should have been possible, although with very long building times (20 turns or more?) and a permanent maintenance fee for the owning civilization. Subsequently, railroads should have been somewhat easier to build, but also with a permanent maintenance fee.
Just my two cents.

 

[Fish Man]

I figured that they were considered peaks, but considering the scale of the game, even a single square represents a sizeable area wherein in real life mountain passes would have been made. This is certainly true for the modern age.

Although I'm new to Civ IV, having played for perhaps a month now, I have seen numerous examples in early games which I eventually abandoned, where one or two of these "peaks" have blocked off large parts of continents. This happens frequently, not infrequently. In my most recent game, which I just abandoned this morning when I started to lose badly, my Romans started on the west end of a large continent, which tapered to a choke point which blocked off the remaining eastern 2/3 of the continent. Here is a picture:

It is absurd to think that even in ancient times people would not have established mountain passes in cases like this. (Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants and all that comes to mind.)
In my opinion, and as I stated in my previous post, roads over mountains should have been possible, although with very long building times (20 turns or more?) and a permanent maintenance fee for the owning civilization. Subsequently, railroads should have been somewhat easier to build, but also with a permanent maintenance fee.
Just my two cents.

Yeah, sometimes mountains are super annoying, so I'm not really against this feature if it's added. It would be a nice quality-of-life thing. Maybe units/workers can only traverse mountains if, say, steam power is researched.

Also...pardon me if I'm a bit too harsh.

But you didn't lose because of those peaks. You lost because it's almost 1900 AD and you're still on cuirassiers.

 

[ruff_hi]

Or go into world builder and change one of the peaks to a mountain. Problem solved.

 

[RobS]

But you didn't lose because of those peaks. You lost because it's almost 1900 AD and you're still on cuirassiers.

LOL, yeah, I didn't mean to imply that I lost because of the peaks, although I could make the argument that they prevented me from settling the area to the east until it was too late and I was brought into an undesired conflict with a neighboring civilization there. I know why I lost - because I'm a beginner at this game, having come from playing Civ 3 for 15 years and only starting Civ 4 about a month ago.

Or go into world builder and change one of the peaks to a mountain. Problem solved.

Is this possible once a game has started? I mean, without revealing the entire world map and everything?

 

[ruff_hi]

Yes and No. Zoom in on the area you want to change, Ctrl-W into worldbuilder, change the peak to mountain and Ctrl-W out. Don't look at the mini-map?

 

[Absolution]

I figured that they were considered peaks, but considering the scale of the game, even a single square represents a sizeable area wherein in real life mountain passes would have been made. This is certainly true for the modern age.

Although I'm new to Civ IV, having played for perhaps a month now, I have seen numerous examples in early games which I eventually abandoned, where one or two of these "peaks" have blocked off large parts of continents. This happens frequently, not infrequently. In my most recent game, which I just abandoned this morning when I started to lose badly, my Romans started on the west end of a large continent, which tapered to a choke point which blocked off the remaining eastern 2/3 of the continent. Here is a picture:

It is absurd to think that even in ancient times people would not have established mountain passes in cases like this. (Hannibal crossing the Alps with elephants and all that comes to mind.)
In my opinion, and as I stated in my previous post, roads over mountains should have been possible, although with very long building times (20 turns or more?) and a permanent maintenance fee for the owning civilization. Subsequently, railroads should have been somewhat easier to build, but also with a permanent maintenance fee.
Just my two cents.

What if instead of a peak, you simply had sea?
I can not understand how you can name such thing as annoying. This is the terrain, this is the game. You have challenges on the world map itself.
I play Civ IV for 11 years already and it has never seemed like any let-down for me. Let alone the logical part of it. Helicopters today can not hang around peak of thousands of Kilometers, am I right?

And regarding the proportion of a tile - you have to give up this thought. This is something that I wished would be fixed in the next version of the game, but for now we have to accept that a small city takes a space equivalent of the width of Florida in a world map. We also have to accept that every horse resource is actually "represents" a whole region in which horses are common, and every gold mine is a rich land full of gold.

 

[RobS]

What if instead of a peak, you simply had sea?

That statement is a non sequitur.
The point is, even the highest mountain cluster in the real world, the Himalayas, is criss-crossed by mountain passes linking several countries.

In any case, I suspect this had something to do with a fundamental design conundrum that arises if one tries to make peaks impassable unless a road is built over them. Here's what I mean:

If mountains, or "peaks" as they seem to be called in Civ 4, were to be impassable unless a road was built over them, then how would a Worker unit enter the mountain square to begin with when there initially is no road? The ostensible solution would be to make peaks initially only traversable by Worker units. But this in turn would create the problem wherein players would use Worker units as Scouts, in order to explore areas beyond the peaks that are inaccessible to other units, regardless of whether they built a road across the peak or not. Off hand, I don't see an easy solution to this conundrum.
One possible solution might be only let Worker units move adjacent to peaks, at which point the player would designate the peak as a "target" for the Worker unit to built a road upon and only upon the completion of the road would units, including Worker units, be allowed to enter the peak square. But I suspect this may create a substantial programming complication, especially in regard to AI behavior.
Another possible solution to building roads over peaks, might have been to initially allow only Worker units to enter non-roaded peaks, and to automatically force them to build a road/railroad as soon as a player moves them onto a peak. In that case, the road building should take a long time, say 20-30 turns. An additional option would have been that the Worker unit is consumed at the end of the road building process.

In any case, I suspect that this design complication is the real reason peaks were simply made impassable.

I know how "peaks" were treated in Civ 3; units had to stop upon entering them, which basically limited movement across mountains to one square per turn, unless there was a road.
How are mountains, or "peaks" treated in Civ 5 and Civ 6?

 

[RobS]

Yes and No. Zoom in on the area you want to change, Ctrl-W into worldbuilder, change the peak to mountain and Ctrl-W out. Don't look at the mini-map?

OK, I'll try that sometime.

 

[Absolution]

The point is, even the highest mountain cluster in the real world, the Himalayas, is criss-crossed by mountain passes linking several countries.

I may be not best informed, but at least according to how I find the meaning of peaks in the game, do you think it is realistic to allow railroads to be built on a terrain like this?

Or like that?

You may say that peaks are too common in Civ4 maps, that may be possible (I'm not enough of a geographer to tell).

 

[Dhoomstriker]

This concept dates back to Civ I. If I recall correctly, units with 1 movement point that wanted to move onto a mountain square had a "chance" of failing. I recall that trying again on the next turn would work for the unit moving onto the mountain square.

I believe, however, if you already had a unit on that square, then you wouldn't suffer from this penalty. I always imagined that the existing unit on the square was "lending a helping hand" to the other unit who was climbing up the mountain.

However, it feels rather gimmicky to "sometimes" make it onto a mountain square--try explaining that concept to a newbie and such a newbie would likely to be even more turned off. As an aside, I don't recall how the AIs dealt with the situation--maybe they avoided mountains unless they were at war with you and you had a unit up there?

Also, would you get a 100% Defensive Bonus when your unit is on a Peak square? The game already seems pretty balanced in terms of defensive terrain bonuses, so offering a square with an even larger bonus than the currently largest defensive bonus could place that careful balance out of whack.

So, deciding to make a square impassable seems to be a better implementation gameplay-wise, and it also makes for a programmable rule that AIs must follow. Of course, how the AI pathing DEALS with this rule (ineffectively, in some cases) allows for AI abuses, which can also be fun in their own right.

Having a subtle feature such as impassable squares (for both of land and sea units) makes for quite a large impact in terms of the variety of layout of randomised maps, which is one otherwise-seemingly-insignificant factor that has helped to breathe continuing life into Civ 4.

Maybe your real issue stems from the seeming simplicity of the graphics, where two adjacent peaks look like you could pass through them--and, indeed, you can, if they are diagonally-spaced, if I recall correctly. But, yes, if they are horizontally spaced or vertically spaced, it is fair to say that the graphics are misleading, since it "seems" like you could sneak through the valley. But, again, I'd say that it's fair to claim that it's all representative, where for a regular square, your "unit" (which appears as 1 to 3 "people," depending upon your game's settings) is actually representing a large number of people, and those people probably won't all fit very comfortably standing on the side of a mountain as though they were goats.

In terms of gameplay, let's say that upon the invention of Gunpowder, your Workers could travel onto Peaks for the purposes of using dynamite to make unsightly holes through those beautiful, innocent mountains. How fair would it be? Requiring 20 - 30 turns won't matter--people could send a stack of 30 Workers, build the Road to completion on the following turn when their Workers regained their movement points, and then your whole army could pour out from terrain that an AI had previously considered to be impassible. It certainly sounds ripe for exploitation, and also an area ripe for players' complaints if the AIs were ever so bold as to do the same in reverse to you while you were busy skipping past Gunpowder in the tech tree.

 

[rah]

I always find it funny because if you play colonization which is built on the same engine, the only units allowed in these peak squares are workers(pioneers) and scouts. Once a pioneer created a road, any unit could enter the square. Of course in colonization you can find whole sections of the map that are peaks.

 

[6K Man]

Oh yes, I had almost forgotten about Civ1 mountains. I think the defensive terrain bonus was +200%. Put a Tank on top of a mountain and watch the enemy units die trying to dislodge it. Civ1 had no hit points for units, so if your unit won a battle it would be just as strong for the next one. I think in one game, I lost dozens of Bombers trying to kill an AI unit on a choke point mountain.

There was also an acrimonious debate on Apolyton, years ago, as to whether building cities on mountains was cheating (units in the city would also get the +200% bonus…). That might have been in relation to Civ2, though.

Ah, memories.

 

[rah]

Yeah the city issue was Civ2, Especially in MP. There was also the ALPINE unit that had an extra defensive bonus.

 

[RobS]

Yes and No. Zoom in on the area you want to change, Ctrl-W into worldbuilder, change the peak to mountain and Ctrl-W out. Don't look at the mini-map?

Excellent. By far the simplest and most elegant fix for what I consider a game-killing issue.

I'm currently playing another game where my civ owns half a continent, about a dozen cities, except there's this smaller area with enough room for three cities that is cut off by two peaks. No other civilizations anywhere close, even by mid-game, and it was patently absurd that my civ would not be able to connect to this area by land, but instead had to use a galley. Really? So by the 20th century they'd still need ships to transport units across "peaks" that in real-life terms would be about the width of Florida? Really? And some people think this is realistic?

For what it's worth, I've read some very old threads about this issue and I don't agree with people who say that mountains ("peaks") should yield any kind of resources. I'm fine with them being the same as desert in that regard. I just think that they should have been made passable for Workers (only!), probably after the discovery of a certain tech (Engineering maybe?) and to allow them to build roads across peaks with a very long building time. After that, any unit could use the road. But I also think that players should be able to destroy (pillage) their own roads, including for the reason of destroying mountain passes if needed. Pillaging one's own roads is suspiciously also not possible.

Here's my final thought:
I think the issue of Firaxis leaving the "Peaks" (which I've just found out are called mountains after all in the terrain editor) is entirely related to keeping things simple for AI programming. Also, the issue of not being able to destroy one's own roads is also probably related to AI programming.

Regardless, thank you, ruff_hi, for the easy fix. I was about ready to give up on this game.

 

[NickGabben]

In Austria, there's a valley that doesn't have any road connections to the rest of the country. The only way to get there is through Germany. Because of the mountains.

 

[Quintillus]

To offer a different perspective - I also started playing Civ3 15 years ago, but started playing Civ4 around the time it came out, and thereafter have played both, though more Civ3.

I've come to appreciate Peaks, and it's not rare that I mod my Civ3 games so that Mountains are impassable to at least some units (typically artillery, tanks, and cavalry), and lately have been forbidden roads on them so they are always impassable to those units. In Civ3, having a range of mountains nearby is in some ways a bad thing - an attacker also gets the 100% defensive bonus, and is thus very hard to dislodge, and it's usually not economically prudent to occupy every Mountain yourself, except you have enough unit support and production to spare on that. Even the, an attacker can target one weak spot in the line, and thereafter have the 100% defensive bonus for all their units. Once in awhile it works out well and you get a mountain chokepoint, but in general, mountains weaken defence, which is not realistic or fun.

Whereas in Civ4, peaks give an option to simulate what really exists - mountain ranges that are generally impassable for large armies, but may have a small number of passes. These passes can in turn be defended by a relatively small number of units. Most Earth maps do a good job of this with the Alps - they are Peaks, but usually have 2-3 Hills in the gaps so units can get through them, but Rome/Italy still is able to defend with a small number of chokepoints. Rome: Total War (and Rome II) similarly limit transportation through the Alps to a relatively small number of passes, again making them a defensive advantage rather than risk.

A better map generator could make things better, though. It would be nice to have a rule of "there's always at least 1/2 passes through a range of mountains", which would also prevent the sort that you have in your screenshot.

The worker-road option also is decent. One option I see there is requiring it to be in the cultural area before the road, which along with allowing pillaging (an area where Civ3 is better than Civ4, as you've mentioned) would allow tactical use of Peaks and prevent offensive use of road-building on them.

So in summary, with time I came to believe that while Civ4 was perhaps a tad overly-strict, it had a good point that Civ3 was too "anything goes" with transportation over mountains. Hannibal did cross the Alps, but it's still celebrated as a logistical triumphs, it was over one of its passes, and it had significant losses, especially among horses and elephants. So there should be, IMO, some limitations on crossing mountain ranges.

 

[lindsay40k]

I don’t mind the Peak tiles behaving as they do. It’d be nice to have the capability to reenact Hannibal’s surprise march, but I’m happy to have the starting point of adding impassable spaces to land. A fix I’d like to see would be an intermediate ‘Mountain’ tile type - perhaps using the existing Peak assets and Peak tiles gaining an even more daunting appearance - which behaves as the ‘ocean’ to a Hill tile’s ‘coast’.

The biggest issue I have with Peaks is the AI’s confusion when faced with them. Can only plan a naval landing from one continuous land mass to another distinct one. If an AI had had your land in that Rome game, it would never have used a ship to get units past the mountains. Play the Earth 18 Civi map and see if the Inca or Aztec ever spread past their geographic boundaries. I think the only way it can happen is if they settle like a Caribbean island, and THEN from THAT land mass launch a naval expedition to the Amazon.