River Transport Reimagined

[Joij21]

Now I know many people before have suggested river transport. In fact there's also a mod already out for it. But the problem had always been the fact that most suggestions (including the mod) required conventional rivers to be replaced with river tiles which made it much harder for modders to convert existing mapscripts and maps to this new form of river generation. Other suggestions have opted for a system that causes the models of boats to be lopsided to the river end of the tile while really just sailing on land tiles adjacent to the actual river. However the implementation of this system is wonky and to the best of my knowledge I don't believe anyone has ever made it work. So then I began to think to myself, why does it have to be so complex? What if river transport utilized a system almost identical to airlifting units? Where only small boats such as galleys, war galleys, cogs, etc. would have the ability to "riverlift" themselves from either a city or fort along a river to another city or fort along the same river. Also cities that are adjacent to rivers would have the ability to build only small ships. Then I also thought that the parachuting system could also be implemented into something like this. "River raids" could be a special ability that normal units like marines or unique units like berserkers could use. Very similar to parachuting(with the exeption that they don't have to be within a city or fort) a unit of this ability when on a tile adjacent to a river will be able to "river raid" to another tile adjacent to this same river up or downstream within a given range. Instead of showing a fancy paradrop animation the unit would just teleport to this tile. It's not as beautiful as a system where you can see the ships sailing up and down the river but I still think these ideas are practical compared to previous ideas and still depict river transport decently. I don't know how hard any of these ideas would be to implement but at least current maps and mapscripts would be compatible.

 

[Xyth]

'River tiles' are an ugly implementation, I agree, but it means the existing pathfinding and AI code can be used. Your proposal would require entirely new pathfinding and AI coding, which is far beyond my capabilities (and pretty much impossible on Mac). HR rivers will have to remain unnavigable, sorry.

 

[Joij21]

Would it be possible to have something like an amphibious 2 promotion that would enable double movement along tiles adjacent to rivers and coastal tiles? Maybe even an additional attack bonus?

 

[Leoreth]

It's quite easy to do that*, but it requires a DLL change. So another dichotomy between Mac and Windows.

*with some issues, because you can only know if a tile is adjacent to a river. So the speed bonus would also apply between tiles that border different rivers.