I place cities in a desert all the time. Usually they are costal citie thou and I have some fish, plus there is some hills I can mine. In a case where I find one desert tile near where I want to build my city, I see if I can palce the city on that tile.
Starting new cities on a desert
- Thread starter Wlauzon
- Start date
Aeon221
Lord of the Cheese Helmet
- Joined
- Apr 22, 2003
- Messages
- 1,995
Go learn some code and do it for the rest of us for Christmas... because you know whats coming in January! SDK! I would think that you could probably work it in one of three ways:
1) The Caravan Food system I remember from one of the 'way back when' Civs. You could put a caravan in a city and have a feast, giving like 50 food or something.
2) Mess with the base trade system to allow you to choose one of the trade routes for each city (kinda like CTP used to let you do, except that was with all of them) so that you can send... well... anything, really. Hammers, food, whatever. Of course, there would have to be a negative.
Lower commerce output in that city would make sense, except that then you should really put that commerce into the other city. A cap on the number of routes wouldnt really be fair, because no rl cities have limits like that. Perhaps a geographical limit that expands with technology (for instance, no trades from cities that are further than... 5 tiles... until refrigeration).
3) Put a second automatic trade system in that deals with the food. Set a city to growth and other cities will send it one spare unit of food.
Or mix two and three together!
Back onto the topic: I am pretty sure you cannot settle on desert terrain or tundra terrain... but I could be very wrong...
1) The Caravan Food system I remember from one of the 'way back when' Civs. You could put a caravan in a city and have a feast, giving like 50 food or something.
2) Mess with the base trade system to allow you to choose one of the trade routes for each city (kinda like CTP used to let you do, except that was with all of them) so that you can send... well... anything, really. Hammers, food, whatever. Of course, there would have to be a negative.
Lower commerce output in that city would make sense, except that then you should really put that commerce into the other city. A cap on the number of routes wouldnt really be fair, because no rl cities have limits like that. Perhaps a geographical limit that expands with technology (for instance, no trades from cities that are further than... 5 tiles... until refrigeration).
3) Put a second automatic trade system in that deals with the food. Set a city to growth and other cities will send it one spare unit of food.
Or mix two and three together!
Back onto the topic: I am pretty sure you cannot settle on desert terrain or tundra terrain... but I could be very wrong...
Grunthex
Prince
Absolutely, settle on an otherwise useless desert tile whenever possible, turning a 0/0/0 tile into a 2/1/1. This can be great if the other desert tiles nearby have incense (tolerable if only a few) or flood plains. Don't go founding a city IN the desert and expecting much. But it's a great way to get 1 useless tile to workability.
Aeon, this does work, and for tundra squares as well. (Tundra is sometimes less bad than desert, because it has trees often, and river squares are nice with watermills)
Aeon, this does work, and for tundra squares as well. (Tundra is sometimes less bad than desert, because it has trees often, and river squares are nice with watermills)
UberCivver
Chieftain
I could have sworn that in the manual it states that if you build a city on a desert or tundra tile, it suffers a 25% penalty when constructing improvements...please correct me if I am wrong.
brokguitar
Chieftain
UberCivver said:
I believe this goes for worker improvements not city buildings.
UberCivver
Chieftain
So if a city is on a desert tile, the workers in its radius create improvements 25% slower?
AlazkanAssassin
Engineer
I think it is that workers building something on a desert are 25% slower.
UberCivver
Chieftain
I thought you can't build improvements on a straight desert? Man, looooooong day at work so my mind may or may not be fried.
narmox said:oh yeah, last time I went to the Sahara desert it was this very nice productive place full of working people and factories and farms and houses and... oops..
Arizona is mostly desert.
The produce food production of Arizona is 3rd in the US....
Irrigation works, you know.
Lord Chambers said:
The manual says you CAN found cities on desert squares.
It also says improvments are 25% slower. Now what exactly it means by improvements is anyones guess. For that that square only? For all squares taken by that city? Only for workers from that city??
It is less than clear on that issue...
I had to put a city on a desert square (yes, it can be done) because I needed nearby oil and that was the only way to get it. I couldn't irrigate the desert tiles, regardless of what level of tech I had--that is, an irrigated flood plain tile next to the desert wouldn't allow me to farm the desert tile after getting the tech for "farms spread irrigation," etc. This place was never going to be Arizona!
I managed 3 population in that city (due to the flood plain) but there was just no way to get it any bigger, because the desert tiles other than the one the city was build on couldn't produce a thing.
I managed 3 population in that city (due to the flood plain) but there was just no way to get it any bigger, because the desert tiles other than the one the city was build on couldn't produce a thing.
