Suppose I wanted to add canals...

[shandelman]

So, I'm thinking I'd like to add a canal improvement.

The canal improvement would have kinda lousy yield itself, but it would enable boats to go inland, and would allow inland cities to build water-purification plants and boats, and to benefit from the increased yield of seagoing trade routes.

It would also enable you to escape from ice-locked seas that the game likes to generate. I haven't actually tested - if I build a city on a hex that borders two oceans, can my ocean-going traderoutes pass *through* that city? I know that my boats can.

Where would I start? Would I need to modify the pathfinding code with a custom .dll or would it possible to do this purely with lua scripting (?).

 

[Ryoga]

As far as I know the only one who managed to do something like that in Civ V is WHoward, but he had to modify the DLL.

I don't really think it's something you can do with lua alone. If it was possible WHoward would have done it already since he is already porting his pick 'n' mix mods to CivBE.

 

[whoward69]

I haven't actually tested - if I build a city on a hex that borders two oceans, can my ocean-going traderoutes pass *through* that city?

In Civ5, trade routes will pass through a city on an isthmus/peninsular - in fact the code is buggy as if the city is razed before the trade route ends, the cargo ship will happily continue to sail through the (now) land tile!

There was another solution to canals using an "inverted pontoon bridge" for CivV, and as the AllowsWalkWater column is still in the Improvements table, it may still work - I don't know which mod it was in.