I have been thinking about this issue for quite some time now and thought I would share my thoughts on the matter. I have played countless games where I have either excelled or did poorly and have been wondering exactly what the deal was as the disparity of my performance was rather huge based on what type of map I was playing on. After this I took a step back and did some thinking; In original civ4, rivers just gave you a +1
. Then BTS eventually came out which gave you the levee, granting +1
on river tiles which was a huge step forward making cities founded on rivers unbeatable in terms of production bonus once one hit the industrial age.
RoM + AND took this a step further. You now have irrigation canals available relatively early in the game granting +1
on river tiles
and the river authority, granting an extra +1
on river tiles on top of the +1
that river tiles already offer
and of course the +1
from the levee of BTS. This gives cities founded on rivers unparalleled advantage over cities that are not in every domain and this advantage really begins to shine in the industrial era. Once the industrial era hits, my inland cities (not founded on rivers) simply fall behind in production no matter what I do.
Having thought about this further, I came up with a partial solution to balance things out somewhat. The best part about this solution is that its also realistic IMO. Rather than having the requirement for building river related buildings be that a city is founded
on river tile, make the requirement such that to build those buildings, a river needs only to be in the
city vicinity.
If you think about it, it facilitates city placement because you don't always have to think about missing out on production / food / commerce bonuses just because you decided to found your city one sqaure away from the nearest river tile.
There is also another upside to this; the AI. The AI often has horrible city placement, many times just a square away from a river tile and thus does not capatilize on all the bonuses that the river related buildings would offer. Thus if the requirement was to change for river buildings to be buildable as long as there is a river in the city vicinity, this would give the AI a much needed boost and make it more challenging to deal with.
Finally, as mentioned before, this is also realistic. There is no reason why a levee / river authority / irrigation canals cannot be built on river as long as a river tile is being used by a city.
When I looked into doing this myself, I found out that unfortunately there is no tag in the XML files that identifies rivers as a tile so I was unable to execute this change. However I feel that this would give a great addition for the game by making it easier for both human and AI city placement all the while making the game more realistic at the same time.
Sorry.
.
