I dont get what you want to say, to be honest. Where am I asking for any additional complexity?
The 'hill' tiles in Civ5: Why no food?
- Thread starter BSPollux
- Start date
I dont get what you want to say, to be honest. Where am I asking for any additional complexity?
Bibor
Doomsday Machine
The reason why Hills have no food is because there are three basic land tiles:
Grassland = 2 food
Plains = 1 food 1 production
Hills = 2 production
Forests serve as a converter of basic terrain types into the generic 1 food 1 production.
I agree that huge areas filled with hills aren't exactly growth-friendly, but Irrigated farms on hills produce 2 food, which is only 1 less than an irrigated plains.
Grassland = 2 food
Plains = 1 food 1 production
Hills = 2 production
Forests serve as a converter of basic terrain types into the generic 1 food 1 production.
I agree that huge areas filled with hills aren't exactly growth-friendly, but Irrigated farms on hills produce 2 food, which is only 1 less than an irrigated plains.
Yep you nailed it. Itsentirely mechanic-oriented. And therefor it creates that unrealist result I dislike.
I'd love to see an improvement that can only be build on hills, produces one food (and possibly one trade, maybe after a specific tech is researched) representing the seasonal farmanimal business that is quite common in hills/rocky terrain.
How about pastured sheep on hills? 2 food (from sheep and pasture) and 2 hammers (from hill), plus another hammer with stable. Doesn't have any gold though. Could also get 1 culture if you take God of the Open Skies pantheon.
I ment an improvement that can be used everywhere.
Smokeybear
Emperor
That would negate the whole point of hill tiles in the game, which is that they will generally give you less food than plains or grassland tiles. Unless they have food modifying tiles on them, like sheep, deer, forest (lumbermills give +1 food), or hills adjacent to fresh water (can be worked as farms). If a large swath of hills does not have enough of those food-modifiable tiles to build a city on, then you just don't. If you've ever flown over the western US, or many other parts of the world, you will have no doubt noticed that their are huge swaths of land without significantly noticeable amounts of towns or cities. Hill and mountain country. While there may be a handful of itty-bitty settlements and don't-blink-or-you'll-miss-them rural roadstop burgs (like your swiss alps photo example), those do not equate to the large civ-style cities that you are wishing you could always build in any kind of hill terrain in CiV. Sorry.
You continue to ignore something multiple people have brought up: What about the unrealistic aspect that you can't get production from grasslands/flood plains? Where is your complaint about how unrealistic that is? Find an area of grassland or floodplains/desert with no hills and you have a city that can't produce anything.
Regardless your arguement requires the game to focus on a smaller scale than it does. The cities in CiV represent big cities, not the towns and villages all over the place.
So you plop a city down in hills with no river. You build the grainary. You can now build a size two city. That equals just a few thousand population. That picture you have is a cute little stream and probably supports a town with a population of less than 10k people. The same size city you could build in civ in a hilly area with no rivers, no features, no resources and building a grainary.
Show me a huge city (1 million + population) built in the mountains anywhere in the world. It doesn't exist. Why? Lack of space. There isn't room to both build and grow food.
CiV is a game. It has to balance reality with game play. This is why the tiles produce what they do. The game would be unblanaced if you could build an improvement on hills that gives food or an improvement on grassland that gives hammers.
velosipederast
Chieftain
Yes but then again why would there be two different kinds of hills - grassy or plains - when there is no difference in the bonuses... civ4 was better that way - grassy hills 1f/1p; yellow hills 0f/2p; desert hills 0f/1p (IIRC). hills next to river +1 gold.
Concerning the game mechanics I really hope future versions would allow the player to 'inter-trade' food and production (with a percentage lost due corruption) or something like this. This would allow building cities on strategic/military spots which can be later developed with the help of other cities. I.e. building cities on 1 tile islands which guarantee you easy access to another continent/island or simply block the path of other civ's trade routes. Or, lets say you simply want that uranium in the snow near the tundra on this remote island near the south pole - you build a city but want it to grow a bit - let say to 5 population - so you import food but since it is really long distance you import 10 food but only 6 is consumed by the city. Special wonders reduce this corruption and buildings ('trade company offices') provide gold depending on the quantity of the transported goods. That way becoming isolated merchant country would become a suitable option too, bcs in older versions there was enough capitalist propaganda.
So, you are saying it is the lack of space that prevents this but at the same time, since the scale isn't real, there may be smaller streams and rivers which are not shown on the map. IRL there are hundreds examples of cities which on first sight are built in the hills but when you zoom in using Google Earth you see that they are actually situated in small plains between the main ridges and some of them are even built on the hills (you probably have heard about the seven hills of Rome). And what is more, you said that cities built in the mountains IRL are not larger than 1 million. Ok but what does that have to do with the game? Mountains in the game are impassable, we are talking about hills.
Concerning the game mechanics I really hope future versions would allow the player to 'inter-trade' food and production (with a percentage lost due corruption) or something like this. This would allow building cities on strategic/military spots which can be later developed with the help of other cities. I.e. building cities on 1 tile islands which guarantee you easy access to another continent/island or simply block the path of other civ's trade routes. Or, lets say you simply want that uranium in the snow near the tundra on this remote island near the south pole - you build a city but want it to grow a bit - let say to 5 population - so you import food but since it is really long distance you import 10 food but only 6 is consumed by the city. Special wonders reduce this corruption and buildings ('trade company offices') provide gold depending on the quantity of the transported goods. That way becoming isolated merchant country would become a suitable option too, bcs in older versions there was enough capitalist propaganda.
This distinction is possibly the only one I would have liked to see in V, and would support the OP's case to a small extent. Still, without a river or granary, and even surrounded by grassland hills, you'd still only have a size 3 "city" (21,000 population town actually).
You are right, im ignoring that. These are two seperate problems and theres no need to fix them at the same time. Trying to fix all problems at the same time makes no sense. Its way more rational to look at each problem individualy.
If you ask me, mines should be allowed to be build everywhere. At least in the lategame. But I dont want to discuss this in this thread.
Thats why my suggestion (+1food improvemnt) is NOT a farm. Farms have theire output increased during the game and will produce more food then that hill.
And thats actualy very realistic. Plain landscape doesnt generate more food then hills. In the same climate, it will be very much the same. The diffrence lays in the usefullness to human farmers. Fields in hills are problematic when it comes to the usage of tools and machines. You can produce food there, you just cant work as efficient as in plains. The diffrence should be small in the early game and bigger in the late game.
I'm sorry, BSPollux, but your arguments are just too abstract. The devs did the best they could to make a game about building cities and conquering other cities, and it is far from perfect. If they spent the amount of time required to make this a practical simulation, would you be prepared to fork over $300 for it? I can assure you that it would not be cheap at all to produce something accurate like that.
Do I think the game is perfect? Heck no, I call it out on all sorts of faults and issues I find, but at the end of the discussion I have to sit back and agree with everyone else's counter argument: It's a game.
If your so insistent on settling your city in the middle of hilly terrain, just do yourself a favor and make sure it's desert hills. Petra gives it all +1's, add the "pretend-it-don't-exist" granary, which is so cheap to produce you could buy it off of CS/barb camp gold, and you've got a city that will support itself.
Do I think the game is perfect? Heck no, I call it out on all sorts of faults and issues I find, but at the end of the discussion I have to sit back and agree with everyone else's counter argument: It's a game.
If your so insistent on settling your city in the middle of hilly terrain, just do yourself a favor and make sure it's desert hills. Petra gives it all +1's, add the "pretend-it-don't-exist" granary, which is so cheap to produce you could buy it off of CS/barb camp gold, and you've got a city that will support itself.
They had 1f 1p hills in civ4 and it didnt cost 300$
Why do you think making hills produce food would make the game five times more expencive to create?
This is a joke, right?
To include in map generation the additional details you keep mentioning, ie thousands of tiny small lakes/streams and berries/wildlife food from RL hills, would require a vast amount of scripting. Not only would such a thing be a huge load of work to add to the game, especially when trying to balance such an undertaking, but adding that extra layer of processing for a map would likely lead to doubled processing time for rolling a map.
Also, the more complicated the map script, the more likely it is to generate ugly, god-awful landscapes that actually glitch out. Few times in Civ4 when I would reroll enough times on an RFC map it would actually take my "terra" request and translate that into a huge toroidal great plains type landscape with infinately running rivers, small clumps of forest in weirdly rounded shapes and NO resources anywhere on the map.
All of that due to adding a few extra things to map script. I'm sorry if you don't like the way the game plays now, you're not the only one so don't feel bad. Your options boil down to his:
1.) edit the xml yourself to make the game exactly how you want it.
2.) find a mod that makes the game exactly how you want it.
3.) accept the differences and adapt to the new game.
4.) don't accept the differences and troll about it in forums 'till you get booted
5.) play a different game.
Moderator Action: Please be more civil in your discussions. When you accuse someone of trolling the forums, you become a troll yourself. Your focus should be on the merit of an argument, not personally on the poster. Please turn the heat on this down a couple of notches.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
EDIT: Sorry, was NOT trying to accuse him of trolling, I can see how that would be taken from what I said. I meant it as he could troll about it as an option, not that he currently is trolling. Trolling isnt a good option, but it's still a choice someone can make. Just place an "or" between each item in the list and it will make more sense.
Also, the more complicated the map script, the more likely it is to generate ugly, god-awful landscapes that actually glitch out. Few times in Civ4 when I would reroll enough times on an RFC map it would actually take my "terra" request and translate that into a huge toroidal great plains type landscape with infinately running rivers, small clumps of forest in weirdly rounded shapes and NO resources anywhere on the map.
All of that due to adding a few extra things to map script. I'm sorry if you don't like the way the game plays now, you're not the only one so don't feel bad. Your options boil down to his:
1.) edit the xml yourself to make the game exactly how you want it.
2.) find a mod that makes the game exactly how you want it.
3.) accept the differences and adapt to the new game.
4.) don't accept the differences and troll about it in forums 'till you get booted
5.) play a different game.
Moderator Action: Please be more civil in your discussions. When you accuse someone of trolling the forums, you become a troll yourself. Your focus should be on the merit of an argument, not personally on the poster. Please turn the heat on this down a couple of notches.
Please read the forum rules: http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=422889
EDIT: Sorry, was NOT trying to accuse him of trolling, I can see how that would be taken from what I said. I meant it as he could troll about it as an option, not that he currently is trolling. Trolling isnt a good option, but it's still a choice someone can make. Just place an "or" between each item in the list and it will make more sense.
I think that to be realistic, after fertilizer is researched, farms should be able to be constructed on hills. Coming from a childhood on a farm, I can totally confirm that hills are farm-able lol. Even without fertilizer...
No that I think about it, its BS that they can't be constructed on hills without rivers after fert.
No that I think about it, its BS that they can't be constructed on hills without rivers after fert.
Bibor
Doomsday Machine
Tiles are abstract, just like everything else in CIV games. Just look at the "big picture", i.e. all citizens in a city and overall placement of it. A desert-ish, mountain chain hills area is a no-go for large cities, except if you're Inca. It may not be realistic, but it's one of those things that makes games different (grassland riverside start = huge cities; hills/plains start = spread out more).
I never asked for that. You are making that up!
I said: In real life, theres more sources for fresh water then are show on the civ maps, so that should be taken into concideration. I didnt say include all these rivers and such.
Following my suggestion would not increase the complexity at all, besides the availability of one more improvement.
REPOST: "Sorry, was NOT trying to accuse him of trolling, I can see how that would be taken from what I said. I meant it as he could troll about it as an option, not that he currently is trolling. Trolling isnt a good option, but it's still a choice someone can make."
Sorry if I offended you, BSPollux, that was not my intention.
Sorry if I offended you, BSPollux, that was not my intention.
you skipped the "ie" part, which means an example, sorry to give the wrong impression.
Rephrased: to include the unseens sources of fresh water would take quite a bit of creative scripting, because if you're not careful you could end up with the generator putting those unseen water sources on every tile, which would definitely unbalance the game.
DudewiththeFood
King
In real life, all the civs and city-states existed. Can I get a game where they all appear?
In real life, the leaders for civs changed a lot. Can I get a a game with 50ish leaders per civ?
In real life, lots of countries used longbows. Why is it only English?
In real life, real things happen. Can I get a game where everything happens according to things that really happened?
