Water for Food - version 2
Changes from the previous Water for Food test:
+ Renamed Aquifer to Groundwater. This is just to make the grammar make sense, Groundwater works as both the location of the resource and the substance that the resource produces.
+ Groundwater produces no tile yield change unimproved.
+ There are three new improvements that can only be built on Groundwater:
Shallow Well - buildable immediately - +5 water +1 commerce.
Deep Well - available at Climate Control - +8 water +2 commerce
Qanat Network - available at Desert Industry - +11 water +3 commerce
(Names and Techs open to change)
+ The different Well graphics are placeholder - using some Drauga buildings from Walter Hawkwood's Fantasy Pack.
+ Groundwater uses iUnique so that it does not occur on two adjacent tiles - in reality a well would drain water from a large surrounding area of aquifer.
+ Dew Plants - Sand Verbana, Burro Weed, Spiked Paintbush, Sword Grass, Creosote, Barrel Cactus all produce +1 water from dew unimproved.
+ Replaced Enclosure with Dew Collectors improvement, adds +2 water +1 commerce to the Dew Plants. The Dew Plants all produce +1 happy +1 health right now but we can vary this for interest.
+ Wind Trap reduced to +2 water from +3.
+ Made base tile produce +3 water. With it producing +2 water there is no way to get more than +3 water from your initial settlement. This meant the first few turns were a bit slow - if people don't like then we can get rid of it.
+ Arid produces only +1 hammer. Desert Plains produces +1 hammer +1 commerce. This was a late change just to make them different.
+ Bonus placement totally reworked. This will need further tuning no doubt, but the game feels like it is in a playable state now. I think we should probably replace Fogwood and Shigawire which are not native to Arrakis. Also having Burro Bush as well as Burro Weed seems confusing.
+ iAIObjective set to 1 for Groundwater. Definitely seems to make a difference - the AI seems more willing to cross the sand sea and settle islands with this switched on. With the worm fear fix in place it will be really interesting to see what happens.
+ I have tested and if anything I think I may have overcompensated for the previous commerce shortfall. Still it's a nice problem to have if so - we can pick which settings to scale back. The AI does build Deep Wells to replace the Shallow Wells when the relevant tech becomes available.
Probably I've missed some things, but I'm sure someone will notice and feedback. This will need ongoing refinement but hopefully people will like it.
If you think there are issues with resource distribution then try to pick out general patterns over a number of games/maps. The random nature of it will still dish out the odd awesome start and crappy start. That has always been Civ though. Even in my straight 1.2.2 test, one civ has 1 city after 250 turns...
Loose Ends
While I hope this change is now good enough to merge back into the main mod there are a couple of loose ends.
+ It would be good if both windtraps and wells can be fresh water sources in a 1 tile radius. Drip farms can then be built on any terrain that has fresh water. This makes it possible to get some water from waterless tiles.
+ I've not renamed all the Food Silo, Food Warehouse buildings to Catchbasin, Reservoir, etc. We should do this.
Future Stuff and Ideas
+ Add some water related city buildings e.g.
- Ornamental Gardens - negative water, positive happiness
- Teachings of Liet (wonder? Sietch Tabr UB?) - some positive water impact
- Power stations/factories cost water
+ Koma said he would do some water related city screen work
+ Maybe link water into the terraforming ideas - I had an idea that when you pass the Three Percent Threshold you start getting Sirocco winds that move around like sandstorms. When these pass over your windtraps you get extra water. Also could you divert some of your water income into a terraforming fund somehow - then collecting water takes you closer to a Terraforming victory.
