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Old July 19, 1999, 15:52   #61
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I suppose I'll have to start a list on my own.
List of Terrain Types:
Grassland
Plains/Savanne/Steppe(is that English?)
Desert
Glaciers(on top of very high mountains)
Arctic
Hills
Mountains
Altiplano(=Plains on big altitude)
Swamp
Tundra

PS: Forests and Jungles are TI's
Perhaps we should make a difference
between Pine Forest and Deciduous Forest.
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Old July 19, 1999, 16:23   #62
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The use of a different railroad gauge from your neighbor in order to prevent that neighbor from using your lines to attack you has some basis in historical fact. Russia and China use different gauges, so people travelling from one country to the other by train have to ride in specially designed cars that can switch wheels at the border. This wheel switching takes a bit of time, and could possibly be approximated by having to wait for a turn or two when encountering an enemy's railroad system before that system can actually be used.
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Old July 19, 1999, 16:56   #63
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Maybe teh most realistic would be to treat all enemy railroad as road (whatever is within their borders is theirs). The locals arn't going to co-operate much, so you can just take advantage of cleared paths, like roads.
It would slow down blitzes alot.
allied rails act like normal.

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Old July 19, 1999, 17:17   #64
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ember: If you give RR a 1/5 Movement Bonus instead of an unlimited MB, rail blitzes are impossible. I would give Maglevs an unlimited MB.

My own post about Pine and Dedicious Forest gave me an idea.
Forest wouldn't be a TI as I suggested earlier but again a terrain type.
If you irrigate Pine Forest, you would get Plains.
If you irrigate Dedicious Forest, you would get Grasslands.
This is to simulate the burn off of forest in Europe to get fertile (Grass)lands. However if you would burn off (pine) forests in Siberia, you would get less fertile lands.
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Old July 19, 1999, 17:21   #65
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If SMAC features altitude, Civ 3 probably will. But, please make sure it is specified in meters (optionally in the English system), for us non-Americans' sake.

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Old July 19, 1999, 17:33   #66
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There should be two kinds of pollution.
1) Industrial Pollution : This should be produced by cities, just like in Civ2, SMAC and probably CTP. Pine and Deciduous Forest, Jungles and Swamps in your territory should decrease Ind Pol.
If there are 8 polluted square, it should begin to trigger global warming, increasing the sea level 100m or so.

2) Nuclear Pollution : Nukes and exploding Nuclear Plants should cause this. If there are a certain amount of tiles polluted, there should come a nuclear winter = - 1/2 trade/square for 10 years. Or how about - 50% Food production for 10 years?
I said 'a certain amount of tiles' because I think 8 tiles are too less. Than 2 nukes should already cause nuclear winter. Is that realistic?
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Old July 19, 1999, 17:37   #67
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SMAC is in meters. Civ3 will certainly be (if there is 3D).
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Old July 19, 1999, 17:50   #68
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M@ni@c's post about clearing forest made me think of that most of Europe, east Asia and eastern USA was covered by dedicious woods before it was cleared for agriculture.

In Civ 1/2, grasslands dominate the map. In Civ 3, they should be more uncommon.

Has anybody handled the issue of resource depletion? As far as I have understood, mineral deposits are never depleted, but become increasingly scarce, until the industry no longer breaks even. How this should be simulated depends on whether Civ 3 should use "shields" or different trading commodities.

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Old July 19, 1999, 18:15   #69
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Ecce Homo: That is just why I suggested Forests should be TI's, not Terrain Type. That way civs should first have to burn off or harvest forests before they can irrigate the underlying terrain. Perhaps harvesting a forest should give for one turn a 5 mineral bonus to a nearby city.

About deleted resources: because eath's natural resources become exhausted, humans would be forced to get their minerals from Mars.

NEW VICTORY CONDITION : TERRAFORM MARS.
<font size=1 face=Arial color=444444>[This message has been edited by M@ni@c (edited July 19, 1999).]</font>
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Old July 20, 1999, 00:57   #70
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Beaten to the punch, but I'll say that any military unit should be able to capture a square of rr. And the quick destruction of rr's in retreat (or for whatever reason) is a good idea. Now if there are small units, from single persons to small groups of individuals (explorers, leaders, spies if still used as units *shudder* but not diplomats) they should be able to ride enemy rails as they could blend into the population easily. However, there should be a small % chance each square they move that they will be caught (by local authorities not on game map).

Maniac,
I consider SMAC-style raised terrain an interesting idea that failed in use. It made it difficult to see where units were, what TI's were on the tile that was tilted away from you on the map. Also it's not very realistic; considering the vast scale we're operating with the tiles should all look "flat" to our view. When tallying the pros & cons, in the end the flat tiles win me over.
Regarding your complaint, I did suggest new tiles: forested mountains & forested hills. They'd have +1 food & +1 production each, and would be found on the windward side of mountain ranges (west slope, like SMAC rainfall). I think your major concern is a lack of different terrain tiles.
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Old July 21, 1999, 04:19   #71
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I really hate the way Civ/SMAC treats huge hunks of land (~100 mile square tiles) as undifferentiated terrain. I also hate the way you can only have one type of terrain improvement, like as if farms and mines and forests (Civ) or mines and solar collectors and forests (SMAC) can't coexist within a tile!

In reality the populace improves the land they need to use. They break new ground for farms in the midst of forests, hills, swamps, or whatever. They mine wherever they discover minerals worth the digging. It does take government initiative or incentive to prospect and mine away from population centers, and in that case people working there are unlikely to engage in agriculture worth notice on the scale of this game.

I'd want to see something a little more innovative for handling terrain use and improvement. Allow more than one pop unit to use a tile, with some kind of diminishing returns depending on terrain. For hills only one pop unit could farm at the highest productivity, but for a fertile grassland several could. Then Civ3 could actually use a linear population scale for the city size… but maybe I'm asking too much.
 
Old July 21, 1999, 04:31   #72
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Ecce: can you name a resource that has been depleted (excluding and animal species)? The answer is, "No." There are places where individual mines or veins are depleted to the point of zero net economical value, but that point drops with technology. Oil fields that were considered depleted thirty years ago when Paul Erlich et alia started whining about the sky falling are now producing again, despite low crude oil prices.
 
Old July 21, 1999, 09:21   #73
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I like the idea of natural disasters. What if, like pollution, you had sqares that where on fire. Have that sqaure usless to a city and inflict damage on any unit that goes on that square. Have a Tech Advance of Figherfighting which would allow a city to build a Firestation to protect that city from that disiaster, like the SDI deffense does with nukes. In the same way create a new military unit, say Flamethrower, to inflict squares with fire, perhaps the same way an engineer builds roads. How about Napalm bombs down the road to create fire in multiple squares? To be realistic about this, the fire should not continue longer than a couple of turns, but afterwards no improvemnts should be left on the square.
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Old July 21, 1999, 09:46   #74
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Allow units to have unlimited movement from the RR only when they leave from a city; otherwise, the RR is treated like a road. This will keep other Civs from having full advantage of your RR. Unless they link up to it with their own RR.

-- I like the idea of colored owned RR. --
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Old July 21, 1999, 10:04   #75
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I'm not sure about a "burning" square, but weapons to destroy terrain would be cool. Napalm and various defoliants were important in Vietnam to remove cover, and reduce defensive bonuses.

On another topic, I've been thinking of rivers. What is CivIII divided rivers into minor and major? Minor rivers would combine and form major rivers. Both river types would give a food bonus, and would be allowable sources of irrigation, but only Major rivers would be navagable by sea units and would provide trade bonuses.

Speaking of navigation, the current system of reduced movement costs for rivers is a bit odd. What is a unit moving ONTO a river square gets a movement penalty of maybe 2 movement points, instead of the usual 1 (fording rivers, preparing rafts, etc. Maybe a bigger penalty of major rivers since thet're harder to cross?), but moving along a river from one river square to another would give the traditional movement bonus. Would allow rivers to act both as aids to movement, and as useful barriers for defence.
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Old July 21, 1999, 10:14   #76
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In a regular game (w/earth) have an option of a large map (say: 100X100) so that the terrain can have more detail. Of course it would lead to a longer game, and that is why I would like to see it as an option.

I like the CIV games because of the learning value comes with it, like history. How about expanding the learning area by associating land squares with actual city names. This would help people become more aware of geography. Since a square can cover several real cities, have mutiple names for that square.
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Old July 21, 1999, 14:27   #77
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dondon--I don't see your complaint about undifferentiated terrain. That just seems a natural result of the kind of game civ is. You can always play on maps and *pretend* that you're not playing on the whole earth, but just a portion of it (flat world option.) I mean, maybe this isn't the whole world, but just 1/10 of it, right? Then the undifferentiated terrain makes sense.

"ember: If you give RR a 1/5 Movement Bonus instead of an unlimited MB"

Here's my suggestion--unlimited RR movement WITHIN your borders (we're gonna get borders, right?). And then 1/6 (twice as good as roads, so this makes more sense to me) outside your borders. This will go a long way to solving the strategy funnel problem of the howie blitz. Combined with some changes to how bombers work, you could really get to use the whole military.
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Old July 21, 1999, 15:49   #78
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EnochF: cloneodo's Engineer suggestion (7/17) was incredibly cool. It would take a lot of the micromanagement out of terraforming. I'd do the checkbox by terrain type, though- after you've selected the terraforming area the pop-up box looks like this:
_______Farm__'solar'__Mine__Road
Plains__[X]____[X]____[ ]___[ ]
Rocky___[X]____[ ]____[X]___[ ]

etcetera...

--
Fortification should be something like outposts in MOOII: If you build a fortification and then settle inside it you should have a city wall.
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I vote for 3d terrain, but i think it should be finer-grained than the squares so that you don't get the 'softly rolling hills' look like SMAC- each game square is devided into, say, a 3x3 grid, and this is deformed by the 3d engine. The 3d engine would represent altitude and moisture ala SMAC.
Since it's not a barren world, have sprites for the flora- trees, grassland, jungle. It'd be cool if the jungle could stick up more than a forest- I know it wouldn't be 'realistic' but I'd love to see a prominent Amazon...
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Old July 21, 1999, 16:03   #79
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tecnophile's road imprivements are awesome. Vaccuum Tunnel should be more expensive with each square of added length, and not allow cross-connections.

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Old July 21, 1999, 17:06   #80
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Flavor dave, That is basically what I wanted to say, but forgot to profread it. It makes sense to me that you don't get unlimited mp on their RR.

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Old July 21, 1999, 17:15   #81
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Is that RR discussion finally over???? Good idea about Railroads Ecce Homo or whoever suggested it. Then I can rebegin to post my ideas. Let's come back on terrain types. I took a look on the CTP site.
Two new Terrain types : Polar Hill (on Antarctica there are also minerals) and Desert Hill (same reason as Antarctica)
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Old July 21, 1999, 17:18   #82
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Oh, it was Flavor Dave. Sorry
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Old July 21, 1999, 20:38   #83
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I haven't dealt with graphics programming at all, particularly 3D graphics. How difficult would it be to program in a rotateable view in the game? This would allow mountains and valleys to be more promiment, as units otherwise concealed by these terrain features would become visible by rotating your viewpoint. This would allow for 3D terrain that didn't interfere with gameplay but still provided for some nice eye candy.

And by the way, I concede the point on railroads and now feel that they should be "owned", but agree with Ember's suggestion that RR's provide a road (or Path) bonus for an attacking army if not yet taken over by that army. This would stop a defender from erecting a wall of railroads to slow down his opponent, which was my primary concern from the start. There, nuff said, I won't touch on railroads again (unless someone brings it up...)
<font size=1 face=Arial color=444444>[This message has been edited by technophile (edited July 21, 1999).]</font>
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Old July 22, 1999, 10:31   #84
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I don't know where you guys got that idea, but I never pushed the wrong direction because I didn't see the unit well.
Is it so hard to push on "T" = Terrain survey.
Then you can see the place where the unit stood without city, unit or whatelse icons before it.

Another note about 3D terrain. If 3D is included in Civ3, terrain must certainly be able to rise more than 1000 meters per square. Due to that rule, it is impossible to make an earth map with SMAC (Andes, Himalaya = impossible).
If Firaxis can't do that, I don't want 3D in Civ3!
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Old July 22, 1999, 17:14   #85
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I like 3d but I have a big problem with smac style terrain

that is, that it looks incredibally big for a civ square a smac volcano was bigger than france and even nurmal mountains would rais straight for two squares without going down

really they are few mountain ranges that wide and mountain rainges go up and down

I thing something like smacs terrain would work (more flatter looking) as the base of the land but not the mountains and hills themselves

by base I am meaning that they would be able to show a difference between lowlands and high lands

then maybe they could use squares for the mountains and hills themselves so that the himalyas don't look like one mountain

the square terrain can be 3d too

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Old July 23, 1999, 11:36   #86
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I like the idea of major/minor rivers. The delineation between them could be a cataract (which would provide a production bonus). Below the cataract=trade bonus, deep-draft navigability.

Assigning a movement penalty to moving onto a river tile and then handing out subsequent bonuses is a good idea, but I think units should suffer a significant defensive penalty for being on a river. Having a river at your back tends to wreak havoc with tactical maneouverability, and sitting on boats chugging away in the water simply presents the enemy with nice slow-moving targets. To take it a little further, units on a road/railroad on a river tile should be ridiculously defenseless - there's not much a tank can do when it's chained to a flatbed in a switching yard waiting its turn to go over the bridge, chained to a flatbed crossing the bridge, or chained to a flatbed on the other side of the bridge waiting to be unloaded and assembled. Moving armies across rivers has always been a logistical nightmare and it always will be.

I think bridging needs to be given some more thought. While they provide additional transportation capabilities, bridges are chokepoints. Anybody who has lived in the SF Bay Area can attest to that - UUGGHHH! I would say that any transportation TI that crosses a river has its effectiveness reduced from normal. If RR is 1/5, then perhaps it changes to 1/4 to cross a river.
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Old July 23, 1999, 13:28   #87
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I like the idea of bridges being able to connect land squares across water as well. At first, you could only build bridges across 1 square of water, and as technology improved, the number of squares would improve. But it shouldn't be more than about 3 squares max.

Also, I like ctp's public works, but it is frustrating that you can't build anything outside of your base radius. So, I think you should have the public works, but then you could also have engineers and settlers, so you could build roads outside of bases, or prepare an area for a base.

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Old July 23, 1999, 16:12   #88
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Instead of bridges I would like underwater tunnels, so sea bases can also have a good transport net. In SMAC that was impossible.
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Old July 23, 1999, 16:25   #89
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I always assumed the rivers on the map were the major rivers, and that they should be navigable by older sea units. Minor rivers are so numerous that they'd be in almost every square, and thus aren't needed. All grassland tiles should be assumed to have minor rivers. This is one reason I say that grassland tiles should always be able to be irigated.
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Old July 23, 1999, 16:47   #90
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mindlace: Check out my 7/7 post for auto-engineers, which is similar to what cloneodo's idea is (I think). To spell it out, in a PREFERENCE screen, similar to SMAC, you'd assign an order of priority to your engineers based on 1) terrain tile and 2) what to do to the tile & in what order. 1st the AI (your engineer) would check to see what tiles are in the area it is meant to modify. If grassland is #1 on your list to modify, it would scan for grassland, then move to the closest grassland if there's one present. If not, it'd move down the list until there was no tiles left to modify (at which point it would un-auto itself). Once there, it would check to see what you want done to the tile, and in what order. You clicked roads as #1 priority in the preference screen, so it builds a road. Then irrigation as #2. Nothing else is chosen (or available due to lack of tech), so it goes back to step #1, searching for more grassland. This setting could be changed during the game, and would stay from one game to the next until changed (or reset to default). You should also be able to change the AI's preferences in a .txt file, for scenarios and modpacks.
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