Culture Borders and Terrain

[Stefu]

There's been this idea, maybe for patch, maybe for something later (Civ4?), that has been floating around my head for a while. When you have a city in Civ3, it has cultural borders. These cultural borders don't care about terrain types - the borders expand on mountains just as easily as they expand on grasslands.

Well, is this realistic? Not that realistic, I think. If we see culture as extent of population belonging to your nation - for instance, little villages and such that aren't shown on map for insignificance - it now reaches mountains that are as near to a city as grasslands in same time. My suggestion, therefore, is that when cultural borders expand, they expand at normal rate at grassland, plain, flood plain and forest squares, and at halved rate at mountain, tundra, desert and jungle squares. (I haven't decided on hills yet.) Also, when city is found, it starts with 3x3 cultural border. This border wouldn't, at first, cover the hard-to-pass squares, requiring at least one expansion to cover them. Here, let me illustrate by smileys.

= "Normal" territory (grasslands, plains, flood plains and forests)
= "Hard-to-pass" territory (jungles, mountains, deserts, tundra)
= "Normal" territory under a civ's culture
= "Hard-to-pass" territory under a civ's culture
= the city

Thus, if we have a patch of territory like this in the beginning:









And we find a city in there:









Then, should my suggestion be noted, it's cultural border would start like this.









After one expansion, we'd have this.





:cool



See? (Hopefully the smileys present themselves in the way I want.)

Anyway, this would also have the benefit of making computer reconsider those damned smack-in-the-middle-of-desert cities to get resources - what's the point, when the city starts with 1x1 border? If the often-presented suggestion of colonies having 1x1 borders, it would have exactly same results as building a colony, but for less time and effort required. Colonies might actually become worthwhile as means of harvesting resources deep inside deserts, jungles or mountain ranges.

Also, it would give civs more natural borders with each other, ones going through mountain ranges or deserts, adding extra bit of realism (after all, many borders are natural) There are some points I haven't fully decided on yet (the hills question, and what about the rivers?), but it seems like a working model.

So, what you say? (Someone set us up the bomb!)

[GodSpawn]

Sounds like quite a good idea to me (although the ramifications would need to be carefully considered). What you're really saying is that the rate of cultural expansion should depend on the movement cost of the squares into which it is expanding - which is realistic.

To digress a bit:

As you say, rivers need to be considered too. Now that rivers run along the edge of squares, there are also more realistic things you can do with them. For example, rivers could have a "size" (perhaps just a a count of the number of tributaries). The greater the size, the higher the movement point cost to cross them. Workers could have a "build bridge" function to reduce the cost.

That could lead to some interesting strategies where you take out bridges to prevent enemy movement. You could even take out your own bridges to slow down an invasion, or set up choke-points.

OTOH, perhaps the extra complexity would simply detract from the game...

[Stefu]

Well, GodSpawn, I avoided using the term 'movement points', since it's not exactly based on movement points - after all, I've listed forest as "normal" territory culture-wise and desert (correct if wrong, but cavalry can move at normal rate through desert, right?) as "hard-to-pass" territory.