Canals, the Worldwide Shortcuts

[Patroklos]

I was playing a game where there was a large continet that streached from one pole to the other, in effect cuting the world in half because it was just to long of a journey to go all the way around. However, this same continent narrowed in it's expance to two points where the was a landbridge only one/two squares wide. I began to thing "why the hell can't I just build a Suez or Panama canal and cut travel time in half.

This would of course be a tile improvement to be used as a worker option. There should also be some requirements.

1.) The improvement must be adjacant to a coastal square.

2.) It must be on a flat terrain tile, ie. desert, plains, grasslands.

3.) It must have an extreme production cost to make it almost like a worker built small wonder (and I mean extreme).

4.) the canal would be in place of road/railrod, like a irrigation and mines can't be in the same square. This will interupt land traval, but a large canal would.

5.) the tile would be a sort of hybrid land/sea square where both tyoes of units could pass.

This would alow those annoying little land bridges to be cut for travel time gain. It is an interesting concept. Like a road or railroad, if it is controled by an ally in a free passage agreement then you could use it for free. Also, if you really want to piss a maritine player off and cripple it's navy, all you would have to do is put a land unit over the square and the naval units couldn't use it (they can't attack land units, only bombard). The other way works, just put a naval unit on the canal squares and the land units can't pass, just bombard if they have the ability. Or imagine a new diplomatic option where you can pay a "price" in luxuries or gold for canal privlages (that is sort of out there, but I can dream...)

Since you can only build on a costal square, the maximum length can only be two squares, keeping peope from building rediculously long canals, and the build time would keep people from buiding a canal on all their costal tiles, which would actually only make a sort intercoastal waterway. Also, I get annoyed when in order to get that one resource square in a city radius I have to settle a city one square away from the coast and thus rob myself of a potential naval production facility/base. Now if I have a large city like that and it has good production, it might be worth spending the time to build the canal and give it sea access and thus naval building options.

What do you think?

[I Am Jeff]

I think this has been mentioned before, or something similar. What you can do however, if the tile has water on either side, build a city on it. Then a boat can pass through the city. But if it is wider then 1, you can not do this because cities can not be adjacent to each other.

[Wormwood]

I always build a city, even if a resource/luxury is beyond the city limits. A canal can be a military lifesaver, and a good cutoff/checkpoint to keep the AI out of that territory. Just use colonies for rec./lux/, but I would give up the wheat/cattle whatever for a well placed canal.

[miccofl]

Could someone figure out a way to teach this to the AI? How many times have we seen the AI build a city right next to a tile that would pass through from ocean to ocean? You can’t just take the city over and pass through, you have to raze the city and build one in the proper place (and it’s usually overlapping another city or is in another city’s radius and therefore unable to be built.)

[Sean]

1) I surport canals.

2) This topic seems to come up every couple of months, and has probably been done to death.

[Purple]

Of course, I build cities on narrow isthmuses that link two oceans, and occasionally where the tile connects and ocean and an interior sea or lake.

However, a canal improvement would be very useful to link a series of lakes, where building a series of cities would be awkward or impossible. Building a two-tile or longer canal would also be useful.

However, the total length of a multi-tile canal should probably be limited, or else the construction time should be extremely long, so as to discourage building continent-spanning waterways all over the place.

[civjunkie]

Conversely: if canals, why not causeways? Civ has always discriminated against island civs, and this could redress the balance. More generally: allow workers to step into coastal squares and land-fill them; they
would then turn into maybe floodplains. Maybe in modern times workers could even landfill ocean squares; then you could connect even distant islands by causeways (and then build RRs on them).

[Solomyr]

i 100 percent agree with canals, and curse the isthmuses my troops walk on. but i disagree with the idea of causeways. yes, civ is biased towards land based civs, but then again, how much influence has the Mironesianas really had on the world? beside, a canal improvment would still opperate as a land tile. besides, even modern landfills ain't cool enough to connect islands. bridges, now maybe...

[Zero-Tau]

I think canals would be a great addition. The way they're suggested here seems quite good. Minor correction though: the canal length can be three squares, if you have a city in the middle. Still not overpowered though.

Originally posted by Solomyr
how much influence has the Mironesianas really had on the world?

Sure, it's realistic, but it's no fun starting on a small insland in the middle of the ocean and not meeting anyone until late in the game, by which time they'll be about an age ahead of you. Honestly, I think game balance is a bit more important than realism.

[sun_tzu_159]

Hi all,
Quote thing is broken on my machine - sorry.

Zero-Tau "Game balance is more important than realism"

It is to a point but as I have pointed out in terraforming thread it has to be taken account of somewhere. You will always get a challening start location some time. Just restart the game until you get a green plain of 100 tiles or so for your CIV.

Only the civilization building the city on a narrow strip can pass through it. There is an interesting possibility here. A right of passage based on per use basis. Pay x gold to let a ship through, will they? Are you going to sneak attack them with the same ship loaded with troops?

Continental splitting canals and those to lakes are a phenomenon of the 19th and 20th centuries. Suez, Panama famous. Don't know the Great Lakes one name in America/Canada. Hugely expensive to maintain and cost to pay for passage. Important, Suez caused a war between Egypt and UK for control. Does Panama own the canal or is it still USA ZOC for income?

I do not think it is right for ships to pass through strategically placed cities. I know of no such cities in the world and this should be stopped immediately. City should only be on one edge of the tile for purposes of access to the sea by ships.

I agree wholeheartedly with the idea of big canals coming with the industrial age to ease transport problems. These should be a maximum of three squares long. With a city each end could be five squares. Right Of Passage to canal for all nations with no question asked and Income to host CIV that owns it. First one built is a Great Wonder constructed by workers rather than city. When built by other CIVS small wonders. Then you can only have one. Of course huge cost but also huge income when done.

Smaller canals were built in the UK. This was initially because of the quality of the roads and transport being so poor that the new goods had no means of mass transport in the growing industrial revolution. It was a small gap of history before the railways were developed. However these canals are very important for tourism now 200 years later. The effect of tourism in the modern era using great monuments of the past should surely not be dismissed by the game.

While we are here there is a question of navigable rivers which in the case of USA were and are very important and much bigger than any canals. Perhaps this type of landscape could be introduced as a fixed unit that can carry ships.

Regards
Sun_Tzu

[Purple]

Originally posted by sun_tzu_159
Continental splitting canals and those to lakes are a phenomenon of the 19th and 20th centuries. Suez, Panama famous. Don't know the Great Lakes one name in America/Canada. Hugely expensive to maintain and cost to pay for passage. Important, Suez caused a war between Egypt and UK for control. Does Panama own the canal or is it still USA ZOC for income?

What about the Corinth Canal? Is it modern? And wasn't there a canal (northern Greece) that cut across one of the peninsulas south of Thessaloniki? And did Russia have early canals linking its major rivers?

[Patroklos]

Hello,

I am sure topics are repeated all the time, but if I feel like talking about something then I'll post it, if you don't feel like talking about something then don't read it. Also, everyone who owns this game was not camping outside the store the day it came out, hence those of us who bought it a little later may have missed a few threads.

I feel that anything more than two tiles would be too long. Yes there are very long canals in the world, but those are for barges and things that require rather shallow draft and short (to avoid bridges) vessels. The scale of the game means that any canal would have to allow aircraft carriers through, and those canals are few and far between and relatively short. of course you could always make a three tile canal by having canal tile, city, canal tile as some have mentioned.

[civjunkie]

how much influence has the Mironesianas really had on the world?

Huh? How about the British and the Japanese? As to canals, Britain's canal system preceded railways
as the key transportation echnology of the early
industrial revolution.

Anyway, more complexity & more options are good for
gameplay - what civ is all aboutthe

[sun_tzu_159]

Patroklos,
The two more ancient canals did not split a continent they only crossed peninsulas at narrow points. However it is a good point and could be added to the early game for single tile canals.

The Russians linked St Peterburg to the Black Sea I think and in South America Orinoco and Amazon are linked also. But in CIVIII the rivers are not navigable yet.

If we have canals we could also have tunnels such as in Japan & UK/France that link islands to continents

I agree with CivJunkie, the more variables are added the better it gets for the AI as human cannot cope with lots of stuff at once. Try AOE and you see what I mean.

Regards
SUN_TZU

[MosesPresley]

Patroklos, ignore the "howlers." Just because a subject has been discussed by the lifers, doesn't mean you can't.

BTW: canals

http://www.winternet.com/~mikelr/flame49.html

[civjunkie]

I feel that anything more than two tiles would be too long. Yes there are very long canals in the world, but those are for barges and things that require rather shallow draft and short (to avoid bridges) vessels. The scale of the game means that any canal would have to allow aircraft carriers through, and those canals are few and far between and relatively short.

Maybe the solution would be for inland canals to be treated more like rivers in civ2, giving a road-like movement bonus (maybe 4 or 5 mp instead of 3). It would also be logical for a canal to allow water to be brought to a city & eliminate the need for building Aqueduct, just as if it were on a river. And what
about irrigation canals, allowing adjoining tiles to be irrigated before Electricity? Then you could irrigate
a tile without having to irrigate everything on the
way to the nearest river - as with roads, you could have a canal and a mine or forest on the same square.

In effect, canals would be an intermediate step between
roads and RRs, which would be historically accurate. Btw: love RRs, but they are way too powerful. It's air
travel and not RRs that made it possible to get around instantly. I'd suggest:
Roads - movement rate 3, build time 1
Canals - movement rate 5, build time 2
RRs - movement rate 10, build time 4

Single-tile canals between waterways can be simulated well enough by building cities; maybe a colony could do the trick too?

[Martinus Magnificus]

in case of a two tiles land bridge: What if you build a city at one end, move your loaded transports in there, destroy the city, build a new city next to it bordering the other ocean and move the transports in the new city? I haven't tried it, but I guess it would be an effective way of getting multiple transports across a landbridge to the other ocean.

[Solomyr]

i can't really see that working. a transport, or any naval vessel on a land tile? and then moving to another? i think the naval unit would just be destroyed, or at least moved into the nearest coastal tile. but i honestly don't know. i have never disbanded on of my cities, only ones i have captured.

[bbaws]

Purple the Corinth Canal wasn't finished until about twenty years after Jules Verne finished 80 days around the world, iirc. That puts it squarely in the Victorian era.

[Purple]

Originally posted by bbaws
Purple the Corinth Canal wasn't finished until about twenty years after Jules Verne finished 80 days around the world, iirc. That puts it squarely in the Victorian era.

Thanks for the clarification, bbaws.

[civjunkie]

I have been reading Herodotus on triremes and canals; specifically, on how Xerxes was able to move his huge army into Greece. According to H, he built a pontoon bridge across the Hellespont consisting of triremes lined by ropes with logs placed across them, and was able to drive chariots etc across. Later he also built a canal through the isthmus at Argos: H. however wonders why he bothered, since he could have dragged his triremes across the isthmus.

So therefore we have a historical model for (a) temporary bridges across narrow bodies of water; (b) a canal across a narrow isthmus, and (c) seafaring units crossing land. (b) can be achieved in civ by building a city on an isthmus, but (a) and (c) can't be done at present. I propose that the rules for triremes could be changed as follows: (1) a trireme doesn't sink if it's in a coastal square and in touch with either land or another of your own triremes; (2) fortified triremes can be used like land tiles by ground units, perhaps with a movement penalty equivalent to mountains; (3) a trireme can enter a land tile if there is water on the other side (not bigger ships, though: they'd be too heavy to drag). Add to that the ability of workers to enter coastal squares to carry out landfill, or conversely to excavate coastal land squares (making it possible not only to build canals but also to build harbors in cities that aren't quite on the sea), and you would have a powerful set of tools for an island-based civ to project its power to nearby countries. Another idea for ending the discrimination against island civs would be a new industrial-age unit, call it a steamship, that could carry out cable-laying operations. Islands connected by cables could then enjoy the benefits of Hoover and other single-island Wonders. Some ideas for civ4 ...

[sun_tzu_159]

Hi all,
I was also looking up some history.

Panama Canal completed in 1914. Suez Canal completed 1895. They made it commercially viable for steamships to transport goods around the world more cheaply than the trade ship 'clippers'. It really spelt the end of the commercial age of sail. Both cut four weeks travel time off the journey around the South American and African continent respectively.

Great Canals should be introduced as a Great Wonder that halts the building of any sailships and increases trade profits. First Nation to get it has GW and all others as SW with half benefits. Ability to build large canals to cross single square land-bridges and also to link Great-Lakes for trade as in the St Lawrence Seaway to Great Lakes complex in North America. All cities bordering connected lakes could then have ports and ships could sail on the lakes to the sea.

On the subject of moving ships. Did not Cortez conquer Montezuma by chopping down half a forest and building parts of ships which were then transported across land to be assembled on the lake protecting the city? A bit hazy on this - maybe someone knows more.

Regards
Sun_Tzu

[Solomyr]

i won't prohibit the construction of sail ships with the GW, as some civs might not be there yet tech-wise or resource-wise.

personally i think canals should be tile improvments, at most one tile long. there could be a GW that could then allow a 3 tile canal to be placed. of course, i have no idea how this would all work...