River squares

[SirOsis]

River squares are quite good with the extra commerce and no need for an aqueduct. However, how can I tell if a square is next to a river?

Some places it is obvious while others I think I am next to the river but find out I'm not. What methods do people use to make sure the tile is adjacent to a river (or a lake)?

[TheArsenal]

Pressing “Control – G” let’s you see the grid lines on the map, that should make it easier see how the terrain aligns in relationship to where you want to place your city.


- edit: clarity

[Solomwi]

Right click on the tile for "Terrain Info". If it's unroaded and showing positive gold production, it's a river tile. If it shows zero gold, it's not. The problem I often run into is the "river corner", where you know the tile alignment, so gridlines don't help, but just don't know if that little meandering end of the river is considered bordering your tile or not. This usually happens with mountains on the adjacent tile.

[SirOsis]

Exactly what I was looking for thanks guys. Yes, the "river corner" is what I always have trouble with.

[Rhothaerill]

Another thing is to right click on a tile. If it comes up with '1' in the commerce square and doesn't have a road or commerce producing resource on it then it is a tile fed by a river.

EDIT: Oops, cross posted with Solomwi. I hate getting interrupted halfway through writing a post.

[Solomwi]

Rhoth... pfffffffttttt, always good to have my advice bolstered by an expert.

[Rhothaerill]

Expert? I'm hardly an expert.

But thanks.


Oh wait I just saw the wink smiley...never mind

[Ecthy]

Right click on the square, and if it produces trade it's next t oa river, that's what I do to find out

Or just move a worker on it and see if he can irrigate or not

[GhengisFarb™]

What would really be cool is if rivers acted as natural roads and units had a move bonus for going up and down the tiles adjacent to them.

[vmxa1]

They dropped that, it was in Civ2. Rivers reduced your movement cost.

[Datajack Franit]

I AM an expert

[Ecthy]

Yeah, I think it was clever to remove that bonus, wasn't very realistic. Too helpful for exploration.

[SirOsis]

It is realistic for large rivers. It's much easier to explore the Amazon by travelling the river than hacking through jungle. Early explorers used rivers much more than overland routes as long as the river was not too hazardous.

[Ecthy]

yeah, but 1. it works in both directions (large rivers?) and 2. if you traverse a continent with a chariot for 300 years and find a river in a desert how are the chances they'll have boats to go on that river on?

[GhengisFarb™]

Bur realisticly it DOES work in both directions. The Americas were explored by their rivers first. Explorers went up the St Lawrence, the Amazon AND the Mississippi. In fact the first settlement on the Mississippi was quite a way up river.

[justjake73]

I have been wishing for navigable rivers since Civ I, and by navigable I mean rivers that ships can enter. I want to be able to sail a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies (sorry ).

[justjake73]

Look!! The girl with collitis goes by!!!!!

[Hagbart]

Originally posted by Ecthelion
Yeah, I think it was clever to remove that bonus, wasn't very realistic. Too helpful for exploration.

I think it was VERY realistic. In the ancient days the rivers were the main transportation roads.

[UnityScoutChopper]

I think the change was made more to deal with the switch to tile-edge-running rivers and to maintain game balance than to increase realism (and I agree that it actually reduced realism). Rivers already newly provide a free aqueduct and far more extra trade than in previous versions (almost twice as many tiles affected per river); keeping the movement bonus would be overkill. Also, now that rivers run between squares, deciding how to implement the bonus would be tougher -- if you have to stay on one side of the river, how is that realistic? And yet if you can flip among sides of the river while using such a bonus, then why bother adding a bridging ability (which otherwise is strategically very interesting) to the Engineering advance?

In favor of keeping the bonus (a moot point, but...), though, is the extra balancing factor of the movement penalty from rivers being even more brutal than in the past, since you can no longer build yourself a bridge pre-engineering just by founding a city on a river.

USC

[SirOsis]

Perhaps we can wish for it in Civ4. Civ3 doesn't really have major river systems with many tributaries. I guess we could assume that the rivers on the map are major rivers and we just can't see the tributaries due to the scale of the map.

It would be cool to have the ability to have a huge river system such as the Amazon, Nile, Columbia, Yangtze, etc. that is navigable. Of course we would want to also include natural events such as floods that would affect your cities.

[Brundlefly]

I've heard that Viking longships will be added as a pre-galley sea transport unit for all civs in c3c. Historically, one of the advantages of the longship was that it was able to sail in shallow water such as rivers. The Vikings sacked Paris with the aid of longships sailing down the Seine from its Atlantic mouth. They laid seige to the islands in the Seine and order theParisians to destroy bridges to the right bank so they could sail their longships South for more plunder. When the seige failed, the Vikings picked their longships out of the river and moved them past the islands on land , rolling them on top of logs. They placed them back in the water and continued South. I want to do that in a civ game!

[GhengisFarb™]

They had Major and Minor rivers in Colonization so it is possible.