[Freeciv-Dev] (PR#2741) Removing explicit mentioning of T_OCEAN

["Guest via RT" <rt@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[jdorje - Wed Jan  8 07:41:32 2003]:

> AFAICT coastal tiles are those adjacent to land, shelf is adjacent to
> coastal, and ocean is adjacent to shelf.
> 
> This is not fundamentally different from what we have now.  Triremes
> can't go more than one space from land, just like in civ3.  And with a
> quick hack to the client it would be possible to display different
> levels of ocean just by checking their distance from short.
> 
> But I can see that putting all this into the ruleset is desirable.

There is also the possibility for more fundamental differences with a
slightly more sophisticated placing of the ocean terrains.  For instance
in the real world the east coast of Canada has a huge amount of shelf
off it while the west coast has considerably less.  This affects what
sort and quantity of fish stocks exist in both locations.  Fishing
expeditions from Europe before Europeans really colonized North America
and the Viking descriptions of "vinland" (Newfoundland) all depended on
the rich fish stocks that a large amount of shelf provides (now all
fished to oblivion sadly).  Specials could take this sort of thing into
account.  Admittedly freeciv isn't primarily a game about resources ---
the military effects of different oceans would probably be much more
significant, but this does show a possible difference which is truly
distinct from anything you can do just by counting tiles out from the shore.

Karen