[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Suggestion: different types of coast

[Ross Wetmore <rwetmore@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Raimar Falke wrote:
> On Sat, Apr 19, 2003 at 09:37:50PM +0000, James wrote:
>
> > What about having different types of coast:
> > 	-Cliff coast: Prevents any units from coming ashore from that direction.  
> > Cities on cliffs cannot have ships enter them, or build ships unless they 
> > have a harbour built.
The current terrain for this is HILLS. It gives a defender an advantage, and
requires more movepoints on entry for any attacker. One might easily flag the
load/unload rules to treat HILLS and maybe MOUNTAINS specially.

But realistically, there are no cliffs that act as a complete block, and no
coastline that does not have any number of shoreline stretches and ravines or
other breaks in the cliffs that allow access. Only on a very small scale map
does this make any sense.

> > 	-Beaches: Allows ships to offload troops.  Cities built next to beaches can 
> > have ships enter them without harbours.
Since ships can always enter cities without harbours, this doesn't make a lot
of sense. Like roads and railroads, cities intrinsically have such improvements.

Being able to move ships *onto* a beach in an arbitrary tile to unload might
be an interesting change. The "Rivers patch" allows one to do this at river
mouths and can be a very effective attack strategy, or make city building on
such river mouths as a fortification/protection measure a strategic imperative.
Experiment with this to see how it works.

> > This would add a whole new dimention to invading someone's island.  Some 
> > islands could be extremely well defended because they are surrounded by 
> > cliffs, although this would make costal cities difficult to be used as ports 
> > because they wouldn't be able to build ships until they built a harbour.
> > It would also be interesting because islands could have hidden, or very well 
> > defended bays that would give building a city there a very good strategic 
> > advantage.
> I like it. It may slow down the expansion of a player with many
> ironclads. So a city which has only cliffs could have access to a
> whale but is quite defended because you can't get the city with the
> usual attack-with-ironclads-and-capture-with-a-horsemen. The same
> could be achieved by providing a special which has the same value as a
> whale for non-ocean tiles.
The specials attribute as opposed to new terrain type is probably a more
effective way to deal with such specialty options. They can then also be
turned off without destroying the usability of the map. In the same vein,
it might useful to consider such specialty clauses to be invokable for
certain existing terrain under option switch. The code would be modular
and identical in either case.

One problem that arises is which coastlines have the attribute, or do all?

A CivIII model where rivers run along the borders of tiles, rather than
through the center of the tile might be extended to terrain features
other than rivers with appropriate effects. This sounds like a more
promising approach for the sorts of over-specialized detail flavour
implied by some of the above.

>         Raimar
Cheers,
RossW
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