[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Suggestions/Ideas

[Ross Wetmore <rwetmore@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

The rivers patch first submitted in the summer of 2001 and various revisions
of it through the corecleanups only allowed ships to enter river mouths, i.e.
coastal tile rivers. There was no restriction on terrain. The AI was never
updated to fully understand it, although it managed to use it in various
ways. Mailing lists should have a lot of details and code patches/diffs.

Coastal rivers with two sea outlets make nice looking small islands with
coastal waterways navigatable by ships.

This allows *very* effective surprise attacks (a la Viking) since there is
no movement point loss in landing. River mouths act like a city in this
respect and need to be guarded.

This allows a lot of movement into inland waterways. The corecleanups have
a lot or connected river and lake systems. By judicious placement of cities
you could effectively connect 3 tiles inland to allow ships to move from
ocean to an inland lake, i.e. ocean->river mouth->city->river mouth->lake.

The change is a trivial one to a switch in checking unit moves.

One can experiment with this limited form before going the whole route.

There will be a lot of changes to bring the AI up to snuff on river
movement since there is a basic assumption that land and sea movement
can never occur in the same tile, and thus there is only one storage
location allocated everywhere. Cities are something of an exception,
and river mouths was the second minimal stretch that almost works.
But generic river movement will cause a lot of fundamental problems.

Cheers,
RossW
=====

Mike Kaufman wrote:
> On Tue, May 06, 2003 at 06:38:53AM +0000, Per I. Mathisen wrote:
>
>
> > > Is there any interest in this? If so, I'll get working
> > > on a clean implementation of it.
>
> I believe that Ross Wetmore has/had an implementation of this, You might
> want to check with him before reinventing the wheel.
>
> -mike