Re: RFE: terrain improvement: canal

 
nicholas.g.lawrence-q/[email protected][1] wrote:
nicholas.g.lawrence-q/[email protected][2] wrote:
>freeciv-bounce-0/[email protected][3] wrote on 14/01/2006 12:24:48 PM: >>>Jason
Dorje Short wrote: >>There would have to be good justification for a change
like this. What >gameplay benefit would having canals provide? >>-jason
>>>Itcan be really annoying to have a huge peninsula, or continent
>(Denmark,South America, Africa) to go around when you could just change
>twosquares to canal. Depending on how large the detour was, you could
>halvethe time for reinforcements to reach the enemy (always a good
>>thing).>>Considering the vast amount of infrastructure required for a
>canal that can handle the largest sea-going vessels... >>Why not use a
string of cities? Sea-going vessels can already >move into a city (by
entering the harbour). What if a sea-going >vessel could move from the
harbour of one city into the >harbour of a city in an adjacent square?
>>nick>>>>This argument holds no water (ha ha -- why aren't you laughing?);
you'd still have to dig a canal to connect the two harbours, unless they're
close enough to be touching, in >which case the canal would be really short.
The Panama and Suez canals were both huge expenses that were justified
because of the great military benefit they led to. Of course the two cities
are touching, in which case it is safe to assume that the harbours are
touching. The string of touching harbours would form the canal, with the
cities being the inevitable urban infrastructures surrounding. It would be a
huge expense, that is entirely reasonable for what you are getting. nick If
these harbours are reasonably sized, wouldn't they have created a completely
separate island, which should be shown on the map as being separated by an
ocean tile?

Idea: some canals were originally for irrigation. Why not make the 'canal'
improvement an upgrade to irrigation, like farmland. It should take the same
time as irrigation, since irrigating something the size of a tile is a lot
ofwork, comparable to digging a long, straight ditch along a preexisting,
smaller ditch.

The size of tiles leads to another point: are cities assumed to cover the
whole tile, or only some part of it? The larger earth scenario map is
160x90,or 14,400 tiles; the total surface area of the Earth is 510,066,000
sqkm, so each tile in this scenario is almost 35,500 sq km (on average).
Thatmakes the average tile about 185 km to a side; if you had two cities
beside each other, the two harbours would be 370 km long in total - 2/3 as
long as Panama, let alone the Panama Canal!

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