Glaciers and Frozen Water

[Sarilho1]

For a long time that I'm thinking about this. In our planet we have Glaciers in land (mountains, South Pole) and Frozen Water in the North Pole. However, in the game there are only one type of frozen terrain, that can be transformed to tundra. My idea is to separate into two different types of terrain.

Glaciers: These are the current type of Icy Terrain that we have today.
* It can be travel by land units;
* Roads and mines can be built in it;
* When transformed, it creates tundra;
* The resources that this terrain can have are: oil and ivory.
* The image that would represent this terrain could be the old glacier image (with sand on its borders).

Frozen Water (or maybe another name...): This new terrain is a kind of special water terrain, because it can be travel by land units;
* It's impossible to build cities, roads and mines (in default rulesets);
* It can be travel by naval units, that are specialized to it: transporters (but it would consume more move points, than in open waters) and maybe a new unit: Icebreaker (that can use the same amount of move points to travel in ocean, deep ocean, lake or frozen water (maybe 3));
* When transformed (melted), it creates deep ocean (maybe ocean, but deep ocean would more accurate, unless the tile is bordered by a land tile). Engineers could work in a boat or not, but they would be killed if they have no place to escape.
* It could have a new resource (seal) that would produce food, or don't have any resource at all
* The image that would represent this terrain could be the actual glacier image.

Conclusion:
In my idea, these terrain would create some different game plays, because, except when frozen water have food resources, it would be prejudicial, for work on it and for travel, through it. Nordic countries (applying these proposal to the real world) would what to melt this terrains to create passages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_Passage and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Sea_Route.

When global warming occur, frozen water would become ocean or deep ocean (lake, if in the middle of a continent) and glaciers would become land terrains (tundra, desert...). It would happen the opposite when nuclear winter occurs.

So, what you think?

[Alien Valkyrie]

Yeah, I think this is a pretty nice idea. Would need some new code though (probably. I've never looked at the freeciv code).

[cazfi]

Would need some new code though (probably. I've never looked at the freeciv code).

It seems to me that everything described in the original post should be doable with current ruleset format.

[Alien Valkyrie]

Oh? Well, then I must have overlooked something. I haven't been doing freeciv stuff for a while. But I think I'll do some stuff again now that 2.4 is out.

[JTN]

This is something I too have been considering for some years (I've been calling the frozen water terrain "Sea Ice"), and I've been meaning to post about.

What originally made me think about it is the unsatisfactory situation with polar regions: either you have "separatepoles" set and these ugly trenches between the artificially-flat tops of continents and the poles, or you don't and your enemies can slowly but reliably trudge all the way around the pole into your territory. (We used to have Glacier as "unsafe terrain", but not any more, so there's no risk to dumping a unit on the pole and just exploring the polar regions for years, mopping up huts.)

Thus, in my world Glacier terrain would be as it is now, but Sea Ice would be impassable to land and sea units, representing the difficulty of exploring the polar regions. Production would be 0/0/0; I had no special resources but I suppose we could allow Seals . Obviously no infrastructure or cities.

To meet my original goal I'd want the poles to be either a mixture of Glacier and Sea Ice terrain, or possibly mostly Sea Ice. Having done this I'd never turn on "separatepoles" again in my own games, so the ice would tend to come down to meet the high latitudes of "real" continents.

Icebound "port" cities wouldn't be much use as ports until later in the game, where specialised transport units (icebreakers) would be able to get to them (but scope for military conquest would be limited to Marines attacking off icebreakers, I guess). Maybe submarines can go under the ice, but they can't do much other than explore and attack icebreakers, so in general the icebound polar oceans are not an important military theatre (this was a property I wanted but I can't remember exactly why now).

Sea Ice would melt under the influence of global warming, allowing things like opening up the Northern Sea Route. I'm undecided on whether I'd let Engineers on icebreakers transform the Sea Ice to open water or have it immovable; it's not something you can do in reality, and I kind of like having some restrictions of that nature. There would be a perverse incentive to cause global warming, which would be greater if it was the only way to get rid of troublesome Sea Ice.

Would need some new code though (probably. I've never looked at the freeciv code).

My doubts were:

• If I invent this terrain, can I persuade the map generator to do the right thing with it without changing the code? I've not investigated at all, maybe it's possible.
• When the Sea Ice melts, can we make sure it becomes an appropriate type of water terrain (Lake or Ocean or maybe Deep Ocean)? This should be more practical with the "flooding" changes coming in 2.5 (patch #3478, bug #20043); I raised bug #20038 with this in mind but perhaps that's not necessary.
• In Sarilho1's version (where land units can traverse frozen water), I fear that the deep division between "land" and "oceanic" terrain types may cause trouble (all units have to end up as move_type="both" or modern equivalent?). But I haven't thought about it very hard.

[cazfi]

If I invent this terrain, can I persuade the map generator to do the right thing with it without changing the code? I've not investigated at all, maybe it's possible.

I'm not sure but Sea Ice would probably need to be classified as Land terrain for it to be limited to polar regions by temperature property.

In Sarilho1's version (where land units can traverse frozen water), I fear that the deep division between "land" and "oceanic" terrain types may cause trouble (all units have to end up as move_type="both" or modern equivalent?). But I haven't thought about it very hard.

Move_type really matters for AI only, but then there it is really important. It might be ok to make ferries "Both" moving, but making "Land" units "Both" moving would mean they would never use ferries (AI ferry code is strictly limited to transporting units incapable of moving on Ocean themselves over Ocean - no transporting on land, no transporting of units that can travel any ocean terrains)

[cazfi]

If I invent this terrain, can I persuade the map generator to do the right thing with it without changing the code? I've not investigated at all, maybe it's possible.

I'm not sure but Sea Ice would probably need to be classified as Land terrain for it to be limited to polar regions by temperature property.

But that would mean one cannot build coastal improvements to cities next to it - probably not what you want.

In Sarilho1's version (where land units can traverse frozen water), I fear that the deep division between "land" and "oceanic" terrain types may cause trouble (all units have to end up as move_type="both" or modern equivalent?). But I haven't thought about it very hard.

Move_type really matters for AI only, but then there it is really important. It might be ok to make ferries "Both" moving

I shouldn't post before getting my morning coffee... making "Both" moving units to work as ferries are on my own TODO (desperately needed for alien ruleset too). However, that should be quite easy to implement and is likely to happen soon while transporting of units other than "Land" units is not in my sight.

[cazfi]

Theoretical side aside, I tried adding such a terrain to variant2 in practice, and just hit some map generator bugs.

[HanduMan]

Years ago, when I was still playing actively long turn type of games with my frfiends, I created this. Pretty much the JTN way. The Freeciv version was 2.3.x.

I found the ruleset files and this is how it looks like:

terrain.ruleset

Code: Select all

[terrain_ice]
name                 = _("Ice")
graphic              = "ice"
graphic_alt          = "arctic"
identifier           = "i"
movement_cost        = 2
defense_bonus        = 0
food                 = 0
shield               = 0
trade                = 0
road_trade_incr      = 0
road_time            = 0
irrigation_result    = "no"
irrigation_food_incr = 0
irrigation_time      = 0
mining_result        = "no"
mining_shield_incr   = 0
mining_time          = 0
transform_result     = "terrain_ocean"
transform_time       = 72
rail_time            = 3
clean_pollution_time = 3
clean_fallout_time   = 3
warmer_wetter_result = "terrain_ocean"
warmer_drier_result  = "terrain_lake"
cooler_wetter_result = "no"
cooler_drier_result  = "no"
native_to            = "Air", "Missile", "Helicopter"
flags                = "NoBarbs", "NoCities" ; "Oceanic", 
;property_ocean_depth = 32
property_frozen      = 5
property_wet         = 1
property_cold        = 80
helptext             = _("\
Ice on sea. Building something on floating ice\
 would not be a very good idea.\
")

game.ruleset

Code: Select all

[settings]
 set =
     { "name", "value", "lock"
		"mapsize", "PLAYER", FALSE
		"tilesperplayer", 187, FALSE
		"topology", "WRAPX|WRAPY|ISO|HEX", FALSE
		"generator", "FRACTAL", FALSE
		"temperature", 63, FALSE
		"landmass", 35, FALSE
		"steepness", 15, FALSE
		"wetness", 60, FALSE
		"specials", 25, FALSE
		"huts", 0, FALSE
		"globalwarming", TRUE, FALSE
		"nuclearwinter", TRUE, FALSE

As we can see, I have commented out the parts making the ice oceanic. Maybe for a reason?
If I remember correctly these map generator directives and settings produced kind of small amount of ice on the map, always coastal and near to the poles. But if I tried to tweak them for some more it would spread all over the map which was not my intention. Maybe this post could serve as a starting point for someone to research it further?

(The move/build time related values are not compatible with the default rulesets, this is taken from a highly customised one.)

[Arbogast]

Here is another 2 bits from me:
I created a 'Unaccessible' tile, darker. (the lighter one is Unaccessible too).
I modified the 'glacier' one into 'Ice-Water'.
I think the picture below is clear enough to know what's what.