Impassable tiles

[adamo]

1. Idea

I would like to see the impassable tiles option in the game. What is an "impassable tile"? It's just an ordinary terrain tile with some special properties: it could not be passed by any water, land nor air unit (in other words, nothing could step on it). Just sort of a "black hole" on a map or designer-made barrier.

2. How would it look like?

It might be completely black, just like the edge of the map. No graphics needed.
Well, we could make something like very high (somehow impassable) mountains, or an impassable lake of lava, or a black hole, or a ("magically" impassable) ghost area etc., but these would need to be done with graphics. So, a plain, black "nothing" (a "hole" in the map) would be just fine.

...ok, for the lava lakes, we could take already existing ocean tiles and swap the blue color with the orange one.

3. What for?

This is for creating special scenarios/special cases. Specifically, to make a completely closed areas, which cannot be entered by the player(s) in any way.
Here we can see the 8x8 island (.) in the middle of the ocean ( ). Inside the island there is 6x6 double barrier, built from impassable terrain tiles (#), which hides something inside:

Code: Select all

                      
       ........       
       .######.       
       .######.       
       .##..##.       
       .##..##.       
       .######.       
       .######.       
       ........       
                    

What could we put inside this area, and what for? Well, for example, we could put four pollutions in four empty land tiles inside, or four nuclear fallouts, to cause "non-anthropogenic climate changes", which I described in a
previous topic. These fallouts/pollutions wouldn't be achievable for the players, so nobody could clean them up; as a result, they would cause constant (non-anthropogenic) climate changes, apart from player's later activities (anthropogenic climate changes). So, if a map designer would like to apply non-anthropogenic climate changes to the game (climate constantly warming/cooling no matter players' actions), it'd be easy to be done.

Or we can make a special fortresses. The player starts (@ for the capital) in the middle of the land (.). As you can see, the capital is surrounded by impassable tiles (#), so it can only be captured from the east:

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...............
.....#####.....
....##...##....
....#.....#....
....#..@.......
....#.....#....
....##...##....
.....#####.....
...............

In other variants, we could make land map exceptions, closed areas ("Bermuda Triangle" in the middle of the ocean?) or anything else the designer can imagine.

4. How to code that?

That would be very easy. No need to code. We could just add another type of terrain ("null" terrain) into the map editor; a terrain with no properties (impassable by units of any type, with zero production of any type, etc.).

[cazfi]

Already there in most supplied rulesets under name "Inaccessible" terrain in 2.5 (are you using older version?), as you can see from http://freeciv.wikia.com/wiki/NEWS-2.5.0

[adamo]

Oh, sorry, I didn't notice that.
Still using 2.4.2 - I was downloading the game from Ubuntu Software Center and it says it's most recent one.