Salem

Allow us to dig rivers

This would be very useful, but is it technically possible?

Water Physics is not in the game and is not a priority at the moment.

Chief PeePooKaKa
MM Tribe

ZtyX wrote:Allow us to dig rivers

This would be very useful, but is it technically possible?

Do research, this has been brought up before.

"nice things"

Would be nice and maybe even possible. With a reasonable scope and on an new map! Also, I looked for the original post and could not find it.

First off, lets rule out the idea of using acctual fluid mechanics. No game has ever done this in a good way. Also, there is no rain ever in salem so there is no flow of water anywhere and all water is salt. Salt stagnant water, it is a good thing we dont need to drink. Now without a flow of water there would be no rivers but lets ignore that for the sake of sanity and just call them rivers.

And lets for the sake of simplicity assume that all terrain in salem has an infinite hydraulic conductivity. That is water can filter through anything giving us a uniform water level. Lets say for simplicity say that level is 0 to conform to RL. With this map generator there is no significant elevation in the inland so there would still be rivers but we would not have rivers climbing hills like we have now.

So this is how I would implement it.
A change to the terrain generator that to instead of generating lakes and rivers just lower the ground level in that area and check if it is low enough to be a lake/river.
Lets decide on a uniform water surface height at which you reach groundwater. Dig deeper than that and the tile turns to shallow water.
Drop soil in water to raise the ground below. If ground is higher than ground water level, water goes away. Droped soil should not displace water, merely replace it.

This opens of for several things.
Dugout waterways of shallow or deep water.
Implement a new boat "Dredger". Very slow moving but with a huge cargo capacity.
Implement digging and dropping soil from dredgers so that people can dredge deep rivers.
Implement a new boat "Ship". A large cargo capacity vessel that cannot travel in shallow waters, perhaps with a crew minimum larger than one?
Harbors in player towns.

Then there is the issue of clay/lime/stone-pits. Since we can raise the level of a pit, the mechanic of lowering when dug is not really relevant. I suggest a new action, extract, that comes at a hefty cost in phlegm and that does not alter elvation and letting digging/dropping work as anywhere else or disallowing digging it in pits altogether.

Then again, these are all nice things but not a priority.

cairde wrote:Would be nice and maybe even possible.

Fairly sure they addressed this in one of the live streams that this isn't possible.

Link?

http://www.twitch.tv/paradoxinteractive/b/338626805

at 34:00 they discuss how the map generator handles water. They chose to make water non-terraformable in order to implement lakes and waterfalls at varying levels instead of a constant "sea level" across the whole map.

That is acctually pretty cool. They say pretty much everything I say except they opt for the other path of having variable height water. Fair enough, it is not the choice I would have made but I am not a dev.

Only difference between what they are saying and what I am saying is that there is acctual gradual altitude change in the game as you venture inland. Now, i live in a mountainous country and my perception of reasonable inland altitude might be off. That or I havn't travelled inland enough

Transcript of minute 34.

"Water is tricky my friend, water is very tricky. Ehm...

Basicly when we did the mapgenerator we had to make a choice between either having no water terraforming or having one, or like a.. a sea level on which all water is located. Or like one uniform sealevel across the entire map. This later thing meant like no waterfalls no lakes up in the mountains etc etc. So we opted to make water non terraformable instead. Ehm... Acctual fluid logic, which is what would be required, eh, if we wanted to have proper water, ehm, is not sometinhg we can do with any resonable ease. So... I am gonna say no to flowing water."