Terrain.mp

Multiplayer Manual
Overview Terrain Cities Economy Units Combat Diplomacy Government Technology Wonders Buildings Hotkeys

World

The Freeciv world is made of tiles (squares) arranged in a rectangular grid. The eastern and western edges connect, forming a cylinder that can be circumnavigated.

Each tile will be some type of terrain. Together, tiles will form larger features like seas, continents, rivers, and mountain ranges.

Terrain

Terrain serves 3 roles: (1) Unit combat, (2) Unit movement, (3) Resources for cities. We shall consider each role in turn.

Unit Combat

Terrain affects combat very simply: when a land unit is attacked, its defense strength is multiplied by the defense bonus of the terrain beneath it. See the page on combat for details, and the catalogue below for which terrains offer bonuses. (Rivers offer an additional defense bonus of 50%, i.e. the terrain-specific bonus is multiplied by 1.5.)

Road

Railroad

Unit Movement

Sea and air units always expend one movement point to move one tile — sea units because they are confined to the ocean and adjacent cities, and air units ignore terrain completely. Terrain really only complicates the movement of land units.

Land units - movement "speed":

• Moving across easy terrain costs one point per tile; moving onto rough terrain costs more. The cost for each difficult terrain is given in the catalogue below.
• The explorer, partisan, and alpine troops travel light enough that moving one tile costs only ⅓ of a movement point (except that they can use railroads like anyone else).
• Other land units move for only ⅓ of a movement point per tile along:
  • rivers, which are natural features that cannot be altered (except by transforming land to sea and back again), and
  • roads, which can be built by workers, settlers, and engineers.
• With the railroad advance, roads can be upgraded to railroads which cost nothing to move along — units can move as far as they want along a railroad in a single turn! Beware that roads and railroads can be used by any civilization, so an extensive railroad system may offer your enemies instant movement across your empire. Railroads cost three settler-turns regardless of terrain.

Cities always have roads inside — and railroads, when their owner has that technology — which will connect to (rail)roads built adjacent to the city.

With the bridge building advance, roads and railroads can be built on river tiles to bridge them.

Resources for Cities

Tiles within range of a city may be worked by that city. Cities may be built on any terrain except Ocean or Glacier.

When a city works terrain on a tile, it receives three products: food points, production points, and trade points. We specify the output of a tile simply by listing these with slashes in between. For example, "1/2/0" describes a tile that produces one food point, two production points, and no trade points.

Every type of terrain has some chance of an additional special resource that boosts one or two of the products. Terrain transformation can make resources inaccessible; for instance, if a Forest tile with pheasant is transformed to Plains, there will no longer be a food bonus from the pheasant for that tile.

The catalogue below lists the output of each terrain, both with and without special resources.

Irrigation

Farmland

Mine

Fortress

Airbase

Improving Terrain

Basics

There are several ways to improve terrain.

As soon as they are created, workers, settlers, and engineers can:

1. irrigate land to produce more food or
2. build a mine to yield more production points

(but not both on the same tile). Once built, a mine or irrigation system may be destroyed by pillaging or further alteration of the terrain.

To irrigate land, the player must have a water source in one of the four adjoining tiles, whether river or ocean or other irrigated land.

Terrain can often be transformed to become more suitable to the player's needs — attempting to irrigate a forest, for example, creates plains (which can then be irrigated in the normal way). (See "transformation" below.)

Roads and railroads are improvements that have been mentioned under "Transportation". They can be built on the same tile as other improvements (such as irrigation). Note that roads and rivers enhance trade for some types of terrain, as shown in the catalogue below, and railroads increase by the production output of a tile by 50% (while also retaining any trade bonus from roads).

Altering Terrain Types: Methods and Number of Turns

Later improvements

Fortresses (2 worker-turns; requiring Construction) and airbases (requiring Radio) are also terrain improvements.

• In a fortress, units are killed one by one (ignoring the game.ruleset option "killstack"), and defence is doubled. Fortresses also extend national borders, and once Invention has been researched, units in a fortress have increased vision.

• In an airbase, air units (including helicopters) are also killed one by one and allowed to refuel, but also open to attacks by land units. Paratroopers can be launched from airbases.

Both take two worker-turns to complete, regardless of terrain. Only workers and engineers can build airbases.

After Refrigeration has been researched, irrigated tiles can be irrigated again, resulting in farmland. This increases tile food production by 100% if the city working it has a supermarket.

Only engineers can directly transform land. (See earlier diagramme above and the catalogue below). For transforming swamp to ocean, one of the eight adjoining tiles must be ocean already. To allow transforming ocean into swamp at least three of eight adjoining tiles must be land. Load engineers on a transport and move them over the desired ocean tile before giving them the command to transf(O)rm. The new swamp will get a river if built adjacent to some river tile's single mouth.

Note that each turn, Engineers get two worker-turns to invest in their activities. Therefore they complete all improvements in half the number of turns specified in the catalogue.

Two or more units working on the same tile under the same orders combine their labor, speeding completion of their project. Be careful: when a unit's working orders are interrupted, its progress is lost.

Any special resource on a tile is lost after its terrain type is transformed. It would reappear if the tile can be transformed back to its original terrain. The lone exception is that Oil on a glacier can be regained if the tile is transformed to desert.

Village

Villages

The user who hosts the game has the option of including up to 500 villages (also called huts), primitive communities spread across the world at the beginning of the game. Any land unit can enter a village, making the village disappear and deliver a random response. If the village proves hostile, it could produce barbarians or the unit entering may simply be destroyed. If they are friendly, the player could receive gold, a new technology, a military unit (occasionally a settler; and sometimes a unit that the player cannot yet create), or even a new city.

Later in the game, helicopters may also enter villages, but overflight by other aircraft will cause the villagers to take fright/flight and disband.

River

Rivers

Rivers increase movement the same as roads while giving a 150% defense bonus. Roads can't be placed over river tiles until the technology Bridge Building is discovered.

Terrain Catalog

Terrain	F/P/T	Special 1	F/P/T	Special 2	F/P/T	Move cost * Defense bonus	Result (turns): Irrigation Mining	Result (turns): Road Transforming
Deep ocean	1/0/2					1 * 100%	impossible impossible	impossible impossible
Desert	0/1/0	Oasis	3/1/0	Oil	0/4/0	1 * 100%	+1 F (3) +1 P (3)	+1 T (1) Plains (12)
Forest	1/2/0	Pheasant	3/2/0	Silk	1/2/3	2 * 150%	Plains (3) Swamp (8)	+0 T (2) Grassland (12)
Grassland	2/0/0	Resources	2/1/0			1 * 100%	+1 F (3) Forest (5)	+1 T (1) Hills (12)
Hills	1/0/0	Coal	1/2/0	Wine	1/0/4	2 * 200%	+1 F (5) +3 P (5)	+0 T (2) Plains (12)
Jungle	1/0/0	Gems	1/0/4	Fruit	4/0/1	2 * 150%	Grassland (8) Forest (8)	+0 T (2) Plains (12)
Lake	1/0/2	Fish	3/0/2			1 * 100%	impossible impossible	impossible Swamp (18)
Mountains	0/1/0	Gold	0/1/6	Iron	0/4/0	3 * 300%	impossible +1 P (5)	+0 T (3) Hills (12)
Ocean	1/0/2	Fish	3/0/2	Whales	2/1/2	1 * 100%	impossible impossible	impossible Swamp (18)
Plains	1/1/0	Buffalo	1/3/0	Wheat	3/1/0	1 * 100%	+1 F (3) Forest (8)	+1 T (1) Grassland(12)
Swamp	1/0/0	Peat	1/4/0	Spice	3/0/4	2 * 150%	Grassland (8) Forest (8)	+0 T (2) Ocean (18)
Tundra	1/0/0	Game	3/1/0	Furs	2/0/3	1 * 100%	+1 F (3) impossible	+0 T (1) Desert (24)

---

Previous: Game Manual

Chapter

Next: Cities