New Map City Placement Preference

[colonyan]

     I almost always wanted some cities are placed near to large body of water. Most of large cities we know are coastral
     or obviously close to a river.

     Now we have rivers, it is more so.

     I want a check box which places some cities coastral or close to river and less on very high altitude.

     I guess recognizing large body of water is not too hard. But how about river? Does program distinguish them?
   
     Are there enough people think as same so I can make this an extension request?
     Or I will be told to place cities on my own... (but I like random aspect of game. Do we play card game by knowing what card one has?
     poker and such are fun because cards(city placement in this case) are random)

modnote (whoami): topics merged 2009-03-26

[ar3man]

I suggest cities are more often located near to the sea or low-altitude ;next to water or river ,even bay area!!
In anywhere of the world, people are usually settle next to any places proviod water and food, which 99% not on the peak or middle of no where

I hope have a system make cities more likly settle in a reasonable spot

sth like

50% of Cities locate the lowest level/biggest size level ( opional );
35% of Cities locate the median level/second and thrid size level
15% of Cities locate the higher level / rest of the land
10% of Cities are random placed ( as same as now )

[colonyan]

This is exactly what I wanted to say! One supporter here.

+ if cities are located near water or river is good too!

[sojo]

If you choose a map, which is not to big and have more cities, than you get a lot of cities at sea and next to a river.

[wipi35]

I prefer starting a game with zero cities. As government player, I create them at the desired positions.

[Fabio]

I support this extension. But i think it should be related with the (future???) changes to the climates system. Any news about them???

[whoami]

@colonyan: I have merged your proposal with the existing similar topic.

[TrainMith]

As Prissi has mentioned in another post, there is some enjoyment in trying to connect cities that are in mountainous regions without much modification of the terrain.  

That being said, however, I totally am in agreement concerning cities placed nearer to water, on average.  On occasion some cities are a little further from water sources, but not too far.

As to this end, I am wondering if the river generation function could return the river placements (ie. all river routes that were generated.) and also a function to find the shoreline, with this data to be used in the city generation phase.  The river generation function knows where the rivers are, in due course, and it should be fairly easy to obtain this information.  Also, a slight preference should be made for cities at, or near, the mouths of rivers.  

My linux harddrive took a nose dive over the past week and I've not had a chance to attempt to bring it back up, so I don't have the code in front of me.  

Also, I would also prefer the rivers not to use the default path finding algorithm:  The rivers tend to be too straight for my liking, most times will run along the top of a ridge then decide to descend much too far away, and occassionally the river channel digging looks out of place.  I have a few ideas on how to accomplish this but, due to my current inability to read German, am unable to understand how the river generation interacts with the ground.  (Mostly I'm unable to read how the ground tiles and such are represented.)  I've been wondering if I could get any help on this?

[wlindley]

Not just cities but resources and industries could benefit from "generally place near..." logic which would favor placing coal and iron mines near mountains; forests on mountain slopes; farms on flat land; steel mills near rivers or water, and so forth.  Perhaps the map and river generation could record lists of areas: mountaintop; slope; flatland; river; shore.