Players can reclaim shallow water for free

[Ranran(retired)]

Players can reclaim shallow water for free like this.

So, anyone can be Dutch.

Players can very easily get a flat vacant land by the sea.
Players can easily destroy navigable big rivers. It's cheaper to make a road by land reclamation than to make a bridge.



Is this a bug? Or is it intended?
I think people commonly call this a cheat.

Extended is also the same.

[Isaac Eiland-Hall]

You have the attention of the Netherlands either way

[Yona-TYT]

The same thing happens when a "fastidious" player occurs to modify the terrain in a nautical pass so that the ships are left without a route.

It was exactly one of the reasons why I did a scritp to divide the map into regions, but lately the scripts / scenarios are very little used I'm afraid.

[kierongreen]

I wouldn't say this is a bug as such as it was half intended to be able to clean up automatically generated shorelines. But if there was a general view that this should be charged for then it can be.

[Leartin]

I wouldn't say this is a bug as such as it was half intended to be able to clean up automatically generated shorelines. But if there was a general view that this should be charged for then it can be.

One issue is that there are two methods to "clean up shorelines", as the change-climate-tool also works on shallow water - but for a price.
Another issue is that the raise-land tool creating flat land from shallow water for free should be mirrored by the lower-land tool creating shallow water from flat land for free, which it doesn't (you can raise land and lower it again to replace it by water though - which just makes it even weirder)

Raising land in a spot where there is water should just raise the node one level above water and turn the surrounding tiles to land. That way there is always some rising of land involved, which needs to be paid. To change land to shallow water and back, use the appropriate climate-change-tools instead.

[Ranran(retired)]

Terraforming costs can be set in the simuconf.tab. Some pak files do not charge for it. So which pak?

I think it's all paksets I've seen. I have confirmed on pak.nippon, pak128.geman, pak128.britain, pak192.comic.
Note that this is a raise land, not a build slope or set climate. As pointed out by leartin, running it with a climate change tool pays a cost. But it's free if you use raise land.
Depending on the pakset, only the public player can be "restored". Because it is in the terrain edit toolbar.

But if there was a general view that this should be charged for then it can be.

Yes, I think that it's free is breaking the game balance. You wanted land for the railroad that connects the cities. If it is a city along the sea, you can easily get vacant land by reclaiming the sea. All the lowest water can be reclaimed for free so it can be reclaiming quite far from the original coastline.