Rivers ???

[rsolow]

Question: What effect do rivers have on combat or movement?

Observation: Is it me, or does everyone agree they would look better drawn on the edge of a province rather than through it?

[Arralen]

Combat: none

Movement: none

Economics: more gold ("fresh water province" called somewhere)

events: enables flooding


edge drawn: changing the existing maps would mean BOTH provinces would need the flag "fresh water", and their "neighbourship connection" severed. No map, neither hand drawn nor generated by the RMG, provides for this atm.

edit: bad wording

[Ballbarian]

There are some (at the very least my released maps), where rivers are drawn on province edges and they do affect movement, and adjacent provinces are flagged "fresh water".

Basically, it depends on the map designer, but I prefer them to act as natural borders.

[Arralen]

I should have worded my answer more clearly: changing the existing maps (hand-drawn or how they are generated by the RMG) isn't really feasible at the moment.

O.c. you can partly re-draw the existing maps to have rivers at the borders - like some maps have those already.

But neither drawing a river somewhere nor marking 2 adjecent provinces as "fresh water" has any influence on movement:

Movement solely depends on the "neighbour-connections" specified in the .map file. You have to manually delete the connection between 2 provinces which are to be seperated by a unpassable river.

While this is far from impossible, it gets a major PITA fast. And prone to error, with more PITA to follo when you have to fix up the erroneous connections.

[HoneyBadger]

It would be nice if water-breathers could move through river-squares, possibly making rivers separate from the rest of a province, or be their own separate province. It should be noted that rivers, especially in myth, tend to have their own separate distinction from surrounding lands. Besides, it would be fun to send a raiding party up a river to attack an enemy capital. Not so much fun for you, when independent pirates or vikings do the same to your capital. I don't think there's an ability in the game that gives a special bonus for traveling in lands with rivers, but there are for swamps, deserts, and the like. If you've ever hiked or spent a lot of time walking along a river like I have, you'll know that the terrain a lot different from a plain or a forest or a hill. Swamps are close, but not all that close, about as different as grassland and desert. Fighting on or across a river would be a lot different too, and ancient generals seem to have taken rivers very seriously. Mythologically, the undead have a lot of trouble with running water, so do evil witches, and not just in Oz-for a good example of this, and a really nasty witch, try Stoneskin's Revenge, by Tom Deitz. There are the Greek river gods, not to mention crocodiles which play a huge role in myths. And ofcourse rivers such as the Nile and the river Styx. The Grand Canyon started out as a river, after all. Because of all these things and more, I think rivers deserve a place of honor in the game.

[Arralen]

If you want river to be provinces, draw a new map or alter an existing one to have those white "capital dots" at the right places, and voilà - there are your river provinces.

Link them up to the other provinces properly via neighbour command, and you're ready to go.

If you only want to be able to "go upriver" from some sea provinces, simply set up a connection between the sea province and the inland lake in question.

There was a Dom2 map which did both: Karan


And what about the random map generator you might ask?
The 'river' shown on those maps are nothing more than an visual clue that the province is marked as "fresh water". As this is a property of the province, you can't split it off into another province to make a river from that.
One might argue if aquatic creatures shouldn't be able to travel through "fresh water" provinces, but I guess that would be too much hassle to programm and have too little effect to be worth it.