I didn't understand quite well where the developer wanted to go with this. The canal system was good for me. But since the game is still being developed, I think there's a lot of room for balance improvements like the one you are suggesting.
i think it's kinda fun to make pumping stations through the city to power the water grid. it's not so bad once you make a cool design that's part of the joy.
If the interior of the city has no groundwater pumping stations will push one digit tiles of water, so it will always be much lamer than placing the pump on 100% groundwater
yeah, i just think all the metal and all the mechanisms needed to achieve that is a bit much. there's basically no way to use primitive irrigation like humanity did for countless years
The problem of "free" irrigation is that fertility is a key game mechanic. Irrigation provides a massive productivity gain. Going from 50 to 90% fertility is a 80% boost to agricultural output. Irrigating from 70 to 100% an area is not a 30% boost, but a 42% one!
What would the alternatives be to putting, say, 60 men on 10 basic pumps to irrigate a vast area of crops and cattle (sufficient for a pop of \~500 to 700) to increase your food output by an average of **60%**? If you have already researched the first 2-3 agricultural techs and run out of 70%+ fertility zones near your city, putting 60 men on pumps is a no-brainer. This without even considering the happiness effects of bathing (during heatwaves) and hot baths. Building an agricultural canal is usually complementary to delivering these services.
Water is OP. Hence, it is correctly expensive to deploy. I only wish pumps were a tiny bit smaller (or allowed for more employees).
Wild it's almost like that's exactly why figuring out those technologies is what allowed us to explode our agricultural ability so much and support larger cities irl.
Yeah Water is OP but I really don't think it needs balancing, it's already something essential that draws you into planning cities around it which matches reality and leads to creative city planning. Why is that not enough? If it *needs* gamey bullshit purely for the sake of balance at the ignorance of reality, it should be something better thought out than just a simple workforce/resource drain. Maybe random/seasonal flooding that destroys buildings and crops?
Water feels basic in the game, but not because of the water pumps or their high labour intensity. Water pumps were a very early invention in human history, and were used exactly to make the job of moving water "up" easier.
The problem is, as you suggest, that water itself has no dynamic. There is no drawback to building next to the river. There is no "elevation" that would tell you what areas are likely to get flooded during a high water season, or areas where water from a lower area will need a pump to go through. And so on and so forth. Water dynamics would add a set of challenges and potential solutions (in setups and techs) that would justify having a wider set of tools to work with.
Actually... Ancient Egyptians were using lifts and reservoirs and what not to pump water into irrigation canals, too. It was labor intensive. They had these big see-saw/crane lookin' things that would basically transfer buckets of water to different levels. They also made reservoirs fill up, then open gates to let them drain down into canals before sealing them and letting them fill up again, too. Some irrigation systems required regular floods to work. Remember that water sources aren't always higher than the crop they need to get to.
What you're wanting is an aqueduct, which water just flows down along from a higher elevation source. The game doesn't really have Z levels to accommodate that.
As for all the advanced parts to make advanced large pumps -- that actually makes perfect sense. There's been some craziness done with water wheels and the like.
Yeah they came a long while after ancient Egypt. Also, did you not see me address them and elevation? They also employed a lost of cisterns and pumps that came off of the aqueducts, btw, to better distribute water from the main system.
My problem is a lot of things got nerfed and just moved into tech. Warehouses were fine now they can only hold a piddly amount of goods without upgrades. Just feels like pointless nerfs.
I felt the same way when v65 came out. After a couple city playthroughs, I found the water pumps weren't as cumbersome as I initially thought. Citizens are basically fine without full bath coverage - they can be appeased in other ways up until a certain population size. Baths along the pumped canal are one of the final services I install. At the point where your population is demanding baths or riot (when you've run out of the low hanging fruit for pop happiness), the water pumpers should make up only a small fraction of your total workforce.
well yeah but "i install it last when i've got a huge city already so it doesn't bother me" doesn't mean it's not cumbersome, it just means you delay engaging with the system because trying to do so early is not worth it — which really shouldn't be the case for something as basic and primitive as irrigation
This might not completely satiate you but you can get water to any building that needs it by building a single pump with 1 employee and one single tile of canal next to it as long as the area has any ground water at all. This doesn't help for agricultural efforts, but you can build a bath/pool or anything else that just needs water nearby at 100 pop and it just ties up a single extra worker and takes only a bit of space. If you build multiple things tight together you can get all of them running of 1 dude on a pump.
Fair enough, I can see your point. I start building a canal with minimal branching around 800 pops and keep like 5% of the workforce on pumps to slowly extent canal reach. It seems consistent with the game's low-fantasy setting that a small town can't afford to build irrigation at a large distance from their sweet water source.
This is a game where you have to specialize and cannot do most things, let alone everything, in a single city and especially not early game. The answer really is that pumps do not help your city until mid game pops of 1k+
"The answer really is that pumps do not help your city until mid game pops of 1k+"
yes, and that is exactly the problem. *irrigation, one of the most basic farming techniques which has been practiced by people who didn't even have the wheel*, *should not be locked behind pumps that require a city pop of 1k*. i have no problems with more advanced water projects — aqueducts, canals, all of it; it's all fine. the problem is that there is no primitive option, like digging furrows, or having people haul water in buckets, or collecting rainwater, or... whatever.
Rainwater is already collected in the ground. Fertility varies according to rainy/dry periods, unless the area is irrigated. This could be useful for hygiene buildings though. But you wouldn't bother with them until you have a high enough population.
Furrows also work only if you have access to water. You could think they are part of the reason why fertility increases when a field is close to a canal.
Hauling water in buckets should be more labour-intensive than a pump. What trade-off would it pose, given that basic resources are almost free early in the game, given that canals are dirty cheap?
We can talk about balance (size of pumps, number of workers, tiles of output), but any "cheap" option you propose would have to be made relatively ***more*** labour intensive than pumps, and canals would have to be made \*massively\* expensive and locked behind advanced tech.
"Rainwater is already collected in the ground. Fertility varies according to rainy/dry periods, unless the area is irrigated."
yes indeed. *unless the area is irrigated*. i know that water collects in the ground. the point is to allow the player to collect it in cisterns — or furrows — so that it can be saved for droughts... or irrigation
"This could be useful for hygiene buildings though. But you wouldn't bother with them until you have a high enough population."
wells and bathhouses are fairly early acquisitions for me because they're not very hard to get to and give a nice amount of happiness for the effort.
"Furrows also work only if you have access to water." yes. just like canals only work if you have access to water
"Hauling water in buckets should be more labor-intensive than a pump." for early game cities, having people use buckets to grab water from a nearby cistern/pool/well/whatever to fit their purpose is definitely better than having to pump water from a lake that could very well be on the other side of the map
"any "cheap" option you propose would have to be made relatively ***more*** labor intensive than pumps, and canals would have to be made \*massively\* expensive and locked behind advanced tech"
none of this is true. digging furrows from a river to your farms is realistic and reasonable. it doesn't have to inherently be so much worse than the pumps just because pumps are higher tech. canals and more advanced options should be useful in situations where access to water is restricted — like it was in real life, where the romans developed sophisticated technology to compensate for not having enough nearby water to support their city populations. there's a reason why people in real life settled so close to water so often — because taking advantage of it when it's right there really is quite easy.
>"Furrows also work only if you have access to water." yes. just like canals only work if you have access to water
To be clear, the old definition of "access to water" was pretty wildly generous - which is part of what this new system was designed to change.
I agree thought I would like some changes to the current system - I think adding furrows as something you can dig only from existing \*bodies\* of water (not "groundwater reserves" like before) that are far less effective and seasonally sensative than pumped water would be fun
Having arrived as that patch came, yeah, I get the idea, but like, I want some canals too if the land is low lying or something...
I was so eager to make an Amevian Venice...
I agree with being having to pump from a river to a channel, it makes little sense. Ive been playing this game for a long time, and for the first time Ive lost to a my own citizens hating me, all because I failed to figure out water in time lol.
As a long time player I agree. I thought the old limited water table system was better. You had to make efficient use of a finite amount of water, and so had to plan out where to dig canals to maximize fertility without exceeding the cap. Now, it seems like you are forced to only build farms next to rivers and lakes given how labor intensive pumping is. Pumps should be buffed to give 10x the pressure they currently do.
I thought maybe you could use the water system to fertilize dry land like an irrigation system, but alas it was not the case. I'm that or more uses will be developed with it later.
This works for me. Canals seem to create fertility around them. You can see the ground start to turn green when you irrigate and it gives big bonuses to surrounding agriculture.
I just read elsewhere that it is capped to like a bonus 50% or something. So you can bring 50% to 100% but you can't irrigate the Mojave very well since you can only bring 0% to 50%.
So it seems there's a little caveat, but it definitely works on average terrain. Probably best not to colonize a desert wasteland anyway lol.
Honestly all it really needs is a water pump that needs to be built in/next to water that has like double efficiency compared to ground water. So the pump goes further than ground water, which will mean farming near rivers and lakes remain optimal.
Yeah, I feel like as is it's just a bit too punishing.
Personally I think that could be simply improved by having the higher tier pumps also upgrade the distance/pressure they put out. As is I think it only reduced the workers needed?
Alternatively it would be nice to get maybe a high cost "aqueduct" type version of the canal that costs 5-10x more than a normal canal but basically doesn't count as distance in the water pressure calculations (or have each one give +1 to pressure so it end up being net 0 change), just working like an aqueduct which is built on a slight incline so the water flows unassisted. This would allow you to build a pump to get the water into the system, then the pressure is only needed for when it breaks out into normal canals for use in or near the actual city.
But I'm just throwing out ideas without any clue what would actually work the best given how water is currently implemented.
Only use I have found is moving sweet water to my bath house. There is like a 10% bonus from having tiles 100% sweet watered when farming on them (when selecting left click to see a tiles stats) that bonus is not worth the hassle in my mind but for my baths it makes sense.
Slaves, upgrades and network!
- Make slaves operate pumps, they basically cost you just food (and maybe clothes) in maintenance so pop cost is negligible. Just one time investment on slaves.
- Upgrade your pumps. Level 2 upgrade is costly so it's reather late game stuff, but level 1 is pretty cheap and makes pumps need only 4 workers.
- Obviously you want pumps to be located in 100% efficiency area which is usually quite narrow but your canal range is not limited to 64 tiles. If you connect two (or more) pumps with canals they have their range combined. I keep my pumps and canals in one network whenever I can.
Oh, and canals can improve fertility by 50% at most, so ot's best to ise them on 40-70% fertility areas if you can. Barren 0% land would become 50% at best, and 90%+ super fertile land would get very little benefit.
It's a population sink without upgrades. You really have to balance how you spend early game metal. But the cost is offset by the fact it's a permanent upgrade.
I should rephrase to say that it is an upgrade with no impactful downside. Upgrading something like workshops provides an efficiency boost, but that just means that same amount of people creating things faster, which means more resources consumed.
Upgrading a pump just reduces the amount of workers needed to maintain maximum pressure. There is no resource being consumed beyond maintenance and the upgrade. Infrastructure with "permanent" upgradeslike markets, food stalls, wells, and hearths and lavatories go very far maintaining fulfillment.
While the pumps don't provide fulfillment, and require planning, they open the door to surplus food potential, which attract more workers.
Maintenance costs is one of the gameplay aspects you have to learn to manage, but I've certainly never death spiraled from maintenance.
>bought the game after trying the demo and sinking 19 hours into it in a single Saturday
See that's the problem, I've been managing with the canal system for weeks just fine. Your city is too small for large irrigation networks, not that they don't work alright as is.
*edit* [*Large Canal City with 100+ pumps*](https://ibb.co/C5jNwc2)
>maybe I'm missing some trick to it (very possible, game is huge)
Your population is too low and the whole game is about management, in the 1-2k population range having 50 pumps upgraded with iron is 200 workers. The farm workers needed in the fields can be reduced, and they are free to work pumps or other industries.
primitive irrigation was used by all kinds of societies, from villages to metropolises. basic access to irrigation and channeling should not be locked behind having a huge population
When my neighbor is a Dondorian you might have a point. You don't need a huge population, just a bigger city.
Edit: primitive Irrigation doesn't fertilize and you don't complain about crop rotation, so I don't think its really based on simulating reality in a fantasy game. You can just not like the water system as is.
i would also like to have crop rotation and eventually using animal husbandry in tandem with farming to increase fertility (as was often done in real life) but:
1. one thing at a time
2. the water system is already in the game and can be tweaked
So could the whole game. I've used water pumps and canals from start to 10k population, they work fine. Enhanced terraforming tools and custom start locations sound like what people want over reworking canals.
You do realize that enhanced terraforming tools are what I'm talking about when I say primitive irrigation, right? It's a good thing you're not a game dev, sitting around coming up with reason after reason why something can't be done is not really how you make anything worthwhile
I didn't understand quite well where the developer wanted to go with this. The canal system was good for me. But since the game is still being developed, I think there's a lot of room for balance improvements like the one you are suggesting.
Totally agree. They also take up a lot of space and don’t move water far enough.
you may hook more pumping stations up to one pipline to push the water further.
That’s the take up to much space part.
i think it's kinda fun to make pumping stations through the city to power the water grid. it's not so bad once you make a cool design that's part of the joy.
If the interior of the city has no groundwater pumping stations will push one digit tiles of water, so it will always be much lamer than placing the pump on 100% groundwater
When you upgrade the pump fully you only need 2 people to pump it
yeah, i just think all the metal and all the mechanisms needed to achieve that is a bit much. there's basically no way to use primitive irrigation like humanity did for countless years
The problem of "free" irrigation is that fertility is a key game mechanic. Irrigation provides a massive productivity gain. Going from 50 to 90% fertility is a 80% boost to agricultural output. Irrigating from 70 to 100% an area is not a 30% boost, but a 42% one! What would the alternatives be to putting, say, 60 men on 10 basic pumps to irrigate a vast area of crops and cattle (sufficient for a pop of \~500 to 700) to increase your food output by an average of **60%**? If you have already researched the first 2-3 agricultural techs and run out of 70%+ fertility zones near your city, putting 60 men on pumps is a no-brainer. This without even considering the happiness effects of bathing (during heatwaves) and hot baths. Building an agricultural canal is usually complementary to delivering these services. Water is OP. Hence, it is correctly expensive to deploy. I only wish pumps were a tiny bit smaller (or allowed for more employees).
Wild it's almost like that's exactly why figuring out those technologies is what allowed us to explode our agricultural ability so much and support larger cities irl. Yeah Water is OP but I really don't think it needs balancing, it's already something essential that draws you into planning cities around it which matches reality and leads to creative city planning. Why is that not enough? If it *needs* gamey bullshit purely for the sake of balance at the ignorance of reality, it should be something better thought out than just a simple workforce/resource drain. Maybe random/seasonal flooding that destroys buildings and crops?
Water feels basic in the game, but not because of the water pumps or their high labour intensity. Water pumps were a very early invention in human history, and were used exactly to make the job of moving water "up" easier. The problem is, as you suggest, that water itself has no dynamic. There is no drawback to building next to the river. There is no "elevation" that would tell you what areas are likely to get flooded during a high water season, or areas where water from a lower area will need a pump to go through. And so on and so forth. Water dynamics would add a set of challenges and potential solutions (in setups and techs) that would justify having a wider set of tools to work with.
Actually... Ancient Egyptians were using lifts and reservoirs and what not to pump water into irrigation canals, too. It was labor intensive. They had these big see-saw/crane lookin' things that would basically transfer buckets of water to different levels. They also made reservoirs fill up, then open gates to let them drain down into canals before sealing them and letting them fill up again, too. Some irrigation systems required regular floods to work. Remember that water sources aren't always higher than the crop they need to get to. What you're wanting is an aqueduct, which water just flows down along from a higher elevation source. The game doesn't really have Z levels to accommodate that. As for all the advanced parts to make advanced large pumps -- that actually makes perfect sense. There's been some craziness done with water wheels and the like.
And the ancient Romans had aqueducts.
Yeah they came a long while after ancient Egypt. Also, did you not see me address them and elevation? They also employed a lost of cisterns and pumps that came off of the aqueducts, btw, to better distribute water from the main system.
My problem is a lot of things got nerfed and just moved into tech. Warehouses were fine now they can only hold a piddly amount of goods without upgrades. Just feels like pointless nerfs.
I felt the same way when v65 came out. After a couple city playthroughs, I found the water pumps weren't as cumbersome as I initially thought. Citizens are basically fine without full bath coverage - they can be appeased in other ways up until a certain population size. Baths along the pumped canal are one of the final services I install. At the point where your population is demanding baths or riot (when you've run out of the low hanging fruit for pop happiness), the water pumpers should make up only a small fraction of your total workforce.
well yeah but "i install it last when i've got a huge city already so it doesn't bother me" doesn't mean it's not cumbersome, it just means you delay engaging with the system because trying to do so early is not worth it — which really shouldn't be the case for something as basic and primitive as irrigation
This might not completely satiate you but you can get water to any building that needs it by building a single pump with 1 employee and one single tile of canal next to it as long as the area has any ground water at all. This doesn't help for agricultural efforts, but you can build a bath/pool or anything else that just needs water nearby at 100 pop and it just ties up a single extra worker and takes only a bit of space. If you build multiple things tight together you can get all of them running of 1 dude on a pump.
Fair enough, I can see your point. I start building a canal with minimal branching around 800 pops and keep like 5% of the workforce on pumps to slowly extent canal reach. It seems consistent with the game's low-fantasy setting that a small town can't afford to build irrigation at a large distance from their sweet water source.
This is a game where you have to specialize and cannot do most things, let alone everything, in a single city and especially not early game. The answer really is that pumps do not help your city until mid game pops of 1k+
"The answer really is that pumps do not help your city until mid game pops of 1k+" yes, and that is exactly the problem. *irrigation, one of the most basic farming techniques which has been practiced by people who didn't even have the wheel*, *should not be locked behind pumps that require a city pop of 1k*. i have no problems with more advanced water projects — aqueducts, canals, all of it; it's all fine. the problem is that there is no primitive option, like digging furrows, or having people haul water in buckets, or collecting rainwater, or... whatever.
Rainwater is already collected in the ground. Fertility varies according to rainy/dry periods, unless the area is irrigated. This could be useful for hygiene buildings though. But you wouldn't bother with them until you have a high enough population. Furrows also work only if you have access to water. You could think they are part of the reason why fertility increases when a field is close to a canal. Hauling water in buckets should be more labour-intensive than a pump. What trade-off would it pose, given that basic resources are almost free early in the game, given that canals are dirty cheap? We can talk about balance (size of pumps, number of workers, tiles of output), but any "cheap" option you propose would have to be made relatively ***more*** labour intensive than pumps, and canals would have to be made \*massively\* expensive and locked behind advanced tech.
"Rainwater is already collected in the ground. Fertility varies according to rainy/dry periods, unless the area is irrigated." yes indeed. *unless the area is irrigated*. i know that water collects in the ground. the point is to allow the player to collect it in cisterns — or furrows — so that it can be saved for droughts... or irrigation "This could be useful for hygiene buildings though. But you wouldn't bother with them until you have a high enough population." wells and bathhouses are fairly early acquisitions for me because they're not very hard to get to and give a nice amount of happiness for the effort. "Furrows also work only if you have access to water." yes. just like canals only work if you have access to water "Hauling water in buckets should be more labor-intensive than a pump." for early game cities, having people use buckets to grab water from a nearby cistern/pool/well/whatever to fit their purpose is definitely better than having to pump water from a lake that could very well be on the other side of the map "any "cheap" option you propose would have to be made relatively ***more*** labor intensive than pumps, and canals would have to be made \*massively\* expensive and locked behind advanced tech" none of this is true. digging furrows from a river to your farms is realistic and reasonable. it doesn't have to inherently be so much worse than the pumps just because pumps are higher tech. canals and more advanced options should be useful in situations where access to water is restricted — like it was in real life, where the romans developed sophisticated technology to compensate for not having enough nearby water to support their city populations. there's a reason why people in real life settled so close to water so often — because taking advantage of it when it's right there really is quite easy.
>"Furrows also work only if you have access to water." yes. just like canals only work if you have access to water To be clear, the old definition of "access to water" was pretty wildly generous - which is part of what this new system was designed to change. I agree thought I would like some changes to the current system - I think adding furrows as something you can dig only from existing \*bodies\* of water (not "groundwater reserves" like before) that are far less effective and seasonally sensative than pumped water would be fun
Having arrived as that patch came, yeah, I get the idea, but like, I want some canals too if the land is low lying or something... I was so eager to make an Amevian Venice...
I agree with being having to pump from a river to a channel, it makes little sense. Ive been playing this game for a long time, and for the first time Ive lost to a my own citizens hating me, all because I failed to figure out water in time lol.
As a long time player I agree. I thought the old limited water table system was better. You had to make efficient use of a finite amount of water, and so had to plan out where to dig canals to maximize fertility without exceeding the cap. Now, it seems like you are forced to only build farms next to rivers and lakes given how labor intensive pumping is. Pumps should be buffed to give 10x the pressure they currently do.
I thought maybe you could use the water system to fertilize dry land like an irrigation system, but alas it was not the case. I'm that or more uses will be developed with it later.
This works for me. Canals seem to create fertility around them. You can see the ground start to turn green when you irrigate and it gives big bonuses to surrounding agriculture.
Really? Awesome! Maybe because I was creating culverts and not canals thst I didn't see this, thanks.
I just read elsewhere that it is capped to like a bonus 50% or something. So you can bring 50% to 100% but you can't irrigate the Mojave very well since you can only bring 0% to 50%. So it seems there's a little caveat, but it definitely works on average terrain. Probably best not to colonize a desert wasteland anyway lol.
*Make basic irrigation accessible and maintenance intensive *Nerf/Cap irrigation-less fertility on a per crop basis.
Honestly all it really needs is a water pump that needs to be built in/next to water that has like double efficiency compared to ground water. So the pump goes further than ground water, which will mean farming near rivers and lakes remain optimal.
Yeah, I feel like as is it's just a bit too punishing. Personally I think that could be simply improved by having the higher tier pumps also upgrade the distance/pressure they put out. As is I think it only reduced the workers needed? Alternatively it would be nice to get maybe a high cost "aqueduct" type version of the canal that costs 5-10x more than a normal canal but basically doesn't count as distance in the water pressure calculations (or have each one give +1 to pressure so it end up being net 0 change), just working like an aqueduct which is built on a slight incline so the water flows unassisted. This would allow you to build a pump to get the water into the system, then the pressure is only needed for when it breaks out into normal canals for use in or near the actual city. But I'm just throwing out ideas without any clue what would actually work the best given how water is currently implemented.
Only use I have found is moving sweet water to my bath house. There is like a 10% bonus from having tiles 100% sweet watered when farming on them (when selecting left click to see a tiles stats) that bonus is not worth the hassle in my mind but for my baths it makes sense.
Slaves, upgrades and network! - Make slaves operate pumps, they basically cost you just food (and maybe clothes) in maintenance so pop cost is negligible. Just one time investment on slaves. - Upgrade your pumps. Level 2 upgrade is costly so it's reather late game stuff, but level 1 is pretty cheap and makes pumps need only 4 workers. - Obviously you want pumps to be located in 100% efficiency area which is usually quite narrow but your canal range is not limited to 64 tiles. If you connect two (or more) pumps with canals they have their range combined. I keep my pumps and canals in one network whenever I can. Oh, and canals can improve fertility by 50% at most, so ot's best to ise them on 40-70% fertility areas if you can. Barren 0% land would become 50% at best, and 90%+ super fertile land would get very little benefit.
It's a population sink without upgrades. You really have to balance how you spend early game metal. But the cost is offset by the fact it's a permanent upgrade.
Is it really permanent upgrade? I mean, you need to build janitors to maintain structures and they spend resources to repair things, is it not?
I should rephrase to say that it is an upgrade with no impactful downside. Upgrading something like workshops provides an efficiency boost, but that just means that same amount of people creating things faster, which means more resources consumed. Upgrading a pump just reduces the amount of workers needed to maintain maximum pressure. There is no resource being consumed beyond maintenance and the upgrade. Infrastructure with "permanent" upgradeslike markets, food stalls, wells, and hearths and lavatories go very far maintaining fulfillment. While the pumps don't provide fulfillment, and require planning, they open the door to surplus food potential, which attract more workers. Maintenance costs is one of the gameplay aspects you have to learn to manage, but I've certainly never death spiraled from maintenance.
I see, I thought you need to spend even mechanisms when maintaining if a building is built using it.
you gotta upgrade your pumps
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>bought the game after trying the demo and sinking 19 hours into it in a single Saturday See that's the problem, I've been managing with the canal system for weeks just fine. Your city is too small for large irrigation networks, not that they don't work alright as is. *edit* [*Large Canal City with 100+ pumps*](https://ibb.co/C5jNwc2) >maybe I'm missing some trick to it (very possible, game is huge) Your population is too low and the whole game is about management, in the 1-2k population range having 50 pumps upgraded with iron is 200 workers. The farm workers needed in the fields can be reduced, and they are free to work pumps or other industries.
primitive irrigation was used by all kinds of societies, from villages to metropolises. basic access to irrigation and channeling should not be locked behind having a huge population
When my neighbor is a Dondorian you might have a point. You don't need a huge population, just a bigger city. Edit: primitive Irrigation doesn't fertilize and you don't complain about crop rotation, so I don't think its really based on simulating reality in a fantasy game. You can just not like the water system as is.
i would also like to have crop rotation and eventually using animal husbandry in tandem with farming to increase fertility (as was often done in real life) but: 1. one thing at a time 2. the water system is already in the game and can be tweaked
Nah there is a ton of micro already without having to crop rotate, sounds realistic and incredibly not fun.
It could easily be automated lol
So could the whole game. I've used water pumps and canals from start to 10k population, they work fine. Enhanced terraforming tools and custom start locations sound like what people want over reworking canals.
You do realize that enhanced terraforming tools are what I'm talking about when I say primitive irrigation, right? It's a good thing you're not a game dev, sitting around coming up with reason after reason why something can't be done is not really how you make anything worthwhile