Remove the ability to plant forest in desert

[Apheirox]

It makes desert tiles less unique, more generic and bland that you can put forests on them and it doesn't hold up from a realism/immersion perspective either. Having the diversity some terrain being really bad is more interesting.

That is all. /thread.

[mara]

I personally have to disagree with this. Unfortunately due to mechanics, and world gen, there are a lot of starts that wouldn't be manageable otherwise.

Edit: more detail

Unless you enjoy starting over and over again, there needs to be a way to make terrible starts better. With the way the aliens work in this game prevent you from moving too much from your starting zone (IMHO the range around drop should be larger, to make more wiggle room for things like these. Hive density is so high early on, getting a second city takes forever.. I digress, this is an issue for a separate thread). If we don't have a way to make up for the abysmal starts you can get, there'll be a lot of new games over and over a la Civ.

Edit 2: Further gripes

It'd hose the Hippie Terras too for a lot of starts. with their increased habitat they need a way to make the most of every space early on, and Forests are the way to do that, especially with early alien hostility wiping out every other improvement.

This would also make multiplayer really really brutal for a lot of people, with the spacing of dropzones as it is.. Especially with map generation being kinda meh. Anyone not in temperate zone would lose.

[Apheirox]

This thread was a mistake on my part. I had forgotten how Pandora has the rather excellent little feature of updating the tree graphics to suit the underlying terrain, ie. on deserts it won't produce a temperate forest but rather palm trees and in the arctic it will be snow-covered forests. That's definitely something to keep so my proposal should be discarded. However, I still think the idea of having 'bad' terrain is something Pandora lacks. In Civilization, for example, deserts are bad terrain that won't get settled until late (if at all) which has the interesting property of creating no-mans-land wasteland zones where nobody owns the terrain. This is something I'd like to see in Pandora, too - for instance, it could come in the form of introducing a new terrain type such as 'desert wasteland' or 'frozen waste' where no terrain improvements can be built.

As Mara points out, Pandora does in fact currently have terrain that is bad, but not in a way that produces good game mechanics: Unlike real life (and most other 4X games), coastal cities are really bad in Pandora, something I believe most of us hope gets rectified in a later patch. Also, Pandora does in fact already feature 'terrible starts' - these aren't deserts, however, but rather the arctic areas. Again, it would balance the game better and help the arctic starts a great deal if coastal cities weren't so bad.

[SephiRok]

There actually is great, worse and bad terrain. Mountains are great. Grassland plains are great. Desert and arctic plains are equivalent and both meh. And fungus is outright bad. At least until you have the resources and technology to build meaningful improvements on desert and arctic, and remove fungus.

Water skews things though. Hope we get to change that. Water forming is what all of us really want to do.

[mara]

With water forming (hopefully) coming down the road, it'd be nice to also have aquatic cities, especially in the continent and archipelago type maps.