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Author Topic: Diverting a River  (Read 720 times)

vaeluv

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Diverting a River
« on: December 31, 2021, 07:42:58 pm »
Hi!  I'm a relatively new player and am enjoying the game so far.  I was wondering if I divert a river, will it impact the rest of the big world map?  Here are my intentions (assuming I can engineer such a thing).

In my world, there is several Dwarf sites near the source of a major river.  Then about a "half day's travel" there are several Elven Retreats near where the river empties into the ocean.  If I were to dam off the river and to divert its flow to a different direction, will that impact the larger world and cut off the water supply to those dirty elves before they start expanding toward our mountains?
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gchristopher

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Re: Diverting a River
« Reply #1 on: December 31, 2021, 09:58:57 pm »
That's a cool idea. Sadly, no, changes like this made to a point in the world (a "site") don't affect the larger world.

In general, the geographic features (temperature, water levels, elevation, etc) are determined once at world creation and then do not change once it starts simulating history, and even then, I don't think their effect on civilization progress is large except in determining the biome types, which does affect where a race can settle.

But your heart's in the right place! Maybe someday there will be dynamic ecology and terrain changes and you could simply burn the entire forest down, as well. I bet that'd work nicely, too.
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PatrikLundell

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Re: Diverting a River
« Reply #2 on: January 01, 2022, 04:27:43 am »
As mentioned, the world map and the mid level tile (embark) maps are not connected dynamically, and the mid level tiles aren't connected to each other dynamically either, so even if you redirect a river to exit at the edge into a different tile from before, those two neighboring tiles will not change, so if you embark there you'll still have an incoming river that you'd dammed off in one tile, and no sign of any incoming redirected river (or magma, should you engineer that) in the other tile.

You can, however, conquer the elves directly instead (clunky and buggy, but most of the crash bug(s) seem to have mostly been fixed)...
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