At the moment Lakes are just a less good version of Ocean (no whales). In the real world, access to fresh water is important, and I idly wonder whether the game could reflect this.
The best tweak I've thought of is that Lakes get the effect of Harbour for free (+1 food) -- the benefits of fresh water are mainly on the population, after all. Building a Harbour wouldn't increase this further for Lake tiles. Perhaps that's too powerful, especially early in the game; it could be balanced by reducing the trade (lakes aren't conduits to trade as the ocean is). So Lakes would be 2/0/1, like grassland-with-river, except that it couldn't be increased by irrigation/roads or Harbour. The effects of the Fish special might need tweaking too. Not sure whether Offshore Platform should still work -- probably it should. I got to thinking about this because it's currently possible to have an Ocean tile next to a Lake tile with a sharp boundary (by transforming a suitably placed Swamp). The obvious fix would be to flood any connected Lake with (shallow) Ocean as soon as it's linked to the ocean; this isn't too different in principle from the current river-extension behaviour when raising Swamp from the ocean. Currently, such a change would be more or less cosmetic, but if Lakes had actual gameplay value, it could become strategic; if you control a tile that could link a lake to the sea, and your enemy is at the other end of the lake, suddenly you can make life difficult for them. I realise it's a bit late to be proposing such a potentially balance- upsetting change for 2.2. Also, please say if you'd rather I engaged in random speculation on forum.freeciv.org rather than here. _______________________________________________ Freeciv-dev mailing list Freeciv-dev@gna.org https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/freeciv-dev