1. The World
The world
The world of Golden Age of Civilizations is made of squares arranged in a rectangular grid and drawn as isometric map. This world is practically infinite (4 billion x 4 billion squares), so that not forming a cylinder or a sphere. Each square contains some kind of terrain and together they form larger features like oceans, continents and mountain ranges.
Placement of players
Every white tile is a 16 x 16 map area which is mostly covered by sea and some small islands; every gray tile is a 16 x 16 map area which is mostly covered by land and some sea. The numbers are the sequence of the registration time of the players.
Placement of the players on the map
Terrain
Terrain serves three roles: the theater upon which your units battle rival player's units; the landscape across which your units travel; and the medium which your cities work to produce resources. Terrain affects combat very simply: when a land unit is attacked, its defense strength is multiplied by the defense factor of the terrain beneath it.
Squares within range of a city may be worked. Cities may be built on any terrain except ocean. When cities work terrain there are three products, described further: food, production points and trade points. These three are so important that we specify the output of a square simply by listing them with slashes in between: for example, "F/P/T" and "1/2/0" describes a square that each hour when it is being worked produces one food point, two production points, and no trade points.
| Terrain | Move cost | Defense bonus | F/P/T | Transform |
|---|---|---|---|---|
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200% | 150% | 0/0/0 | Tundra |
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100% | 100% | 1/0/2 | Swamp |
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150% | 100% | 0/1/0 | Plains |
|
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100% | 100% | 1/1/0 | Grassland |
|
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100% | 100% | 2/0/0 | Hills |
|
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150% | 150% | 1/0/0 | Desert |
Landscapes
The landscapes extend the capabilities of the terrain squares and adds various bonus to the units and the cities.
| Landscape | Move cost | Defense bonus | F/P/T | Transform |
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
|
150% | 150% | 1/2/0 | Grassland |
|
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200% | 200% | 1/0/0 | Plains |
|
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200% | 300% | 0/1/0 | Hills |
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150% | 200% | 1/0/0 | Plains |
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200% | 150% | 1/0/0 | Ocean |
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50% | 150% | 1/0/1 |
Extras
Same as the landscapes, the extras extend the capabilities of the terrain squares and adds various bonus to the units and the cities. Every type of terrain has some chance of an additional special resource that boosts one or two of the products. Special resources such as gems or minerals occur both on land and along coastlines. Terrain transformation can make resources inaccessible. Players familiar with the commercial games or FreeCiv may note that the dispersal of Golden Age of Civilizations specials does not have any regular pattern.
| Extra | F/P/T bonus |
|---|---|
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1/3/0 |
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1/2/0 |
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3/1/0 |
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3/0/2 |
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4/0/1 |
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2/0/3 |
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3/1/0 |
|
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1/0/4 |
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0/1/6 |
|
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1/2/1 |
|
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0/4/0 |
|
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1/1/4 |
|
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3/1/0 |
|
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0/4/0 |
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1/4/0 |
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3/2/0 |
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2/1/0 |
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3/2/1 |
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1/2/3 |
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3/0/4 |
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2/1/2 |
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3/1/0 |
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1/0/4 |
Specials
Same as the extras, but have special capabilities.
| Special | Description |
|---|---|
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Randomly hand out goodies or hit to any unit that steps on them. |
|
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A mine grows production. |
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An oil rig grows production. |
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A nuclear fallout on the tile. |
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A rubbish on the tile. |
Villages and huts
You can find villages (also called huts), primitive communities spread across the world at the beginning of the game. Any land unit can enter a village, making the village disappear and deliver a random response. If the village proves hostile, the unit entering may simply be damaged or destroyed. If they are friendly, the player could receive gold, a science points or a unit.
Chances of the villages
Transportation
Sea and air units always expend same movement time to move one square — sea units because they are confined to the ocean and adjacent cities, and air units ignore terrain completely. Terrain really only complicates the movement of land units.
Moving across terrain costs base step time of the land unit per square; moving onto rough terrain costs more. The cost for each difficult terrain is given in the catalog below. With the railroad advance, roads can be upgraded to railroads which cost lower to move along. Beware that roads and railroads can be used by any civilization, so an extensive railroad system may offer your enemies easy movement across your empire. Cities always have roads inside — and railroads, when their owner has that technology — which will connect to (rail)roads built adjacent to the city.
Improving terrain
There are several ways to improve terrain. As soon as they are created, workers and engineers can:
- irrigate land to produce more food or
- build a mine to yield more production points
But not both on the same square! Once built, a mine or irrigation system may be destroyed by further alteration of the terrain, if the resulting terrain is unsuitable for the improvement.
Terrain not suitable for irrigation or mining can often be altered to become more suitable to the player's needs — attempting to irrigate a forest, for example, creates plains (which can then be irrigated in the normal way). More radical changes are mentioned below.
Roads and railroads are improvements that have been mentioned under "Transportation". They can be built on the same tile as other improvements (such as irrigation). Note that roads and railroads increase the production output of a square.
Later improvements
Fortresses and airbases are also terrain improvements. In a fortress and the airbase the defense is doubled and units in a fortress have increased vision. Both take six hours to complete, regardless of terrain. Only workers and engineers can build fortresses and airbases.
After Refrigeration has been researched, irrigated tiles can be improved again by building farmland .
Transform land
Only engineers can directly transform land, with the results detailed in the catalog below. For transforming swamp to ocean, one of the eight adjoining squares must be ocean already. To allow transforming ocean into swamp at least three of eight adjoining squares must be land. Load the engineers on a transport to move them on the right place on the ocean. The new swamp will have a river if built adjacent to some river square's single mouth. When a unit's orders are interrupted (which can be done just with a click on the unit and cancel the working), its progress is lost. This will also happen if the unit's former home city is conquered or destroyed.
Any special resource on a tile is lost after a transformation by workers, global warming, or nuclear winter. It would reappear if the tile can be transformed back to its original terrain. Oil on a glacier is lost after the transformation to a tundra, and reappears after the additional transformation to a desert.
(Content is available under the GNU General Public License).