The hills are no longer alive but water flows downhill?
Terrain is being simplified. Marsh and hills are out. I’ve been unable to come up with a good enough functional justification to keep them. The new terrain set are:
- Ocean (blue)
- Plains (green)
- Mountains (brown/gray)
- Impassable (white/black?)
Another small change is the handling of transport locations. When produced transports accumulate on their producing building and can then move out from there to form contiguous set with the production building similarly to the pattern described for buildings below. Caveat: Transports don’t have to be set-contiguous with the building that individually produced them, they merely need to be set-contiguous to a building which produces those transports and is owned by that City State (may not be the same one that produced that individual transport token).
None of this is a change. The changes relate to the placement of deployed transport markers.
Sea transports are placed in the centres of tiles and there may be a considerable of transport markers in any given location. A sea transport is considered contiguous with the 4 orthogonally adjacent tiles/buildings. Land transports are placed along the shared edge of two land tiles and are considered to be contiguous with 6 tiles: the two tiles which form the shared edge and the additional two tiles at either end which share corners with the end of the shared edge.
Building tile size has been adjusted to be somewhat smaller than terrain tiles so that there is room between buildings to see the colour of the underlaying tile and to plsce transports along that edge.
Possibility: Add blue stick-like markers which may be placed during setup along the edges of land tiles, Settlers-of-Catan-roads? style, to denote rivers. This would not only potentially allow waterway-specific transports (barges, canal boats, etc), but also lakes, inland seas, and also opens the possibility of deliberate canal construction and bridges over waterways.
Complexity: one step backward into simplicity, one step forward into detail and morass.