Canal digging

[Doodle_Jack]

I didn't think this completely through, but it's worth a thought.

How about canal digging in Cantr? It would require shovels, sand, stone (for the dikes) and a hell of a lot of work. Perhaps you can even make them upgradeable like roads to allow bigger vessels to pass through. This way also the inland towns have the possibility to get get access to seas and lakes and it would mean a revolution in Cantr transport.

I do think however that a canal should be a huge investment for a community and perhaps canals should start at some body of water to prevent that two inland towns would be connected by water without being connected to a sea or lake, which would be odd.

To make it a bit easier for the PD, canals should go from town to town, parallel to roads.

This way it would also be possible to connect seas and lakes!

Perhaps canals should not be able to be built in deserts?

[Chris Johnson]

I like this alot . An excellent suggestion I'd see these as rather mammoth projects - bigger than road improvements .

We probably also need navigable rivers as well - I know thats been suggested before .

P.S. - No canals allowed in Deserts ? ... what about the Suez Canal
The ease of completing the project should be based on the type of terrain it is passing through - maybe Mountains should be impassable

[Doodle_Jack]

The ease of completing the project should be based on the type of terrain it is passing through - maybe Mountains should be impassable

Nah, I think distance is good enough to help decide how much effort should be needed to build a canal, just like with roads. About the mountains, perhaps it should indeed not be possible to build canals to and from towns in mountains.

[Sho]

Unless you create a set of artificial "canal paths" that canals can be dug along, this would require some sort of free movement. I don't think that's doable, though it might be a failure of imagination on my part.
What I think could be done is the option of building canals alongside roads. Ships already display roads in their location pages, so it would be a small step to make it possible for certain ships to travel on roads that have been upgraded to canals. This would require a change in the road-upgrade system, to allow for adding attributes to the roads other than the current linear upgrade path.