Longturn Forum

For an aqueduct the help screen says:

Requires the River terrain special on the tile or an adjacent tile.
Requires the Lake terrain on the tile or an adjacent tile.

Elsewhere bardo says “Aqueduct is cheaper near rivers or lakes.”

An aqueduct is quoted at cost 60. Can someone explain this. Are there places where I can't build an aqueduct? If I can't build an aqueduct can I build a sewer? How do I expand beyond size 8 without an aqueduct?

If close to a river/lake then aqueducts are only 20 shields and they can be built before construction. If you want an aqueduct in a city without an adjacent lake/river, it will cost 60 shields and you need construction.

Thank you for that explanation. I have a couple of cities near rivers and I hadn’t noticed they have the option to build an aqueduct. I wish I’d known that earlier. I would have done several things differently.

det0r is right.

The idea was to make aqueducts for free at cities near rivers or lakes, same than civ3, but it was not possible in freeciv. The solution was to make cheaper versions of the aqueduct, in some way to compensate that cities near rivers are more vulnerable to enemy attacks due to the increased movement.
As johnhx reports, there is an error in the help text of the standard aqueduct (cost 60). Those are negative requirements in the ruleset, but showed as afirmative in the help. It should say:

Requires NO River terrain on the tile or an adjacent tile.
Requires NO Lake terrain on the tile or an adjacent tile.
(but it is hardcoded, not possible to fix it inside the ruleset, that I know)

Interesting. It seems someone has added entries to the help file about Aqueducts. There are now separate entries for “Aqueduct”, “Aqueduct, near Lake” and “Aqueduct, near River”. Excellent. I have only one question. It's about the phrase “Lake terrain on the tile”. How do you build a city in a lake, or is this something else I didn’t know about?

The text is automatically generated by freeciv, and I guess it takes into account that some modpack could allow cities over oceanic tiles.
In this LTex rules it is not possible to build cities over lakes nor oceans, as always.