Mountain path carving.

[theunfrailhale]

How cool would it be if a mountain that was impassable could be carved to create a small vertical passage. You could then reach a plateau on which you could build an outpost of some sorts. This would allow fortifications to become extremely defensible, at the cost of much time in the creation/ferrying of materials. It also might expedite some trade routes that are heavily relied on. Whether it is a carved staircase, or a scaffolding network, it could be neat. I have no idea how hard this is to implement though.

Iove whats going on so far.
Thanks.

[Argus]

I'd settle for being able to carve the paths already in the mountains that are impassable.

I've seen this happen all over: places you can tell were designed for your characters to pass through, but there's a slight cliff face that's like 20 feet long that stops you. Most recently, I was traveling in the mountains north of Bark; there are so many places there where the paths are broken, it took me three days and numerous bandit attacks to find an alternate route through them to Bark.

[theunfrailhale]

I'd settle for being able to carve the paths already in the mountains that are impassable.

I've seen this happen all over: places you can tell were designed for your characters to pass through, but there's a slight cliff face that's like 20 feet long that stops you. Most recently, I was traveling in the mountains north of Bark; there are so many places there where the paths are broken, it took me three days and numerous bandit attacks to find an alternate route through them to Bark.

Ah, bummer. I don't know how the game calculates impassable terrain, but I think this feature could be useful in your case. It would be nice if you could enable a layer that highlighted impassable terrain, and then you could more easily identify where available paths are. Maybe even have a mountain climber perk that allowed units to travel over normally impassable terrain, although slowly.

On a similar note to carving staircases or building scaffolds/ladders/stone steps, building bridges could be a really useful function for mountain peak travel/defenses, it could also be useful for optimizing trade routes. There could be small/medium/large bridges, to tailor the amount of stone required to build them. Could be pretty neat feature/option.

[Clawdius Talonious]

Some of these ideas are interesting, I'm just uncertain how easily they could be implemented. I could see, for example, opening an outpost on either side of a cut you make through a mountain pass, and then charging a toll or at the very least seeing significant amounts of traders coming through and doing business with you. I imagine once the map is closer to a finished state these sorts of things may be considered. There is already a climbing skill that hasn't yet been implemented, as far as I know there hasn't been any specific mention of what exactly this will entail however, so it may be simply the ability to scale walls for infiltration.