Benifits of settling on a Coast/River/Road?

[Salem Graves]

Title? I assume settling on a coast is nice because it's one less side for raids to show yeah? But what good are roads and rivers?

[martindirt]

Rivers can have watermill power generator.
And if you have fishing mod, you can have large fishing area.
Road increase walking speed.

[M.K.]

I don't like coast, as it removes a big chunk of floorspace from your map, and the beach makes walling it off problematic while still allowing raiders to trickle past.

River = water power. Also, rivers make for *great* delay-lines against raiders. The same as deep swamps, except rivers tend to be long lines instead of puddles. Put your turret on this side of the river, and mow down the enemy as they struggle to wade across.
On the other hand, until you build bridges your hunters and miners will be very slow getting across, too.

Road = faster walking speed on your map, which is kinda trivial. But huge speed increase on the world map for caravans. The best base spot is not ON a road, but close next to it.

[Gentlest Giant]

If starting on ancient highway, there will be some metal posts that you can deconstruct for quickish steel. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[grapplehoeker]

Caravans have a much easier time travelling via road or river. This more than any other reason is why I look for a tile with a river or a road or both to start in.
As for coasts, I don't want to limit raids... the more the better and so I'll want all possible directions for them to be available.

[Bullwinkle]

Do you get raided more often if you are on a major road?

Oh, and roads and rivers or coasts can act as natural fire breaks. Not so much the coasts, but sometimes. Coasts aren't necessarily perfectly straight lines, so sometimes you can find some interesting sandbars or tiny islands or peninsulas (don't count on it).

[grapplehoeker]

Originally posted by Bullwinkle:

Do you get raided more often if you are on a major road?

Not that I've observed, no. That has more to do with your choice of storyteller, difficulty and your wealth.
However, I do see more traders just passing through.

[Mr Compassionate]

Roads allow for much, much faster travel on the world map.

[grapplehoeker]

Originally posted by Mr Compassionate:

Roads allow for much, much faster travel on the world map.

I said that 2 days ago o.O

[Henry of Skalitz]

Rivers are also great for chokepoints without walls. Build a small bridge and raiders will go on it instead of traveling through the water. Best to make a 2 tile wide bridge and then use traps (explosive only) for massive destruction since they'll clump together. Spike traps can't kill multiple people in a single chop if I remember correctly.

[MayoCulpa]

Agree with what everyone has said above about movement speed, watermills etc Rivers and roads are also super helpful with fire control. All the ones I've seen so far are at least 4 tiles wide.

Could be a drawback or a benefit depending on your base design style, but it seems to me river maps also have more swampy areas. It can be useful to take advantage of natural choke points for defense. But it makes pretty, symmetrical base designs harder to do. Don't wanna put too much stuff on bridges.

[Preechr]

I spent quite a bit of time last night rerolling to get a river and a road on a boreal mountain tile. It makes the map a bit more interesting, and I enjoy the immersion aspect as well as the other benefits listed above. I've done the same to find a really nice map on the coast with a river and a road... not everything has to be min-maxed.

Sometimes I'll play a Crashlanded game where I don't get many choices, but if I'm playing as settlers, that's a different story. If I'm leading a group of people to build a colony in a hostile land, you bet I'm looking for easy access to water, roads and shelter. This latest run has a goal of setting up a medieval tavern/inn run by dwarves, elves and hobbits with a mix of construction styles of each race. We might enslave some kobolds (or humans) for labor... not sure yet.

[Bullwinkle]

Originally posted by Preechr:

I spent quite a bit of time last night rerolling to get a river and a road on a boreal mountain tile

You need the Prepare Landing mod. You type in the parameters you want for a landing site, and the mod simply shows you where they are.

Oh, another benefit, Creeks increase the amount of rich soil on the map. I think rivers do to, but not 100% sure on rivers.

[Henry of Skalitz]

Originally posted by Bullwinkle:

Originally posted by Preechr:

I spent quite a bit of time last night rerolling to get a river and a road on a boreal mountain tile

You need the Prepare Landing mod. You type in the parameters you want for a landing site, and the mod simply shows you where they are.

Oh, another benefit, Creeks increase the amount of rich soil on the map. I think rivers do to, but not 100% sure on rivers.

I can confirm there is a lot more fertile soil near rivers than without them

[Grimelord82]

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1714553308

More fertile ground, they said. It was liiiies!
I probably have Real Ruins + standard caves messing up my map gen. I just crash landed with the Gallagher family and their two ferrets. There's an entire BASE over there! There's almost 3k marble blocks, 4k wood, 3k steel on this map. And a couple pawns dead for 40+days. I have literally never seen this before and it's awesome...

also, topically, a river

[Preechr]

Originally posted by Bullwinkle:

You need the Prepare Landing mod.

Oh, I've got it :D Boreal + Mountain + River + Road still takes a lot of world generations to find unless you want 10-20% growing season, and since these guys will never have hydroponics and I don't want to abuse the LotR dwarf underground growing ability, I needed 50%. Takes some time to find. Had to use axial tilt in Realistic Worlds mod to find it.