TERRAIN MOVEMENT COSTS
Different terrain charging different movement — roads at half cost, forests at double, mountains impassable, swamps that swallow a turn — making the map's surface a pricing structure for motion.
- SOLO-DEV COST LOW
- TIMING TURN-BASED
- COMMON IN 4X · TACTICS · STRATEGY · WARGAME
Civilization's terrain chart is foundational literacy (river crossings, hills, and eventually railroads define every war's logistics), Fire Emblem and Advance Wars price tiles per unit type (cavalry hates forests; infantry shrugs), wargames descend from hex-and-counter tradition where terrain effects charts are scripture, and even action games implement soft versions (deep snow, mud, and water slowing sprint speed). Designers price terrain because uniform movement makes maps merely distance: with costs, geography becomes strategy — the road network is a circulatory system worth building and cutting, the forest is a wall that leaks, the mountain pass is a chokepoint because arithmetic says so — and unit differentiation deepens automatically when movement types read the same map differently (the flier's ignorance of terrain is a whole identity). Terrain costs also make pathfinding choices legible tactical decisions: the long road route versus the short swamp slog is a real question with a computable answer players enjoy computing. The system's power is that it's invisible worldbuilding — why is the city here? where the roads meet; why did the battle happen here? the ford — geography generating history the way it does in reality. Key decisions: cost granularity and visibility (players must read costs at a glance — tile tooltips and path previews showing turn counts are mandatory), unit-type differentiation depth (per-unit terrain charts multiply tactical texture and rules burden together), terrain interaction with other systems (defense bonuses coupling with movement costs make forests doubly meaningful), and infrastructure — roads and bridges as buildable cost-modifiers turn the map itself into a progression track. Pitfall: costs that only ever slow — terrain pricing that makes everything worse everywhere reads as friction; the system sings when costs create meaningful alternatives (fast-exposed versus slow-safe), because a swamp nobody would ever cross is just a wall with worse graphics.