I am no stranger to infinite water, however at least I can remove small pools of water or build over it in that game, here water is infinite and immovable. We have players spawning on islands or locked on continents, surrounded by an impassable barrier for Biters and the Player alike, and most importantly it is the only infinite resource in a non-infinite map (aside from oil which becomes functionally useless once you get a patch to 0.1 per second). A little pool will last any factory forever no matter how much you draw from it with constant fracking, and running steam engines day and night.So it fitting with the themes of this game (the use, and abuse of natural resources in order to stay alive, and the constant need to expand to gather more of said resources) water should drain. Here are my ideas for how this could be accomplished:
1. Maybe it works like oil where the "lake" or "ocean" it made up of nodes that can be harvested to a minimum amount (again making it functionally useless).
2. Maybe like the ores in the game where the offshore pump will "mine" an area of water nodes (each node having a "richness" to it) and once the nodes are empty they disappear, leaving land in its place.
3. My personal favorite however is the slow shrinking of a recursive program that seeks out water-land borders and works inwards from that. Seeing the body of water shrink as the outside edge is replaced by land and the water is sucked into a central point. This could use the "mining" version of water nodes that have a "richness"to them, so water doesn't drain too quickly unless it is in small pools. To prevent problems like the scrips lagging the game because of a massive water patch the offshore pumps could have a large-ish "mining" area, were the outside edge of the mining area is treated like "ground".
Some of my other ideas about water:
I have a fondness for the idea of bridges made from steel and stone. Stone bridges have a maximum of 16 tiles, steel has 32 and for both of them both ends of the bridge have to be on land. Steel Bridges will also be wide enough to have train tracks placed on them.
I have one last idea, This one is about the Biters and their interaction with water, seeing as Biters seem to mimic ants and bees (with a hive mentality and suicidal protection of nests) I can see no reason why Biters might try to do what ants do and make a bridge of "drowned" Biters across the water. Perhaps the bridge the Biters make could cause damage to the player (Acid like worm spit?) but not the Biters. It may be some more advance AI stuff, but I like the idea of seeing a horde of Biters running over the corpses of their fallen comrades in order to get at the "invader".
Once again I know this is a well covered topic but I think I have some unique ideas, and I think they fit really well with the themes of this game.
