Roads and creeks, brooks. Springs!

[JP_Finn]

This’d be a sizable change.

Suggest to downsize road tiles from 100m, full zoomed-in tile 50x50, entire Wilderness map tile, -wide to mere 3-5tiles wide on zoomed-in.
Likely a massive programming task for world map generation.

While that is done, add creeks / brooks. To run between lakes and rivers. And from springs to lakes&rivers.
Width anywhere from 10 tiles (20m) to mere 1tile (2m) width.

Even the narrowest brooks should be traversable with punt. Only larger creeks or after winter (thawing snow) or heavy rainfall they should be traversable with raft.
And they should be shallow enough for ford, with maximum of 2-3 tiles (4m-6m) swim across. 

[PALU]

If you have to swim it isn't shallow enough to ford...

These water features would have a very significant effect on game play:
- More or less constantly getting wet unless they're frozen over.
- They would affect the interaction between the local map and the overland map, as you can pass them easily on the latter (there are some exploits currently available with the overland map that are similar in nature).
- Animals would have to "learn" how to deal with these features, i.e. cross them, or hunting will become far too easy.

[Erkka]

As much as I'd love to have this kind of additions, there are user interface related questions which are more or less unclear for me.

Let's imagine we would have brooks some 1 - 12 meter wide, criss-crossing the terrain. And you're travelling on the overland map. Would you like to get notified every time you automatically cross a brook? Or get zoomed-in every time? Or just simulate on a higher level, assuming that your character figures a way to cross the brook without asking player decisions? Or allow the player some setting or configuration to be switched based on need? For example, if you are thirsty, you'd probably like to be notified whenever your character spots a small brook?

Or, you are just covering a longer distance, travelling on the overland map, using the high-level simulation of automatically crossing brooks without interrupting your gameplay with constant notifications like "you cross the 23rd brook of the day, again". But then, that one time the simulation, RNG and skill checks would determine that when auto-crossing a brook you slip and fall. Now what? You then get zoomed-in into the situation?

(also, I have to say that adding small paths and brooks would require a lot of additional data to the world-map, to keep track on how these smaller-than-a-world-map-tile features go, something like "this tile is mainly forest of type X, but there is a brook running from north to south, and then there is also a east-west path", and should the data structure allow only one brook and one path per world map tile, or are the occasions we would need two creeks near each other? It would be an interesting coding task to inflate this data so that when you travel in the zoomed-in map these creeks and paths would run uninterrupted but with natural curves.)

I'm not saying these are reasons we won't implement these features. It is just to affirm that, like JP_Finn says, this would be a sizable change, requiring a lot of re-coding the map routines and re-structuring the entire map data structure.

[PALU]

On the technical side you could take a look at how Dwarf Fortress (DF) handles rivers.

At most one river per world tile, but allowing other rivers to join that river (bifurcations are not generated, although they can be created by hacking the structure). Rivers have a width (in 2*2 meter in-game tiles) that can gradually increase as it flows downriver and gathers more water (from rain and joining rivers). They enter a world tile at specific in-game tile indices (i.e. x1 - x2, or y1 - y2) and exits them similarly, allowing them to enter on an X side and leave through a Y side.
The path the river takes is generated according to some algorithm that doesn't seem to generate undulations (which is a deficiency, of course), but both the world scale and the in-game scale rivers look reasonably realistic (the lack of undulation is most noticeable at the intermediate level, where the game spends only a small amount of time).

A DF river width can be from 1 to 48 in-game tiles (because the level between in-game tiles and world tiles is 48*48 in-game tiles).

That's some input on the technical side. However, the game play implications are probably trickier to deal with than the purely technical side (although memory management is an issue that always has to be dealt with, of course).

[JP_Finn]

I’d wish to see brooks on wilderness map as a thin blue line over/on/in the underlaying map tile (heathland, spruce mire etc)
Adding a “slip” chance seems bit out of place as we never seem to trip and fall on zoomed-in or on wilderness travel anyway. Getting wet crossing brooks is something I’d expect ancient folks to have deal with. Same as rain, you get wet outdoors.
(Heck, I pack 2 extra pairs of socks in waterproof bags for day/overnight hunts)

Trails/paths and brooks should be allowed to cross each other. 2 brooks should be able to merge and feed to a river / lake.
Traveling brooks on watercraft, should be limited to zoomed in, or be heavily slowed down on wilderness map.

I might’ve not phrased it the best, but most of the time fordable, with rare chance to require swimming with water level fluctuations/flooding.

As for chasing game, they do cross brooks in nature just fine. Fording, leaping over, swimming.
All too often with river or lake currently, the prey doesn’t get in water. If anything, it’d make tracking but more challenging as water doesn’t hold tracks. Banks on the other hand, print easily.

On Dog Commands suggestion, I mentioned chance to command dog to track game by smell, brooks and rivers would stop the trail scent tracking (air scent could still be a help for tracking hound, if recently enough)

[PALU]

How do you know the characters don't trip or slip? You're simply not notified about the trivial mishaps, but falling into (deep) water wouldn't be trivial (in particular if you managed to bang your head on the log while falling), nor would falling from a cliff face (which characters currently don't try to scale on their own, given that there are walkable paths).

Regarding chasing, I meant the prey should cross, rather than being blocked as per the current lake/river behavior.

[JP_Finn]

My character doesn’t slip or trip as I don’t need them to get up unless close to passing out from exhaustion.
And hitting a head on log or rock  when tripping could happen on dry land too. Yet there’s never knee scrapes or hand, elbow, skull scratches when I check ^physician screen.. if you don’t have any real criticism, why not just state you don’t like the suggestion?

Re:cliffs, I already suggested they should occasionally have sheer side(s), that can’t be traversed. And have some trees on them too, not just bottom.