A year and a half after release, Civilization 7 experts have started building almost perfect canal cities

Civilization 7 still doesn't have a dedicated canal improvement, but players have finally found a classic workaround.

Building a city between two bodies of water has been a known trick for a while, letting players move fleets around without sailing the long way. Recent updates to Civ 7 made these lucky spots show up more often, too. The terrain generation system seems to produce these setups a lot more frequently now.

The mechanic relies on navigable rivers. Ships can sail these rivers deep into the mainland, and any settlement with at least one river tile inside its borders can build and deploy a fleet. When a city center sits directly on a river, ships pass straight through it, turning that center tile into a canal linking two separate bodies of water.

There's one catch that's easy to miss. The city center needs to sit on a coast or next to a lake, otherwise ships can't enter that tile at all. A city built only along a navigable river stays off-limits to naval traffic.

Players have worked out a few practical rules:

• a fleet can enter a city center from any adjacent water tile, including a navigable river tile

• ships spawn on the nearest open water tile near the center, or inside the center itself if no open tile is available

• harbors can only be placed on coastal tiles and navigable river tiles, and fleets spawn there by default

• after recent patches, ports can now be placed on navigable rivers as well

• a landlocked city can't be attacked from the water, though its districts can still be pillaged

Recent examples show just how well these spots can turn out.

One city ended up linking two lakes while staying the only entrance to an inland sea, and another cut straight across a continent between two rivers, connecting the northern and southern halves of the landmass.

Pulling off the second one meant tearing down a rival city that happened to be sitting on the exact tile needed.

The economic payoff from this kind of geography is basically nonexistent. Trade units in the game move at the same speed on land and water and switch between the two freely, so owning a strategic strait doesn't earn the owner any extra gold. Players have suggested adding a toll for trade routes passing through someone else's canal city.

Canal cities may have become more common, but outside of logistics, there isn't much practical reason to build one right now.

Civilization 7 will probably reach a point where canal cities become genuinely powerful assets for an empire. That's assuming Firaxis hasn't already moved on to something else.