I've been thinking about the oddity that beaver lodges need to be dry and don't work when their entrance is flooded, even though RL beavers work effectively the other way around. Based on that, I came up with an idea for a new faction, the Aquatics (or Traditionalists, as I first called them).

General changes:

• Beavers can swim up or down (i.e., beavers can change height arbitrarily in water, without the need for stairs). This would be available to all factions, but the Aquatics would benefit from it the most (see below).

Aquatics:

• Lodges need to be flooded to work.
• For all beavers except starting beavers, housing is an essential need (i.e., they die without it)
• All buildings except those handling paper (paper mill, explosive factory, printer) and fire (smelter, bakery, etc) can be flooded with no ill-effect. Water wheels still don't work while flooded.
• They have only one farmhouse building that works on both types of crops. Crops still follow normal flooding rules.
• They have a special farmland building that can be placed on top of platforms, houses, etc. It's considered watered if one of the adjacent four blocks or the one above the farmland itself is water.
• Their special power generation building is the turbine. The turbine is a 2x1 building. The "back" block has an opening on top where water can enter the turbine, and the face opposite the "front" block is the power outlet. The "front" block can have stuff (such as, say, levees) built on top, and has a water outlet on the face opposite the "back" block. The amount of water flowing through a turbine can be set (like with a flood gate), and the power generation is proportional to both the water troughput and the amount of water atop the "back" block (i.e., water pressure), e.g. 100hp/cms/block (yes, that's much better than the water wheels, but don't forget, they have neither windmills nor engines, so they need to have water flowing even during droughts).

The idea would be a faction that can effectively live inside the reservoir (like RL beavers), which has both upsides (easy stacking), but also downsides, especially early on (without dynamite, your lodges need to be built in the river, removing valuable water storage). They are also much more dependent on always having water around, but are more flexible as long as they do.

I was also thinking that it might be interesting to give them a "water lock" that allows them to pass "through" a dam, so they wouldn't need all those stairs on the outside of dams, but that might be too much.

What do you think? Critique, suggestions, comments?

EDIT: Maybe instead of 100hp/cms/block, it could just be 1hp/cms/cm ;)