{The List} Terrain and terrain improvements

[Straybow]

It seems like many of these suggestions are forgetting that tiles are huge. It isn't a city with suburbs, one tile can fit city, suburbs, and surrounding countryside. One 100-mile tile of US midwestern "corn belt" would feed a whole country (at nearly 4000 people/mi²). Tiles within the city radius already are villages, towns, and minor cities.

We have one tile improvement that directly effects trade, and some people want to get rid of it? We have one tile improvement that inadequately represents the tremendous increase in resource development in the modern era, and some want to get rid of it? So why bother having any tile improvements at all? They could just make Civ4 a game that plays itself, like MoO3.


Other people want to get rid of the tangible benefits of road and rail, and then introduce new trade and resource tile improvements. That means you'd still be building roads and rail, plus the new things, with double the unit management that posters here whine about, and get nothing more for the effort. What's the point?


/me thinks of calming images (mostly teddy bears)

And to the whiners who think roads and railroads everywhere are ugly: get over it. And play Civ2, for which you can make your own graphics with a simple gif editor.

[frekk]

It's just building the rails everywhere that is a pain in the butt. And yes, they are ugly. I know it is more realistic to have them everywhere, but lets face it, I've got better things to do. Easier to just say something like, ok, connect your city to a rail network (like a trade network) and build yourself a Rail Depot in the city, and get the tile bonus in all the squares. That way you don't actually have to go around building rail in all the squares. Just assume that building the Rail Depot also includes building little branch lines out to the farms and mines. The rails that you connect your cities with are the main trunk lines. Is that really such a massive change? You still get your tile bonuses. You still get your rails. In fact you get them in nice pretty lines. Whats lost, except the big ugly looking black spaghetti all over my beautiful farmland, and all that tediousness with the workers?

I've got no problem with roads or irrigation or mines the way they are.

[Straybow]

And play Civ2, for which you can make your own graphics with a simple gif editor.

[frekk]

How is a graphics editor going to do anything? The only way you can make the rails less ugly is to make them invisible, and then you can't see them. Anyway, the ugliness is the least of the problems:

- current system is too much micromanagement. Graphics editing can't fix that.

- current system makes no differentiation between branch lines, extremely limited for rapid movement of large amounts of material, and trunk lines. Again, graphics editing is no help.

I say the branch lines should be modelled by a city improvement; build a rail depot and branch lines are assumed in all the tiles around the city (tile bonuses apply). The only rails you need to build then are trunk lines - LINES, not spaghetti - connecting your cities. Way less micromanagement, prettier, and far more realistic. Compared to some system like this, there is NO good argument for keeping the current system which is outdated and too much work, other than sentimental attachment to hitting "R" a billion times. Let's face it: building rail in every tile is an essentially brainless activity, you're going to do it anyway, so why not make it easier. There's no strategy to it. "Build rail in every tile," Wow, what a genius plan.

Also, you can already edit the graphics in civ3. It doesn't help. Its not the graphics that are the problem.

[Straybow]

If "ugly" is the issue, the graphics are indeed the problem. If "mindless" is the issue, don't play any games as they all have mindless yet necessary actions. Occam's razor.

"Branch" and "trunk" lines are below the hundred-mile scale of Civ tiles. This is a large scale strategic map, not a tactical map.

There is strategy to building rail. If you don't rail every tile (and I generally don't) you have to choose tiles. Tiles that gain production might or might not be railed if you are trying to limit pollution. Strategic issues (where might I need troops in a hurry?) determine rail building in other tiles.

[frekk]

Scale is irrelevant in civ. If it isn't then the official scale of a tile is TEN miles to a side, 100 SQUARE miles. Not 100 miles to a side. You can say that on a map of size X representing area Y that it is whatever scale you like, and not everyone plays an Earth map. Some play a map of an area like Greece or perhaps the meditteranean. You can easily verify the 10 mile 'official' figure on the 'land mass' figure given on F11, though. I reject the notion of scale as an argument. Scale in civ is too variable to balance an argument on it.

What you're talking about is a level of micromanagement not suitable for a game with mass appeal, and thus the majority of ppl playing the game end up putting rail in every tile. I suspect very few people play the way you do. What I'm saying is that micromanagement can be reduced without sacrificing any realism. The strategy becomes one of connecting cities and building rail for strategic purposes; not "reducing pollution" which is a really unrealistic way to look at rail. If anything, rail decreases pollution where it is built as transportation of resources by road burns more fuel. It's counter-intuitive and micromanagement heavy to look at rail like that.

[wrylachlan]

Tile Size

The whole size of tiles think is bogus. How far can an early catapult throw? 200 yards? ABC - put catapults in tiles A & C and have both of them attack tile B. That would seem to indicate that tile B is less that 400 yards on a side. But wait, Canons can fire much farther, and you can do the same thing with them, so that means tiles are bigger. And 1 tile fits a city the size of Mexico city which is much larger than 10 miles on a side. So how big is a tile.

Bottom line, it is as big or as small as makes the game work. Civ is a boardgame! A really advanced boardgame with an AI, but a boardgame still. And nobody asks how big a tile is in chess - for the same reason: it doesn't matter.

And as for rails being ugly. They are. But if that were the only reason to hate them, I'd live with it. The problem is that when you create an incentive to place rr on every tile, people will do that. And that is very bad for strategic combat. Bombing RR is never a big consideration since there is just too much of it to make a strategic difference. Every now and again I'll bomb out a strategic resource, but if you found a way to incentivize it such that there was just a single line between cities, you'd have much richer tactical combat.

[frekk]

Re: Tile Size

Originally posted by wrylachlan
The whole size of tiles think is bogus. How far can an early catapult throw? 200 yards? ABC - put catapults in tiles A & C and have both of them attack tile B. That would seem to indicate that tile B is less that 400 yards on a side. But wait, Canons can fire much farther, and you can do the same thing with them, so that means tiles are bigger. And 1 tile fits a city the size of Mexico city which is much larger than 10 miles on a side. So how big is a tile.

Bottom line, it is as big or as small as makes the game work. Civ is a boardgame! A really advanced boardgame with an AI, but a boardgame still. And nobody asks how big a tile is in chess - for the same reason: it doesn't matter.

Well put.

The problem is that when you create an incentive to place rr on every tile, people will do that.

What do you think of the depot idea I outlined above? That way you still get the effects of the tile bonus, you just don't have to put rail in every square to get it.

[Trifna]

There isn't a point to have railroads all over the place in the real world. What we call "railroad" in civ is in fact advanced movement infrastructure in the real world. THIS is something we put all over the country. Puting railroads everywhere costs more, while in ORDINARY situations, only those between two cities are used. More is just a waste of money.

To have this, one would need to get "railroad" separated from "advanced roads/highways". With a cost to infrastructure and economic advantages (trade...) to get cities connected, everything seems globally solved. As simple as Firaxis' Civ... perhaps.

[wrylachlan]

Re: Re: Tile Size

Originally posted by frekk
What do you think of the depot idea I outlined above? That way you still get the effects of the tile bonus, you just don't have to put rail in every square to get it.

I think the depots are unnecessary. Its much simpler to tie the bonus to completing the connection between cities. i.e. when you finish connecting city A to City B, both cities see a commerce bonus.

[wrylachlan]

I think its useful to really frame what a change to RR is trying to accomplish. For me its a few things:
1)Get rid of the ugly mess
2)Make RR more tactical in terms of a useful target for bombing/artillary.
3)Get rid of the cheesiness of being able to pull troops from all across your empire for a lightning raid. And vice versa being able to pull troops from all over your empire to defend against an attack.

I think that removing the tile bonus and transfering it to a percentage bonus for linkage does an effective job of taking care of 1 and 2.

3, hoever is a different sort of problem. As long as rails provide inifinite movement, there is no particularly strong incentive to place troops strategically along your borders in a balanced way - you can always get them where they need to be. In fact, its often a good idea to keep all attackers well back from the front lines, in case there is an attack, then they can be used for counterattack.

How do we make it so that you can't just move all of your troops from one front to another on a single turn, but still allow timely reinforcement, etc.

My Suggestion of the easiest way to do this is a 1 turn embarking/disembarking penalty.

[frekk]

It's an idea. But how does it work in the game?

There are problems with each of the ways it could work.

The big problem is entraining and detraining. How is the computer to distinguish between a unit moving by rail, and one that for instance merely wishes to cross a track? Either you have to load and unload all the units manually, or a Modern Armour trying to cross a 2-tile-wide space of track has to stop when normally it could move 9 tiles if there are roads. Manual loading and unloading has a high MM overhead, not to mention ppl would start to simply "float" a huge force on the rail by loading it up (and not unloading it).

I agree that the depot idea is probably unnecessary.

It's probably easier just to say: a city connected by track to any other city or cities, gets the tile bonus in all of its squares in the radius, as if it had rail in all the tiles.

[patcon]

I confess. I am a "rail every tile" addict. And not just tiles within a city radius. I mean every tile in my territory, as soon as possible.

First I build roads everywhere. Why? So that when a new resource becomes discoverable, it is automatically available. I don't have to scour the map to find where aluminum has appeared and then build a road to that tile.

Then I build railroads everywhere (except for volcanos, of course). Why? So that when pollution pops up I can move my workers immediately to that tile and clean it up in one turn. I hate pollution. Those ugly orange tiles make me nuts. I guess if pollution is removed from the game I could probably break the RR addiction, but I still will put roads everywhere for the resources.

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

Tell me though, Patcon, if roads and rail cost you-for example-1 gpt per 4 tiles (on a standard map), would you still build them on EVERY TILE?? Also, if they move away from a mobile worker unit towards more of 'national labour force' approach, would you still feel it neccessary to build RR's on all tiles? I am VERY interested in knowing how both you and others would change their game tactics given the above putative changes!

Yours.
Aussie_Lurker.

[patcon]

if roads and rail cost you-for example-1 gpt per 4 tiles (on a standard map)

Cost means nothing to me. I usually play monarch/regent and switch to democracy asap, so I am usually swimming in gold by the middle game. By nature I am a peaceful builder and only fight when provoked (or if I want a resource that's in your territory) and I'm not happy unless my cities have every available improvement.

The real issues are resource availability, pollution clean-up, and unit mobility.

As long as I need a road to a resource tile to be able to use that resource, I will build roads in all likely tiles asap. I may be peaceful, but I am impatient. If I discover the tech which reveals aluminum, I want that aluminum NOW. I refuse to wait several turns for my worker drones to build a road to that tile so I can build better units. I may be peaceful, but my motto is "Peace - through being able to kick the crap out of anyone who pisses me off." I get SOOOO annoyed when I'm the Celts, discover iron working and find that iron is within my reach but will take 20 turns before I can get the road built that will let me build my Gallic Swordsmen.

As long as I need to send swarms of workers to clean up pollution, I will build RRs asap. I hate that ugly orange crap.

As long as the AI insists on stopping on my roads and railroads - cutting my supply lines for resources and forcing my peacefully-moving forces to waste turns getting off the road and then back on again,I will build roads and railroads everywhere asap. I find it bad enough when they camp out on roads I've built through unclaimed land, but when they block roads when trespassing in my territory and refuse to get out of the way, my dark side overpowers my peaceful nature.

Also, "idle hands are the devil's workshop" and I can't stand the thought of my workers sitting around doing nothing, so if I've got nothing better for them to do - "let 'em build roads". I know I could build forts, but ...

if they move away from a mobile worker unit towards more of 'national labour force' approach

I hope they don't. I hate the 'NLF' idea - CIV is a unit-based game. But even if they go that way, I'd still want to have roads everywhere for the reasons outlined above.