Infinite RR Movement == Evil!

[Drachasor]

You can avoid maintainance cost issues by making it time prohibitive to build criss-crossing railroads every which-way. If a railroad is changed from being just on a tile to connecting two tiles (Enigma Nova's idea), then it would take 20 turns to cover a 3 by 3 area instead of 9 turns.

This wouldn't be hard to implement either, when you decide to build a RR or road by pressing "R" then it asks for the square to build it to. Once it is built you get the road bonus whenever traveling from the one square to the other.

I don't favor having maintainance costs on roads and railroads just because it would probably be pretty annoying, and how are they supposed to handle it when you don't want to pay any more? Do you get to pick what roads and railroads you aren't going to fund and what ones you will? I don't see a good interface for that problem.

I think a simple bonus when cities are connected combined with the non-infinite movement bonus is enough to justify building roads and railroads. No bonus resources from a tile though, and no maintainence costs either. As I have also said before, standard tile improvements should give a small movement bonus when moving between them. If you are going from an irrigated to an irrigated square, for instance, then you should get a 2 for 1 movement bonus, which later improves (as long as roads improve with the automobile). This would help decrease the need for roads and railroads everywhere too, since you won't be sacrificing a lot of mobility.

-Drachasor

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by dannubis


what i meant, for instance with medicine, or a new tech "fertilizers", the workers of your city would be able to produce +1 extra food per irrigated square.

with another technology, perhaps explosives the workers of your city would be able to produce +1 extra shield per mine

in this way you don't need the production bonus of rr

also certain technologies (or perhaps the passing of an age) should lower distance corruption. Rank corruption i would not touch because an empire with more cities is indeed more expensive to maintain...

I would like to see a return of improvements like supermarkets that were required in a city before the tile improvement of farmlands could be used or where highways improved the trade produced by roaded tiles. It would be helpful in the fight against ICS if early improvements were necessary to make use of tile improvements - but that then tile improvements were extremely useful.

For example, maybe granaries would be made a necessary pre-requisite to benefit from irrigated tiles, make non-irrigated tiles produce very little food, but irrigated tiles produce a lot more.

[dunk]

Originally posted by Drachasor
I don't favor having maintainance costs on roads and railroads just because it would probably be pretty annoying, and how are they supposed to handle it when you don't want to pay any more? Do you get to pick what roads and railroads you aren't going to fund and what ones you will? I don't see a good interface for that problem.

The roads, railroads, and any other transportation improvements can be handled like SimCity (at least the original SimCity, I'm not sure how the newer versions handle this). You decide a funding level for transportation, and railroads can deteriorate at a random spot within your empire over time if not fully funded. So a railroad tile would degrade to a normal road tile and then the road would disappear after a random number of turns. Heck, I even think a regular road tile should have an upkeep. And perhaps there can even be a "Transportation Advisor".

Or, another thought, a road or railroad tile could cost money to build. X gold per Y tiles with a road. So that the player is discouraged from building roads and railroads over every tile in thier empire.

[Dauphin]

Railways and roads have upkeep costs paid for out of local and national government and so would be an important part of a simulation of a city's fiscal management and transport infrastucture initiative but within the civilization model wouldn't the cost of upkeep be pre-deducted from the trade taxes that the transport network helps to generate. Roads and rails may cost more money to operate than they recoup directly through tolls and fares, but they generate more economic activity than their cost to maintain. Thus I don't think they should have a maintenance cost in the civilization model.

[Kuciwalker]

RR's MUST have infinite move for workers.

[Arrian]

No infinite movement. I like either 1/6 or 1/9 for RRs. Or make it even faster, but require 1 turn to load/unload from the rail system.

What MZ said about the production bonus:

As per the bonus, there should be a way to make the cities benefit once connected to a railroad network, these bonuses should therefore be city or empire-based, not tile-based.

Or have the rail line itself have a sphere of influence (say 3 tiles in every direction) that gets the production bonus. That way you just connect your cities, and don't have to RR every tile.

-Arrian

[Drachasor]

Originally posted by dunk

The roads, railroads, and any other transportation improvements can be handled like SimCity (at least the original SimCity, I'm not sure how the newer versions handle this). You decide a funding level for transportation, and railroads can deteriorate at a random spot within your empire over time if not fully funded. So a railroad tile would degrade to a normal road tile and then the road would disappear after a random number of turns. Heck, I even think a regular road tile should have an upkeep. And perhaps there can even be a "Transportation Advisor".

The problem with the Sim City model in Civ is that certain roadways in Civ are much, much more important than any roads you might have in Sim City. It is unrealistic and unfun for the important roads like this to suffer the same fate of deterioration. It is also unfair to always expect someone to maintain all roads when they only need one or two lines.

Originally posted by dunk Or, another thought, a road or railroad tile could cost money to build. X gold per Y tiles with a road. So that the player is discouraged from building roads and railroads over every tile in thier empire.

By the same reasoning farms and the like should cost money too, but that just isn't the system Civ uses. It takes time and energy to produce roads, and I think that works fine. Other methods are available that leave the current ease of making roads intact, while discouraging sprawl. Simply not giving a trade/production bonus is one way. Another is to make it harder to fully connect all the roads in an area to each other. Either one would help the look of sprawl, both would help a great, great deal.

Hmm, perhaps another possibility is to make it so you can double or triple up roads/rails on a square. This would make them more resistant to bombardment (though I have expressed other ways to decrease the effectiveness of bombarding, one is to have automatic counter-bombardments from your units that can do so).

-Drachasor

[Drachasor]

Originally posted by Kucinich
RR's MUST have infinite move for workers.

Why? so you can put all your workers around one city and then all of them around another, then move them back and forth across an entire continent every couple turns doin that?

It is just as manageable if you spread out your workers more and then the movement to a far city for one or two isn't as bad.

I am not particularly against infinite movement for workers on rails, but I don't see why this should be a special case. They don't get a special case with roads...how is this different?

-Drachasor

[lajzar]

The main reason RR sprawl will happen after we remove infinite movement and production bonus is...

It's free to build.

Think about it. After teh initial expansion and development phases, you'll have a large supply of workers with nothing to do. Building a RR sprawl costs you nothing other than time.

tile improvements should cost production to build, something like how CTP handled it. As it is, there is no opportunity cost to build the sprawl.

[Drachasor]

Workers cost money to maintain when they are out and about.

If you make it take 2-3 times as long to make the same network of rails, then people won't do it merely because they won't have the time.

If you make it so that you don't need rails to move among your improvements and add more at the edges, then rails won't be built as much. If you make it so that rails and roads don't add trade or production, then they won't be built as much. Priority will be given to other projects.

And when you disband your worker in a city, they do help with whatever you are producing. If someone wants to keep them out and suffer the financial drain and loss of that extra bit of production, then that's their problem. Of course, they could make it so that you get some sort of gold bonus if you disband a troop outside of a city, that might make them more readily disbanded.

-Drachasor

[hexagonian]

Kill the abomination of infinite movement...Crush it into the earth!! No infinite movement for any unit.

Allow the player to lock-group workers (giving reduced construction time bonuses over and above the normal time you save by using multiple workers to construct a tile improvement) to cut down on micromangement.

No bonuses for Roads and RRs either, other than movement. Create an improved farm/mine type as you move through the ages, and add commerce tile improvements to give your workers something to do.

[Drachasor]

Well, I've even thought that perhaps a system wherein workers only were responsible for roads, forts, airbases, and the like might be best. The rest could use a CP-like system. Then you need less workers, so you make less and you micromanage less. You don't lose the benefits of building forts and the like far from home or out of your territory either.

Of course, if you aren't building roads everywhere, then you won't need as many workers, so you'll make less. Each one will be just as busy, there will just be fewer. No need to make other improvements.

-Drachasor

[lajzar]

Originally posted by Drachasor
Workers cost money to maintain when they are out and about.

If you make it take 2-3 times as long to make the same network of rails, then people won't do it merely because they won't have the time.

-Drachasor

True, workers cost money to maintain, but that cost is trivial compared to directly paying for roads.

Lets say you build a worker at the start of a 400-turn game, and keep him building roads for 200 turns, the rest of the time being wasted in movement, idle time, etc. Thats 400 "units" of maintenance for 50 roads. Even the most trivial cost is 60 for a road in CTP, albeit on a slightly inflated economic model. The most trivial civ cost would be 10 "units" per road, and I'd suggest 30 as the base cost. That's a total of 500 - 1500 units out of your economy, compared to the base 400. RR only costs 2x the base cost in civ, which seems a little trivial considering how much more support rail requires compared to road.

CTP also had exponential increases in cost for more advanced transport systems, and that works well too imho. RR is over 3x more expensive than road there.

There's a reason why ctp was the only 4x game not to suffer from road/rail sprawl.