Keep infinite railroad movement?

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

Well, I said it at CivFanatics, so I may as well say my peace here too !

My vote is for Unlimited Movement but Limited Capacity .
To summarise my proposal, whenever you connect a city up to your trade network, with a RR, you recieve a set number of Capacity points-based on the size of the city connected, the tech level of your rail system and the presence of specific improvements/wonders. Capacity points indicate the maximum number of units you can move on rail each turn (though some units might use up more than 1 CP). As you use up CP's, though, your per turn income drops-for that turn-as you divert your Rail system away from supplying the needs of your civilian economy.
This would be especially important if you are having to pay a fixed maintainance cost on railroads as well.
Lastly, civs mobilized for war pay half cost for using CP's to move units, wheras peace 'mobilized' civs pay double.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

[Xorbon]

Originally posted by MrFun
What is all the fuss about?

Just mod the game once you buy Civ IV, to change the movement cost for railroad to whatever you would like it to be.

I suppose that'll be the case; we should be able to mod to our heart's content. But it would be nice if they made some changes to rails in the 'vanilla' version of Civ 4. There are plenty of people who don't use mods because then they're 'not truly playing Civ'.

(I'm not one of them. I use my own mods all the time. I'm just saying... )

Originally posted by TomVeil
The fact is railroads ARE that fast. The only form of human transportation that beats it is air travel. I actually think that the unfairness comes from the 1-unit limit on airlifting, not from the unlimited rail travel. The game should recognize the fact that mankind can travel hundreds of times faster than it could in the ancient era, or even the early 1800s.

Sometimes, playability trumps realism (or at least it should). Infinite rail movement reduces a person's need to think strategically (as others have mentioned on this thread). That's why people would like to see the system changed. In the case of rails, realism should be trumped.

[The_Aussie_Lurker]

Well, to be fair (and at the risk of blowing my own trumpet ) My system allows the realism of railroad movement to be retained (and, at the same time, keeping out unneccessary micromanagement) whilst still improving the gameplay element of railroads-by introducing a strategic element in deciding what units you are going to send to the front, and how much of your civilian economy you are prepared to sacrifice for war.
Also, as CP's are generated for only the first connection of a city to the rest of the nations infrastructure, it prevents any major exploits, highlighted by other posters, to the limited capacity per tile approach.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

[DeathByTheSword]

Originally posted by GeoModder
This is only one forum, what is the feeling about this issue on others? Surely Firaxis checks more then just 'Poly?

heretic this is THE ONLY TRUE civ site

[hexagonian]

Originally posted by Modo44
If you have a year (which is the shortest Civ turn), you can do it with ease. This has been demonstrated many times in many wars, especially (as numbers at a time go) during WWII.

The way years are marked in civesque games is only there for a point of reference tied into tech levels and generally remains somewhat true to history. However, the system of how time is portrayed in relation to unit movement in civesques games is totally unrealistic - and not only in the modern age, but throughout the game.

Ancient/Medieval age units did not need hundreds of years to move from point A to point B in the real world (and if I are attacked, this inconsistency really sticks out in my mind) - but this is the norm in civ. Even moving from city to city via roads takes years.

If you do not have a railway in place, it will take several years for an infantry to move through several jungle tiles - even during peacetime. Hey, I could crawl faster than that...

This is why I'm more concerned what turn I'm on rather than what year I'm in.

[Modo44]

Well, many things in Civ can be called unrealistic. But that is the case when you use models. In case of Railroad, I think it is as good as it gets without turning a strategy game into a tactics game. You might argue, but that will not change my opinion.

[hexagonian]

Nor will you change mine.

I'd rather be able to put aside the crutches and walk on my own power

[Atahualpa]

Utilization limit for railroads - only a limited number of units can get rail bonus from a square each turn

Aaahhhh this is the user unfriendliest.. how do you want to display that somhow at this crossing you cannot pass anymore because too much have passed here already...

I am fine with a rescourse cost when using and to maintain (in order to prevent having a railorad on every tile; i would also kick any terrain bonuses of railroads)

[sophist]

I like infinite movement on railroads. I think having centralized military forces that can respond rapidly to threats anywhere in your empire is a good thing because 1) it's realistic (yeah yeah yeah) and 2) it improves gameplay by making wars more fluid. In the modern era, issues that might have led to war in previous times are settled before a shot is fired (partly) because the speed of a response makes the cost/benefit of war a lot easier to calculate, so one side is a lot more likely to capitulate. In previous times, a small nation could take on a much larger one and win because, even though the larger nation might have a much, much larger military, communication and transport were so slow that their effective force was whatever was garrisoned in that region. By the time reinforcements arrived, the attackers could be entrenched or have reached their goals (plunder, punishment, etc.) and departed. Napoleon attacking Russia in 1812 was no better off than Alexander attacking Persia in 320-something BC, but Europe in WWI and WWII was able to mobilize much, much faster. Transport and deployment are so much faster these days that quibbling about whether they're 30 times faster or 40 times faster is pointless and arbitrary; just go with infinite and leave it.

That's not to say the civ1-civ3 model is perfect. Infinite movement can be too powerful. I think rail blight is ugly, not to mention unrealistic (yeah, yeah). The advantage of rails (in the real world) is that they are fast, efficient, and high-capacity. The disadvantage is that they are inflexible and expensive to lay. I mention this not because I am a realism nut but because that kind of trade-off is exactly the sort of thing that leads to enjoyable game play, at least if it's implemented properly. I don't agree with changing the rules of the game solely because of AI limitations, though; the solution for that is to make the AI smarter, not to make the game less capable.

I also dislike the rail production bonus. The rationale for the bonus is that railroads improved access to markets; you could more easily bring Ukrainian wheat to German markets than before. That's true, but Egypt was the breadbasket of Rome, so it's obvious that rail wasn't the sine qua non for such advantages. Regardless, it uses an intra-city mechanism (boosting local production) to model something that has inter-city benefits. If my cities can trade with each other better because of railroads, that shouldn't affect each city's local production, just the flexibility with which it can trade it. The trade model is a separate discussion, but I wanted to justify "I don't like it."

Enough blah blah blah. How do I think it should work? Worker units build railroads as they do now. However, the railroads they build cannot split or join except in cities. Each rail segment is part of a longer point-to-point connection, not a standalone rail line. You can only get on a railroad in the city (you can get off anywhere, though). Railroads offer no production bonuses, but do improve connectivity for trade (both arrows and movement of resources). Railroads should take considerably more time than they do now to construct. Railroads are not an upgrade to roads, but rather a separate thing; you will be able to have a railroad and a road on the same tile, or a railroad and no road. When a unit passes through a city by rail, it takes a movement hit.

The movement cost in cities is to slow you down a little bit (and has significance in my trade model). You can imagine that to represent congestion, switching trains, slowing down to pass through populated areas (noise and danger), or what have you. 1/3 sounds best for that to me (consistent with roads), but I'm open to suggestion. So if you're moving from Turin to Milan to Florence to Rome to Naples, you expend 1 movement point total, regardless of how far Turin is from Milan, Milan from Florence, Florence from Rome, or Rome from Naples, because your rail line passes through Milan, Florence, and Rome for a 1/3 hit three times.

The advantage over the "train station" city improvement is that it reflects more what is happening: intermediate infrastructure is being built. Airplanes just use the air, so airlift style operations work fine for them. Trains move on the land, though. This is a good thing for strategy, because it means that railroads can be blocked or destroyed from outside the city for them to lose their benefits. Train stations are too hard to get to in cities. It's also too damaging to destroy them. If I destroy the train station in Osaka, it's cut off from Tokyo, Nagasaki, Yokohama, and all the other cities. That seems to be too great a vulnerability. Leaving rail as something on the ground means that I have to destroy the individual links between Osaka and the other cities to cut the city off. That seems much better to me from a strategic perspective.

With this model, you won't have a tank winning one battle and then moving instantaneously to fight another battle a continent away the next, because it will have to return to the city to get on the rail line and it will have to transit numerous cities to reach its destination. You can build in redundancy if you like, but you won't end up with the same rail blight. You can build an "express" from Turin to Naples if you like so you don't slow down through Florence and Rome, but that will take your workers time.

Rail shouldn't work like roads or airlift because they're fundamentally different things, both in the real world and as far as game play goes. Roads are flexible but have lower capacity. While the roads themselves may be very large, each quantum of cargo must be driven independently. You want 200 loads of stuff to go from Hamburg to Prague by road? You need 200 drivers. You want 200 loads of stuff to go from Hamburg to Prague by rail? You need 1 driver (well, with backups etc.). Airports are even more flexible but have even less capacity, due to the infrastructure, limited cargo space of aircraft, and the need for pilots. Air travel is for dense things that need to travel fast, like people, packages, and papayas. Anything bulky that can wait a while to get there is much better served by sea or land travel, like cars, computers, and canned corn.

To summarize.... The advantages of railroads should be in trade, supply, and deployment, but nowhere else. I think game designers are and should be hesitant to add features that are "just like X, but without Y" because that adds complexity without depth. Rails, roads, ships, and aircraft should all behave in substantially different ways so you have to think about how you want to allocate your production and worker resources and what transportation medium you want to use in a particular case.

[Atahualpa]

Just a minor thing, but you know that what would probably emerge is a hub system... like this

And after the Hub is constructed, if you don't put maintenance costs or such and the workers have nothing to do.. it will become what is shown in the next picture... point-to-point so your system would only slow down the process of connecting with railroads.. the maintenance thing could be very difficult to balance though...

[Atahualpa]

or in the extreme case:

[jw32767]

Originally posted by Atahualpa
Just a minor thing, but you know that what would probably emerge is a hub system... like this

And after the Hub is constructed, if you don't put maintenance costs or such and the workers have nothing to do.. it will become what is shown in the next picture... point-to-point so your system would only slow down the process of connecting with railroads.. the maintenance thing could be very difficult to balance though...

And that's different from how real life works how? =) I think it fairly accurately models the real train network.

Another option to fix the roll-off-the-assembly-line-in -boston-and-counterattack-in-california problem is a movement point cost to entrain. The time to move a unit by rail is almost all in mustering the rolling stock and crossloading the cars. Plus, a unit is rendered combat ineffective while getting on or off a train or boat, at least until they can reorganize, hence the movement point hit.

Say 1 mp to board a train but still infinite movement. It's simple, clean, and allows mobile units to still have limited effectiveness after being strategically moved. You could do the same for planes/boats too. To prevent people from just entraining their strategic reserve and leave them sitting like that, you could automatically detrain all units at the end of a turn.

If you give a +1 mp bonus for being elite like smac did, it'd add an even more useful bonus for having elite infantry troops, in that they would be able to hop off a train and counterattack.

EDIT: I didn't make it clear that I support moving the production bonus that rail lines generate to another improvement/building. The AI won't build them all over creation that way making offensives more difficult and if you increase the build time for rail lines to make them somewhat painful to build, players aren't going plaster the landscape with them either.

[Atahualpa]

the railroad network is not really organized as hub.. airlines work that way, but railroad more has this neighborhood-connecting cities, which actually is a natural thing if you begin to build a network... but if you think before you begin, you might decide on a hub and save a lot on transportation time, while you will not come too far with 4 hops on a traditional network, you'll be almost anywhere with a clever designed hub

Ofc, this is not a problem, like I said before, but something one has to consider when creating models. Also you'll have to teach the AI to build clever transportation nets.

[sophist]

Atahualpa, that's a really handy drawing. That's exactly what I meant. I have no corresponding visual, but compare that to the current situation where you have the entire landscape carpeted with railroads and tanks using railroads during battles (so to speak). The drawing embodies exactly what I was trying to say about railroads being about connecting cities just as much as they are about moving units.

We can avoid the second situation in two ways. One is by making workers and building railroads more expensive. That could mean requiring more time, more resources, costing money, or any number of things. You can still do it, of course, but once you have your skeletal network in place, it'll be hard enough that you'd only do it selectively. The other way to avoid it is by not allowing railroads to cross, though that does hurt the realism.

I don't know what you mean by "neighborhood connecting cities." Railroads might not be a perfect hub and spoke system, but they're certainly a lot more hub and spoke than roads.

As far as they AI goes, I'm 1) confident they can figure it out, since it's a simple model 2) unwilling to sacrifice good game play due to limitations of the AI. After all, civ4 will ship with working multiplayer.

jw32767, I want to keep the idea that going further costs more. The cost is no longer in motion, though, but in navigating intersections, which you have to do frequently. Such costs exist in the old road days, but were hidden because it was an immense PITA to just get from point A to B in the first place.

Compare the postal service to the Internet. In the postal service, first you have to drop the letter at the mailbox. Then it travels to the local hub (5 hours). They examine it (2 seconds) and decide to send it to a regional hub (10 hours). They examine it (2 seconds) and decide to sent it to a different local hub (7 hours). They examine it (2 seconds) and decide to send it to a local mailbox (24 hours). The exact same issues exist with the Internet, except it's like this: packet goes to local switch (2 nanoseconds). Switch examines packet (100 nanoseconds) and sends packet to router (5 nanoseconds). Router examines packet (200 nanoseconds) and sends it to another switch (10 nanoseconds). Switch examines packet (100 seconds) and sends it to another machine (2 nanoseconds). In both cases, you take a hit both from moving and from routing, but in one case, moving dwarfs routing, and in the other case, routing dwarfs moving.

[Atahualpa]

We can avoid the second situation in two ways. One is by making workers and building railroads more expensive. That could mean requiring more time, more resources, costing money, or any number of things. You can still do it, of course, but once you have your skeletal network in place, it'll be hard enough that you'd only do it selectively. The other way to avoid it is by not allowing railroads to cross, though that does hurt the realism.

I don't like this too much, because increasing the cost will also increase the time until the skeleton is in place...