More beautiful roads and hints of a good AI

[cassembler]

Ok, I HATE the way roads plaster the landscape. So I made some changes. First of all, I found out that you CANNOT prevent roads from being built on ANY terrain. So I worked around it.

1) remove commerce bonus that roads give to hills and mountains.
2) remove the resources from hills and mountains.
3) give these resources to other terrain types so that they don't just disappear from the game.
4) Give hills and mountains a different bonus [I made mines a little bit better for them: +3 for mountains (for a total of four production) and +2 for hills (for a total of one food, three shields].
5) Make hills and mountains harder to move through.
6) Make tundras usable terrains [I allowed irrigation (looks beautiful) and made them equivalent to plains.]

Ok, I tested this all out. It's about 0 AD so far and the AI has only built only ONE road on a mountain (none on hills yet), and that one road was to connect a city.

This has made the game much better for me- mountains are now key strategic points as well as clean.

I'll have to check out late game to see if it still works then (I think with railroads the AI will go crazy again...) but hey, at least for the first 4000 years, the earth looks beautiful...

(I'll post screenshots soon when I figure out how to do so, as well as the mod if anyone's interrested).

[Spiffor]

Great idea !
To take a screenshot : in Civ3, press PrintScreen, this way you copy what your screen displays to the clipboard. Then open a picture editing software (paint shop pro is good), and paste it as a new image.
To attach a picture : use the "browse" button under the field where you type your posts. You can't attach more than 500 Kb though.

[cassembler]

Ok these might be really crappy quality 'cause I resized them and converted them eact twice. not thinking today. But you can see the roads...

[cassembler]

screen2

[cassembler]

screen3:

[cassembler]

Now, obviously, the AI has started to build the haneously unecessary roads, but they appear to be delayed... Maybe they just build them all late game anyways and I just haven't noticed...
Maybe they HAVE built fewer roads on hills and mountains... I'll get to late game and let y'all know.

Anyone wanna help me tackle this situation? I LOVE how the game's playing now- it's more of a chess-type game where every move counts and each terrain is NOT begging for the traditional "road-mine-railroad," although It has crossed my mind that once rails come along, they DO gove production bonuses...

Anyone, please, help us all out here. I think we're on to somethin'.

[RTodd]

That's awesome....

Venger had a similar thought...don't know where that thread went; anyways, I started to do the same thing and ran into the AI ignoring the commerce bonus removal as well. See

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=37917

I still think the commerce bonus should return and some point, and Venger had the idea of a city improvement called "Highways" followed by something called "railyards" that would return those bonuses back to the game. I started messing around with some graphics for Highways and started working on incorporating it into a mod, then strained my Achilles and went bed-ridden for a week, and completely stopped working on it.

Vel is working on what appears to be a most awesome mod...you should see if he will incorporate these changes as well. I think this is great....

T

[Merp]

Here's a thought, I don't know how workable it is.

In the same vein, I'm sick of mines in the middle of plains and forests, etc. Would it be possible to make them completely useless on plains, but very productive on hills? Ye gods you've got to hate the mined cattle resource

[cassembler]

As posted by the Merp-meister:
Would it be possible to make them completely useless on plains, but very productive on hills?

Not only is it possible, but you CAN prevent mines from being built on any terrain (just set the bonus value in the editor to 0). Same can be said of irrigation, just not roads...
Dan from Firaxis has supposedly submitted this for a change...

Problem is that early and mid game, if you have no water, you can't irrigate(on top of not being able to build mines) so all of your plains and grassland become kinda useless until electricity...

PS, I really like what I've done to tundras: I've made them identical to plains so that you can irrigate them and nurture at least a medium-sized city.