Trade Roads – Determination of the Bonus Road and Railroad Connection

[rah]

Why bother using a warrior to go along, the settler defends better.

[DrSpike]

I didn't say use the warrior to go along. I said use any free turns you may have with a warrior. It costs you very little, since you will build the warrior anyway, and helps me plan early on.

There are many viable approaches.

[SlowThinker]

Originally posted by rah
Why use warrriors, just use the goto command on the settlers building the roads. They move a square then clear the goto command.

The problem is that you usually waste one settler in the very early stage of the game. Trade routes go often trough squares where you woudn't build roads normally.
Frequently it is better to use a warrior and to build the route later when time of a settler will have a lesser value.

[rah]

Hmmm, the settler has to build the road. So I don't see the difference. Goto the path when your settlers are ready to build the road. The road building settlers are usualy from my core group of cities built right before the caravans can be produced, so they start in the right locations. My outlaying cities build the settlers that will fuel further expansion. When the core group of settlers is done roading, they either improve a few choice squares for hidden specials or improving defensive terrain, and by then the boats are ready to move them out quickly to what's left of the frontier.

[Zenon]

Solo,

according to my tests rivers do not change the effective trade routes, they just change the go to order for units that follow the fastest way. I have looked into your example. The Atlanta Rome railroad follows the regular path (just the last field next to Rome is ocean, therefore it goes to the field next to Rome). But I found a good example in a New York Washington trade route I created. A quick test says it´s regular, too, but it is not the same path a one move unit would follow. I am not completely sure but so far I haven´t found an example were rivers would alter effective trade routes.

ST,

this is an interesting observation. I remember that in a self made scenario I played I got a settler on grassland an a city on a mountain. I thought that this was due to terrain changes and the program "remembered" the former terrain. When I find time I will find out if this bug affected my tests.

Zenon

[SlowThinker]

Originally posted by rah
The road building settlers are usualy from my core group of cities built right before the caravans can be produced

I wanted to say that you usually want a road connection between cities very soon - sooner than you will produce caravans. But these early roads will go by Grassland preferentially; but once that you build them, the goto command will follow these roads and you won't be able find out the correct trade route by a goto command. So it is good to use the goto command on warriors before the early routes are built.

[SlowThinker]

I can't test the effect of rivers now but I attach a tool that clears all rivers from a .sav file.

[Straybow]

Use Explorers, dude!

That's why I've always tested paths by cheating Explorers into place, sometimes I even substitute a rules.txt with Explorer movement bumped way up.

PS, here's a version that shows up:

[Straybow]

Path Problems

Using Explorers may not be perfect. There was a challenge game of some sort about a year ago. Over time I got three different Avalon-Tenochtitlan paths using Explorers.