Infinite Road & Railroad Sprawl

[To_Serve_Man]

A long forgoten thread.. I have come up with an idea!

How about if we let roads and rails have a radius. When you lay a road or rail down, it also gives bonuses to the tiles that are touching it. This gives people their tile bonuses, and also since a player doesnt need to put a road or rail on every tile, can just make a few routes going from a certian city...

[polypheus]

Originally posted by To_Serve_Man
A long forgoten thread.. I have come up with an idea!

How about if we let roads and rails have a radius. When you lay a road or rail down, it also gives bonuses to the tiles that are touching it. This gives people their tile bonuses, and also since a player doesnt need to put a road or rail on every tile, can just make a few routes going from a certian city...

Agreed! By reducing the trade/production bonuses, the need for building these ugly webs of roads and railroads everywhere would be reduced as well.

Unfortunately all the preliminary screenshots that I have seen seem to indicate that the road/railroad sprawl is with us, perhaps worse than ever.

SIGH

[TechWins]

perhaps worse than ever.

You might be right. With needing roads to resources there should even be more roads/railroads. I hope the go to command will be able to handle all the roads/railroads this time around.

[meriadoc]

Okay, I'll admit that I've been playing a lot of CTP2 lately so a lot of what I'm going to say is based on that game and not Civ2. That doesn't mean, however, that I don't like Civ2.

Personally, I tend to agree that the webs of roads and rails that tend to form around cities in Civ2 really don't look that great. Sure, they increase resources and movement rates, but they tend to be ugly and, worse yet, make it too easy for an invader to come in. In CTP2 the roads and RRs only increased movement rates. Food, production, and trade was handled by another series of tile improvements. So I ended up with a minimal set of roads connecting cities and making shortcuts for war transportation.

So how do I feel the roads and railroads in Civ3 should work? Well, I don't think that they should decrease the amount of food/production/trade that a tile produces. Personally, I tend to like the idea of having the roads/railroads only provide transportation benefits and nothing else. However, what I really am after is keeping the amount of roads down to a minimum. If it takes maintenance costs or stuff like that, then so be it. Just keep it simple.