Roads and rails

[MiloMilo]

Wow, some good posts here, with a lot of intelligent reasons fro restricting RR movement. I hope Firaxis does read this post. As for my $0.02: (didn't there use to be a 'cent' key on the keyboard?!)

The infinite movement thing is definitely a bit screwy. One idea is to restrict it. Maybe a compromise would be to restrict movement for motorized units to double or triple roads, but let infantry troops move at triple roads or infinite. You could still defend your borders, but not with the big heavy mechanized units. This would also give us incentive to keep marines/paratroopers/etc. around. Also, every tile in a city should get a commerce bonus (or give a % bnus like someone suggested), as long as the city is connected by rail to the nation's capital. This would clean up the RR sprawl ugliness.

I also like the idea of replacing the terrain improvement with a city improvement, the Railroad Station. The city with a RR Station would get a commerce bonus, and units could jump to any city within X tiles that's connected by land. BUT moving would take their turn, so they could not attack until the next one. This would reduce the defensive advantage somewhat. Later, when an airport is built the # of tiles that can be traversed would be upped to infinte and overseas cities could also get the commerce bonus.

These ideas would not break the game (a tank would still be plenty useful for defense if it could move 18 or even only 12 tiles). I agree that something like this should definitely be implemented in a patch, the XP, or the sequel.

[Captain]

wrylachlan, after some more thinking, I really like your idea of limiting raillines to four per city, but....

...would it be that the rail line goes immediately from one city to another, shortest path? or do you get to lay the line. if you lay the line, would it not be able to connect to all other cities anyways? I don't connect it out of the first tile radius surrounding the city, I just wait til the second tile. then I RR a ring around each city. wouldn't that just make the countryside full of rails?
does it cost money to upkeep rails on tiles? or just stations in cities?

how do you count "directly connected"? if I have a railline from Berlin to Rome but midway between I intersect with a line to Prague, are all three "directly" connected? this is kindof a cool math question.

also, how does it address infinite movement, or the civ2 style rolling attack?

[wrylachlan]

Originally posted by Captain
wrylachlan, after some more thinking, I really like your idea of limiting raillines to four per city, but....

...would it be that the rail line goes immediately from one city to another, shortest path? or do you get to lay the line. if you lay the line, would it not be able to connect to all other cities anyways? I don't connect it out of the first tile radius surrounding the city, I just wait til the second tile. then I RR a ring around each city. wouldn't that just make the countryside full of rails?
does it cost money to upkeep rails on tiles? or just stations in cities?

how do you count "directly connected"? if I have a railline from Berlin to Rome but midway between I intersect with a line to Prague, are all three "directly" connected? this is kindof a cool math question.

There are a couple of ways this could be dealt with:

a) Make Railroads only available as a "RR to" command like the Shift-R for roads currently. So workers can't set down individual RR tiles, they must stand on a city and "RR to another city". Once a worker has started it, other automated workers can help but there is no mechanism to lay down single RR tiles, they must be between cities.

b)Allow single tile RR's as they are now, but in order to get the "direct connect" bonus, the RR path must be no greater than say 150% of the optimal path. In your example:
- Having the railroad go from Berlin to Prague, a ring around Prague and then to Rome wouldn't work since the total path would be more than 150% of the optimal path of Berlin to Rome.
- The Y however could work since both branches of the Y would create paths that are less than 150% of the optimal. And since the goal in the first place was to make less railroads each more strategically significant, I see no problem with using Y's.

also, how does it address infinite movement, or the civ2 style rolling attack?

a) It does not address infinite movement specifically, instead it attempts to correct some of the imbalances that infinite movement causes when coupled with having every single tile filled with RR.

b) When you take over an enemy city the adjacent rail tile auto-destructs. You could even make it all rail lines within a radius of 2 (or more, it doesn't need to be hard-coded).So in your example, someone takes over Berlin, and the rail lines to Prague and Rome are cut. Autodestructing doesn't work when RR's are everywhere, but when you cut down to just a few going into and out of each city this becomes a very effective stop to the rolling attack.

One more corrallary to this autodestruct: You could prevent the autodestruct by maning the RR tile with one of your units. This would add to late game strategy as you try to flank the cities and control all of their RR's before you take the city.


Someone else on this forum suggested a turn penalty for using the rail line. Go as far as you want on the rail, but when you get there your turn is over. I kind of like this. It could be as simple as a new command - instead of "Go to" you would have "Ride to". Works just like "Go to" except it has to be on rails and when you get there, no matter how far away it is, your movement points are used up.