Road question

[MisterHungry]

I have a question about road building: I know that irrigating and mining times are determined by the terrain section in rules.txt.

But what about road/railroad build times? Where is that determined? Is it a based on the Transform number in the Cosmic section of rules.txt? Is it unalterable?

Any insight is much appreciated.

[MisterHungry]

While I'm here...

I've got two other questions that are unrelated.

1. What, exactly, are the effects of the "WW2-only AI" in the Scenario parameters?

2. The trend seems to be to make the unit icons as realistic as possible (ie HiRes, etc.) Are there any good graphic files out there to make them _less_ realistic? I have to say I kind of like the old Civ 1 icons. After all, they are _symbols_ for the unit, not a _picture_ of it.

[Panda]

Mister Hungry:

Roads seem to have a fixed construction time of 2 turns for a road and 5 turns for a railroad. I haven't messed around with this to be able to say for sure: you might want to look at irrigation costs, movement costs or defence bonuses to see if they have any effect because it is certain that building roads and fortresses on different terrains does increase in time for hills and mountains. Have a look.

The "WW2 only AI" in the scenario parameters is an early relic of the first versions of civ2. The idea being that in the MPS WW2 scenario there would be less chance of peace between, say, the Germans and British. I don't know what settings they had for vendettas and attitudes towards each other to further affect this, but that was the basic idea. After version 2.62 "Conflicts in Civilization" was released and introduced events we can prevent peace by forbidding negotiations between such enemies, so the flag has no real use. Unless you wanted to allow negotiation and still hamper peace treaty.

As for the unit icons, there is a mod-pack in the database section to convert civ2 to a civ1 look-alike. I don't know if it acheives this aim, or indeed if the old icons are restored. Yes, it would be nice from a nostalgia point of view.

As for "photo-realistic" unit icons such as included in the HiRes mod-pack (and also scenarios by John Petroski) I've always considered them inferior to such hand-drawn icons such as Captain Nemo's in Red Front or icons converted from pictures but simplified and cleaned up to fit in with the "standard" civ2 graphics look. Some of the "realistic" icons look very good, some okay from a distance but distorted close-up because of a bad clean up. But you have to balance two requirements: a standard angle of the photo shot and a scaled size. Fighters as big as bombers seem wrong.

I read what you're saying about the icons being symbols rather than pictures, but against that, if you have the capability of producing scenarios with high-quality pictures and miscellaneous graphical improvements, to deliberately choose a retro-grade style is really selling Civ2 short.

[mindseye]

"Photo-realistic" versus "hand-painted"
I think both of the styles have their strongpoints, I suspect it's more a matter of personal preference than anything else. Quality is of course very important, but so is consistancy - when you start mixing the two styles, you have a mess.


Scale versus size trade-off
This is very challenging to deal with. First you need to decide how abstract you want your graphics to be. At some level, they are all symbolic icons, i.e. a Chariot does not really tower over a city, an Archer represents more than one man. Yet most people seem to desire some degree of uniformity of scale for simple aesthetic reasons.

Where do you draw the line? Obviously, all units cannot be of the same scale, or the Carrier would reduce most others to a single pixel. But even trying to maintain scale within a unit "class" (say, aircraft) is easier said than done. If your Bomber is a B-52, your Fighter is not going to be a very large unit. The smaller the unit, the less detail, recognizability, etc. Keep in mind that the average unit graphic is only about 40 x 40 pixels in size. Every pixel counts, giving up even a few can have a major effect on the quality of the graphic.

To make it even worse, most "classes" of units actually cover quite a range in physical size. Think of Carrier vs. Ironclad, Bomber vs. Cruise Missile, Armor vs. Diplomat.

Yet when all is said and done, if the graphic doesn't capture the essence of the subject, or simply doesn't "look good", the rest of the analyzing is useless!

- mindseye
[This message has been edited by mindseye (edited May 09, 2000).]

[Panda]

Mister Hungry,

found it! It was related to the movement cost of the terrain - the first value. If MP is set to 1 then an engineer can build a road in 1 turn. If set to 2 an engineer will take 2 turns...etc, etc. Settlers take twice as long. If MP cost is set to 0 then a settler can build a road in 0 time at all.

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"The man who can smile when things go wrong has thought of someone he can blame it on"

[MisterHungry]

That makes sense. I'm sure there's a 1 turn minimum for it as well.

However, making a terrain with move cost 0 would defeat the purpose of building roads at all...you'd actually be moving _less_ efficiently if you built a road, which has move cost of 1/3...until you built railroads...which you wouldn't need because it's 0 to begin with, right?

Well, it looks like those build times are stuck where they are.

[Panda]

sorry, double post again.
[This message has been edited by Andrew Livings (edited May 10, 2000).]

[Panda]

Wrong. I thought you were going to try this for yourself. Terrain with a movement cost of 0 does not mean that units can move without cost: they have a minimum cost of 1MP. What it does mean is that a settler can build a road in a single turn on such a terrain. If a settler had 2MP then it could move and build the road in the same turn.

Obviously my little joke fell flat.

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"The man who can smile when things go wrong has thought of someone he can blame it on"

[Mercator]

Are you saying a movement cost of 0 doesn't work??? I'm pretty sure it does. I once had a go at this, and my units were able to travel infinitely across the terrain (don't know about the road-building though).

[Panda]

Ah....you're both quite right, and I'm completely wrong. MP costs of 0 do work for land terrain.

I had tried this before but with ocean terrain and it didn't work, so my off the cuff remark was based on that.

Mister Hungry, I am very sorry for that remark.

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"The man who can smile when things go wrong has thought of someone he can blame it on"