Roads

[LDiCesare]

Demo 6 has roads built in, but I feel their use is a bit puzzling.

(Mostly copied form D6 comments thread)

Players need feedback on how much money to put in the road-building (so I don't put 30% where 5% is needed), and they can stage it over several turns.
Currently, they are a bit lost as to how mich does a road cost?

For example, in the EndRoad button we could show a panel saying the roads will cost this much $, propose an option like build it in 1,2,? turns, and, optionnally from which econ (civ or province) the funds should come. When this panel fades, econ orders are adjusted automatically, and when the roads are built, road-building econ orders are automatically reset to 0.
Of course one could still go manually type the road costs in the econ window, but I think it is very hard for anyone to guess how much money they must put to get their roads built.
As an alternative this panel could be a road-building preferences panel so you set it once and for all, but the changes to econ orders still occur after hitting end road and when the roads are built.

[Mark_Everson]

Hi Laurent:

I Suppose you don't like the fact that you can currently build roads into unexplored territory either!

I think all your points are good. People will like the auto-roads thing. I just need to work it so that is shuts off when there are no more orders. Should be trivial. Rather than making it very complicated I would just stick with how many turns to build for now, and assume Road Building infra is done at the civ level. Once we have agreement on the best thing to do short-term I'll put it in the small feature list.

In addition there should probably be a short (maybe one turn) delay between the order and the execution, regardless of the resources invested. Just so you can't flash-build a huge stretch of road on the very turn someone threatens a far-off province. In the long run building roads not near population might require a variable amount of time simulating the time it takes to Get workers there and then do the job.

[LDiCesare]

Agreed. Keeping it simple is good, so a how many turns (maybe with total cost showed) would be enough. The one turn delay also sounds very good to me. If nothing else, it will prevent people from rushing a road to move their troops faster to attack/rescue, so it will have an effect on gameplay. I like it a lot.

[Mark_Everson]

Actually I have to admit that the delay was something originally suggested by Gary when we were originally figuring out how to 'cost' roads. But as you say, it does help out in gameplay.

[Gary Thomas]

My concern was that no amount of money will allow you to build a road from Paris to Beijing in five years. Although we don't necessarily want to include all the resource details in the game, there should be some kind of limitation other than the availability of money. That, unfortunately is about as far as I went in this area.

Cheers

[axi]

The limitation is the capacity of your productive base: you just don't have enough skilled people and enough machinery to do the job in such a short notice. You can start training the people and manufacturing the equipment or you can buy from abroad, but that will cost.

Remember that one unit of road infrastructure will eventually cost both resources, production and services (although it will probably cost no food) as each and every infraclass will.

What I'm trying to say is that the actual game will have more complicated delays than this, which will stem out of the models themselves.

[Mark_Everson]

Here's our thread on Roads. Please move the discussions of late on Roads in the D7 Comments... thread here.

Thanks, the MGT

[Martin the Dane]

Ok here are a few comments that I made in the D7 thread. (edited so they don't appear totaly out of context)

I like the idea of automatic alocation of resources to roadbuilding. But I don't think all the funds for the roads should be drawn from the province, but that's a minor detail.

I do not like the idea of having to micromanage roadbuilding in uninhabited land [the suggestion was to allow the building of roads in uninhabited land only if there was a unit pressent], having a road building unit that could build roads as it moved along would be ok, as an enemy could kill the unit in order to stop the roadbuilding. This unit should then have a very low speed and an upkeep based on the roads it was building. the unit could also be used to speed up roadbuilding in ones own territory. Furthermore it could be an idea to draw pop directly to the roadbuilder unit, for a shorter or longer time, to speed up roadbuilding.

And finally I do agree [with Richard's suggestion] that the cost of roads should reflect the size of the map.

Now to comment to things said here:
I see that there are a number of good suggestions to make roadbuilding more realistic. I like the ide of letting te buildtime be determined by available resources and trained manpower, and not only money. But there should be an optimal buildtime, and the cost of speeding up the roadbuilding should be high. Furthermore build-time and road-quality should som how reflect the state of the related technologies.

Roads should have a maintainance cost and if not met by alocated funds, the roads should deterioate.

A final note that might as well have been placed in the Expansion and Settelment thread: When population decides to move out the availability of roads rhould be taken into consideration.

[Richard Bruns]

I have been trying to search for these older threads, but the search function never seems to work for me. I will search for something that I know I wrote, but it doesn't show up. I'll post all my D7 road comments here, in approximate chronological order:

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Roads are incredibly easy to build in [delenda]. I built a road from Rome to Marsaglia to Sevile to help troop movements, each section taking only one turn. Then the GUI kept hounding me, saying that I had a lot of road building funds left over. So after a while, I tried an experiment and ordered a road from Seville to Carthage, but set aside no funds. It popped up in one turn, apparently from the leftover funds from earlier roads. That should IMO be counted as a bug/cheat.

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It should definitely be impossible to build roads in enemy territory. After all, if you have an army there to protect the builders, the game calls it your territory. I think that roads through uninhabited land should also be prohibited. A good coherent model for road builidng would be:

You use the current interface to plan a road. Funds are allocated automatically, as per military tactics. If the road is in a province you control, the money comes out of the province economy and it is automatically built. Otherwise, you need to move a unit with engineers over the road builidng spot, and the money for the roads comes out of that unit´s supplies.

Obviously we don´t have unit supplies introduced yet, so until then a road can be built from civ funds if a unit is on top of the planned site.

[Mark_Everson]

Originally posted by Richard Bruns
I have been trying to search for these older threads, but the search function never seems to work for me. I will search for something that I know I wrote, but it doesn't show up.

Hi Richard, search is busted. It only goes back a few months now. I have complained in the Community forum about this. It is due to change of a global setting by the admins for the purpose of using less processing power. Others have complained also.

It should definitely be impossible to build roads in enemy territory.

I can agree with that, and it can be done easily without MM.

Vovan, roads are already somewhat included in settlement choice, at least they're supposed to be!