Road and rail sprawl

I hope they're doing something about road and rail spam in civ5.

In civ4, they took away the trade bonus from roads in the hope that it would stop road and rail spam. However, anyone could have seen that it would not; rail only gave bonuses on production tiles in civ3, and yet there it was, on every tile eventually.

It isn't just that workers have nothing else to do, either. There's an advantage; your units will always move faster across long distances if they can take the straightest path, and with every tile covered by roads or rail, they can always take the straightest route between any two points. Some people don't bother spamming roads and rail, because the advantage is perceived to be minor - however, it is an advantage. There's a reason the game designers programmed the AI to do it!

Some mods have attempted to rectify the problem by vastly decreasing the work rate and making roads take much longer to build. However, this only encourages bigger stacks of workers, which is just more tedium and micromanagement. And it only delays the spam, it never prevents it.

Admittedly, this is more of a gameplay issue than a realism one. In the real world, roads and even rail (feeder lines, anyway) really do sprawl and would be present in most tiles in the world on the really big Giant Earth Map, except the most underdeveloped areas. With automated workers it does not involve a lot of micromanagement, but it does involve some, and the map looks really ugly with sprawl, in my opinion. The cleaner and less busy the map, the better. I like detail, but not too busy - one of the main flaws with civ4, I think, is that the map is too crowded and too busy, with all the gigantic towering units looming over the landscape, colossal windmills taller than skyscrapers and bigger than stadiums, etc.

Probably not everyone has a problem with sprawl - but some do, and I don't think anyone sees sprawl as necessary and won't play civ with no sprawl.

I don't know exactly what solution could be applied. This thread is for brainstorming. I've had a few ideas; here are some of them.

Infrastructure Costs

Basically you'd get charged some gold for every X number of tiles of road or rail. This would absolutely prevent sprawl. Players would strive to be as efficient as possible in building transport infrastructure.

Automatic Roads

Instead of building roads, they would simply appear automatically. No micromanagement, no sprawl, and no income penalty - almost perfect, but somehow, unappealing to me for some reason. I like to be able to have some control over the route.

Enemies use Roads

This probably the most 'traditional' solution, because it comes from previous editions, but also demonstrably ineffective, since sprawl was present under this system. The idea here is that if enemies can use your roads, you will want to mitigate the damage they can do if they break past your defenders and strike deep into your borders. If you have sprawl, high-movement units like cavalry can run around causing hell and are nearly impossibly to catch. If, instead, you have chokepoints and put defenders on them, the enemy will have a hard time doing this.

Still, sprawl will mean your units arrive faster and lower the chance of the enemy breaking through succesfully, so most people would probably still spam roads.


Anyone else got any ideas?

Honestly, I've never had a problem with road sprawl, since it is more an aesthetic issue. However, it is a common complaint, so I can see why people would want to change this. A couple of suggestions:

First, the Civ2 method. Road sprawl existed before, but it offered less strategic advantages (if you remove the trade arrow advantage it would help too). Basically, there were two things to hurt this. First off, you would lose 1/3 combat effectiveness with each third moved. This reduced the speed advantage. Second, your enemies could use them too. Honestly, the biggest reason remaining for the roads would be boredom. I'm not entirely in favor of this because it was frickin annoying to get those "you only have 2/3 strength combat, do you want to proceed?" pop ups. But this would certainly make you consider it.

A infrastructure support system would be realistic, if not entirely practical, but address the basic concern. Basically, if you give cities commerce bonuses for being connected by roads, but then forced them to pay gold to support the roads, it would discourage random roads. The only roads that would matter are the ones that connect cities, since they are the only roads that would make you money. After that, necessary expenses for connected resources would make sense, but that's it. It would also encourage sea trade, since they would be road free. The downside would be related to when you can't pay for the roads or when you capture an enemy city with too many roads. Do you have to go out and pillage your own roads, or can they fall naturally into disrepair? I almost can see a Sim City style system here.

The other idea would be automatic roads, similar to Rome: Total War. Basically, you build roads inside a city. I too am not in favor of this, since it reduces the point of workers and gives you less control.

I feel compelled to point out that, with the change in unit stacking, road sprawl has become more useful, not less. It's not longer practical (or possible) to funnel units from one city to another to defend against a stack. Instead, you need to get them to a front and spread them out. This pretty much encourages the ability to have a road to each individual hex.

Louis XXIV said:

Honestly, I've never had a problem with road sprawl, since it is more an aesthetic issue.

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Purely aesthetic, yes. I don't think sprawl decreases realism, and I don't think it ruins play or anything. It's just ugly. I just want to have a few major roads, rather than spaghetti. Spaghetti is definately more what roads really look like in the real world, but ... I just want it different, as if you are seeing only the major arteries and main trunk lines, because it makes the map less busy, less like somebody has been doodling all over my hills and forests.

There are other solutions though. Making the roads a bit less prominent would probably help, but then, you'd have to peer to see them, which is a problem too. Perhaps there's some nice middle ground. Or maybe they could be less visible but glow a bit on a mouseover or across the path of a wayroute.

Louis XXIV said:

Honestly, I've never had a problem with road sprawl, since it is more an aesthetic issue.

Click to expand...

Purely aesthetic, yes. I don't think sprawl decreases realism, and I don't think it ruins play or anything. It's just ugly. I just want to have a few major roads, rather than spaghetti. Spaghetti is definately more what roads really look like in the real world, but ... I just want it different, as if you are seeing only the major arteries and main trunk lines, because it makes the map less busy, less like somebody has been doodling all over my hills and forests.

There are other solutions though. Making the roads a bit less prominent would probably help, but then, you'd have to peer to see them, which is a problem too. Perhaps there's some nice middle ground. Or maybe they could be less visible but glow a bit on a mouseover or across the path of a wayroute.

I'm in favour of simply adding a maintenance cost for roads and railways. The cost would be offset by the benefit of having them in creating a trade route in between cities, but actual spam would not increase the benefit gained, and would only add to maintenance cost. A simple gold per tile of road/railroad would suffice, IMO (although it would probably have to be less than 1).

I doubt this will be as big a problem in Civ 5 though, what with a limit of one worker per tile. This will mean you won't have bands of workers wandering around in stacks creating tons of roads/railways, so hopefully it'll reduce this spam.

road spam is dead apparently

If rail/road sprawl is a purely aesthetic issue, then the solution should also be purely aesthetic: make the damn things less ugly.

squadbroken said:

If rail/road sprawl is a purely aesthetic issue, then the solution should also be purely aesthetic: make the damn things less ugly.

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Ironically, it can't be done. The only way to make sprawl less ugly is to make roads blend into the background more, and then, you have to squint to see where the roads are, which is no good.

Building and maintaining roads and railroads has always been expensive, even today. In Civ virtually every tile is roaded and i think it greatly decreases the strategic and tactical value of roads. If roads and rails cost maintenance one would build where it would either be cost-effective or tactically important to help deploying your units. In addition the unrealistic roadbuilding early on decreases the historical importance of naval transportation of units and resources. I live in Norway and we have very few railroads and until the last century coastal transportation of units and resources was THE only way. In Civ we build roads through jungles and desert like it was nothing rather than using seagoing transport.

Tantor said:

Building and maintaining roads and railroads has always been expensive, even today. In Civ virtually every tile is roaded and i think it greatly decreases the strategic and tactical value of roads. If roads and rails cost maintenance one would build where it would either be cost-effective or tactically important to help deploying your units. In addition the unrealistic roadbuilding early on decreases the historical importance of naval transportation of units and resources. I live in Norway and we have very few railroads and until the last century coastal transportation of units and resources was THE only way. In Civ we build roads through jungles and desert like it was nothing rather than using seagoing transport.

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The problem is that, before long, every jungle and forest within culture borders are cut down. Now, if building a road or railroad through forests/desert/jungle simply canceled out the negative terrain movement instead of giving a bonus, movement on the sea would be more important.

That, and get rid of the production bonus for cutting down trees and make cutting them down take longer. That way, clearing out every forest and jungle in one's borders no longer sounds like a sound idea.

civ_king said:

road spam is dead apparently

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Do you have a link for this?

Toggle roads and rail on and off

Tantor@Sonereal@

The importance of sea transport is underated.

The movement cost on roads/rail should depend on the type of terrain

Roads/rail should have a maintenance cost but a small/reasonable one which would depend on the terrain
So you will still get lots of roads but you may not rail an icefield etc that an enemy is unlikely to advance across.

One option is to allow full road/rail movement within borders, but have the game automatically generate the graphics only between cities. Definitely not ideal though because it removes the costs (mostly time, maybe money) of building the road or rail system

I really hope enemies can use roads though, that would make defending your lands much more strategic, and would probably also contribute to less road spam.

BobTheTerrible said:

One option is to allow full road/rail movement within borders, but have the game automatically generate the graphics only between cities. Definitely not ideal though because it removes the costs (mostly time, maybe money) of building the road or rail system

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The problem with this is it unrealistically would ignore the massive investment required to build extensive transport systems. Given, currently that is only represented in the cost of workers anyway, but completely eliminating any cost is the wrong way to go.

Well, it can be a cottage mechanism where you seed roads and they grow accordingly wether they are on flat and open terrain along the short path between two cities, so their alpha connectivity indices are raising and providing better trade income to the tile owner.

Guys, see:
Fan report from PaX East

Information from what I heard/saw (subject to change, of course.. this game is a work in progress)
-roads are primarily used for an economic bonus for linking cities; you won't need/want more than a minimum
-if a road goes through a resource tile, that tile yields less than it would otherwise

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"Assuming you can remove and move roads at will (and more importantly, assuming that worker AI is able to do all this pissing about to build optimal roads for you automatically) hopefully it won't cause any problems."
-They specifically mentioned that one coder's only job was to make sure the workers would intuitively build roads without boning up your tile yields / making spaghetti etc.

"Is it possible that roads will no longer speed up unit movement; that a unit can move just as quickly across empty plains as along a road?"
-I also got the impression that the roads didn't increase unit movement, but the pace was such that I was swept along well past remembering to ask about that by the time questions were open.

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http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=359099