Caravans and railoads

[jordissim]

In at least my version of Civ1, there's a bug which is quite annoying. If you send a caravan from one city to another which are connected by railroads, it should take one turn (just like with any other unit), yet the caravan responds to the railroad as if it were a mere dirtroad. Is there a solution for that bug? It's not that important, but as the game advances I want my caravans to reach their destiny as soon as possible, and the only alternative is keeping manual control over them, and dealing with 20 at a time is not fun. Any ideas?

 

[Mize]

The GO command is just buggy like that. It treats railroads just like roads. It's a pain in the ass moving units manually on long distances, but it's the only way to take advantage of the railroad. The AI for instance does not. It moves its units along railroads as if they were on roads. Of course it does teleport its caravans, a nifty solution to the otherwise massive logistics effort to transport them to the best cities of the world...

 

[Whelkman]

I think the behavior is quasi-intentional. Figuring best path is computentionally complex, and treating railroads as roads avoids the problem. They probably found the "bug" in testing and didn't "fix" it because they realized there was no way of doing it without putting the computer into a 30+ minute crunch cycle.

 

[Dandenoth]

It's punishment for not micro-managing... At least, thats how I see it.

 

[Theov]

No, it's the GO feature that just uses 3 movements at the time.
It's a 1991 game, so expect things to be different sometimes

 

[Tristan_C]

Also, don't move the van through a city that was not built on top of an already-railroaded square, or it counts as road movement

 

[Mize]

Well, you could sentry it and then wake it up...

Caravans and diplomats are fair game for the sentry bug IMO, since the AI teleports them. Right? (Also chain transports)

 

[InnateGamer]

I'm not sure, but I think the problem is that the games pathfinding sometimes enters a loop. Instead of finding a path once and then following it, each time the unit has moved to a new square the game reevaluates the path and sometimes it ends up going in a loop. In order to make sure that the loop is never infinite the total amount of moves has to be limited. Pathfinding is actually an easy problem, especially for a tile based game, but for whatever reason they couldn't get it right. I remember from a youtube Civ 1 LP (I think I've seen them all, lol) there was a sail that was set to GO to a location and it ended up sailing around in a loop and the player had to take manual control of it, if the moves had been unlimited it would have just gyrated about in an infinite loop and the player would have had to restart the game.