A fix for transport, especially rail

[rhialto]

First, tile improvments such as road and rails do NOT provide any trade or shield bonus. It simply encourages sprawl.

Tile improvements include:
road - 1/3 move cost
highway - 1/5 move cost
undersea tunnel - 1/5 move cost, cant build in seas/oceans, and if any part of a contiguous tunnel net is pillaged, all land units on connected undersea tunnels die (drowned).

note: no rails! Also, no land transport units or air transport units.

Civ2 airports had a form of rapid transport. I'd liek to expand that for Civ4, with a series of city improvements.

Harbours allow rapid transport between coastal cities. Both cities must have a harbour improvement, and the maximum distance between them should be equal to the fastest transport ship's movement multiplied by a factor. 12 tiles would be good for ancient age, rising to 36 by modern times. A harbour should also allow a class of cheap sea transports to be drafted (purchased for gold), representing ships being impounded for a war effort (the gold cost represents the lost economic production by taken merchant shipping out of the nation's economy). Such ships should have no attack and minimal defence compared to normally built sea transports.

Airports allow rapid transport between any two cities anywhere that have an airport. They also allow veteran air units to be built. Aside: speaking of veteran air, what was the effect of having veteran air in civ3?

Rail depots are a new city improvement. They allow rapid transport between any 2 cities that a) have a connecting line of road/highway (the actual rails are abstracted in this model), and b) have a rail depot city improvement. They also give a 25% bonus to shields, representing the bonus previously assigned to rail. Aside: civ2 only provided a shield bonus for rail, civ3 gave foo or shields, depending on other tile improvements. I think food should increase with a specific food production technology, such as refrigeration.

Civ2 had an air transport limit of 1 per turn per city. Instead of this, I propose that each time one of these improvements is used for movement, there is a gold cost. This is higher for heavy units (tanks) or air transport, and lower for very light units (spies) and sea transport.

This model has the following advantages:

1 - preventing the enemy from using infrastructure on the ground is no longer an issue. They'd have to capture a city to use the rails, and roads should be useable.

2 - It reduces the incentive for road sprawl, but eliminating the economic incentive.

3 - It allows for Roman style empires to surround a sea without having to build excessive numbers of sea transports - you simply use the rapid transport network.

Thoughts?

 

[Yuri2356]

If you remove the bunus from roads you'd have to have some kind of trade-enhancing terrain improvement to replace it, like the solar pannels in SMAC. Other than that, it sounds pretty good.

 

[Stid]

yea i agree with everything u said cept for what yuri pointed out.id like to add that i believe ship movements are too great as destroyers can move 8 sqaures(?) whereas land units can only move 3 max - i dont think they are good camparisons so the harbour transport should be lower aswell.id aslo like to bring back the chance of air transported untis being shot down in times of war (like it was in civ2) and if units are moved by gold cost, then there should be no limit to the number of units that can be moved from 1 airport in 1 turn.

 

[rhialto]

@yuri2356 - I agree. A trade enhancement needs to be made. I'm torn between something like CTP2's trade outpost - mall - nature park model, or just giving a small trade bonus to any tile which happens to have a tile improvement (ie farms/mines includes the trade bonus of a civ2 road built in).

@stid - the harbour transport is intentionally faster than what you could get by regular shipping. However, not only are you paying for teh regular building maintenance, you are also paying a premium for every unit that gets moved by the rapid transport net. If you're moving huge stacks, that could make a serious dent in your economy. So you can move slowly for effectively free, or pay for the faster movement.

In any case, a 3 move tank becomes 15 with highways, which is still a pretty decent speed. It still is not as fast as the RTN, but the RTN is a premium cost move. 15 is still twice as fast as the modern troop transport though. And I think a good case can be made for giving modern tanks a base move of four.

I have deliberately enhanced the speed of shipping in order to make sea power more strategically useful. A lot of players virtually ignore naval situations because sea power isn't critical in any way. I'm not sure if that is the right fix, but something needs doing.

Also, just to clarify, under this system, the RTN airports (and harbours and rail depots) do not have the 1 unit/turn limit from civ2. The only limit is the size of your coffers.

 

[Colonel]

This should be pointed out, rail is what the military uses in transporting on the mainland, so if you get rid of rail there is a realism problem that can be avoided simply by adding rail

 

[Mewtarthio]

I don't think the military uses highways. Rail is much faster (could you imagine a Tank driving across an overpass?). The only logical upgrade to Rail would be Maglev.

 

[Colonel]

actually they use highways for light vechiles such humvees and trucks but rail is used for tanks and heavy units, and immobile units

 

[rhialto]

And my father, who was in a British tank regiment, regularly drove his tank over German highways as part of the cold war.

 

[Mr. Blonde]

Every idea to get rid of worker MM is a good idea. Your ideas sound very good, but maybe it is better to build a small wonder (available with 5 factories) or province improvement instead. An improvement for every city is too much imho. I think commerce increase and food increase should also be based on small wonders/ province improvements (if they implement them)instead of roads and rails. I like the idea to have roads/streets for pure strategic and trading reasons, but then they should be usable by everyone (you can block them with units, your cities are natural blocking points anyhow). Of course these streets/roads must have a defined vector (when you lead a road to N and one to NE from a city no bypassing between these two tiles unless you build this bypass). Undersea ways... I don´t know it sounds very fictional, but so does a spaceship to Apha Centauri...