Construction of railroads

[Zwelgje]

Maybe I missed out on something but since we've discovered railroad now we should lay them on every tile of land we're using because it will increase production. So we also need enough settlers to do the job.
Therefore two questions: are the settlers building railroad? Do we need to recruit extra settlers to build railroad?

 

[duke o' york]

Initially I say that we should only connect the cities with railroads but then put them in productive cities' radii so that they can get to a multiple of 10 shields wherever possible. Eventually I'd like to see all the Fanatica land covered in railroad as this prevents barbs from appearing although if Kev can't be bothered to do this then that's fine. We should definitely link the towns though so that we can have a quick reaction force set up to defend our cities against enemies landing.

 

[Kev]

My every intention to have rail lines connecting and eventually surrounding our cities. We've only had the tech for 2 turns, and we will start gathering new settlers/engineers a lot more now. Right now, most of our settlers are dealing with "virgin" territory and have been building roads with the occaisional irrigation. Being only a few truns away from explosives, I expect to have the engineers up and running and the land improvement will REALLY get going!

 

[Duke of Marlbrough]

I'm confused on a few things.

First, why do we need to cover every square with railroad? It only gives a production and/or trade bonus to squares that have a natural production of two or more shields/trade. So, railroading a plains or grassland square does nothing for production or trade.

Second, railroads keep land barbs away? I thought it just had to do with the fact that if there is open land (i.e. land a certain distance to a city) that makes them able to appear.

And, as Kev, said, we just got railroad, so it will take awhile to get the empire connected. But, that is why we planned for the railroad/explosives combo.

 

[Dell19]

Connecting our cities should be a priority so that we can quickly move our troops to defend a certain city. Railroads may not be that effective though because we are on small islands...

 

[Kev]

If I remember correctly, I think that railroads give some extra bounuses in Civ1 that was later removed in Civ2.

I'm usually of the mind to connect my cities first thing, then rr the forests, buffalo, mined hills, etc. to get the production bonus (+50% shields if I recall). I sometimes will rr other areas just to give other routes of movement should a block or pillaging occur, but really at that time engineers are usually better used to improve virgin territory or even to build new cities.

As he's the MOI, duke made some suggestions in this thread about settler/engineer activity in the short term. They seem fine with me and I'll follow them unless there are some major objections - though I'm confused as well regarding the barbarian appearance. How does that work, duke?

 

[Leowind]

Yes, connect the cities first, then worry about RR on mines and buffalo and forest, though the later only gives one more shield and represents a significant Engineer investement if a road has to be built first.

 

[duke o' york]

Barbs turn up in open land, yes, but they only turn up in undeveloped land. If you have built any kind of improvement on a square then that will not later become the base for a whole horde of land barbs. Obviously, this doesn't do anything for sea barbs, and you don't need railroads - you only need to road all the squares. This little trick works a treat for island nations like ours, but it can be a bit of a pain to road all the squares on a large continent until you have 100s of engineers so you can just fill in all the gaps between your cities and then put some forts or whatever by the borders to stop the barbs running wild. I agree that we don't need them every where, but I do in my games as I've got the PS version and can't use the number pad. If you make a little mistake with the PS controller then you can lose 2 moves and potentially a city or a wonder or whatever.