(Firaxis: READ) Railroad Movement in Civilization IV

[Aussie_Lurker]

What I also forgot to point out, Rhialto, is that I see my Railroad model as a small part of my much greater, 'holistic' model-one which is aimed squarely at curbing-if not ELIMINATING-the Snowball effect.
This model includes:
1) Linking city wealth (which has a role in determining both city and national income) to population and demographics.

2) Having a flat cost for establishing new cities, and an additional cost based on the population/size of the city.

3) Maintainance costs for ALL terrain improvements.

4) Linking Resource disappearance to # of units and # of cities using that resource.

5) Increased Risk of Seccession, partly based on # of cities and distance from capital.

What these factors will do-I hope-is not STOP players/AI from expanding rapidly, but simply reduce the ability of rapid national expansion to feed automatically into increased military, technological and economic strength! Strength which feeds into even GREATER expansion-and so on and so forth!!

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[Lockesdonkey]

I am not sure about this particular of your model AL--though I support your model wholeheartedly--is this: can units get on or off the RR at any point on the line? If this matter has already been adressed, then sorry, but I'm too lazy to read some long posts. If not, then I do find it kind of unrealistic; perhaps we could have a tile improvement--call it the "train station" for the moment--that can only be built along a rail line, and must be spaced out, say, every five tiles (so that a unit near the line is never more than one move away along a road). Whether these create CPs is up to you.

 

[burleigh]

Oh, cheese!

Just voted 2... then read 7 & agree with 7. Infinite (& unmoddable) movement is the single biggest spoiler to gameplay & gives a huge bonus to an intelligent human over the AI. Abolish it! (or at least allow modification)

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

OK Lockesdonkey, I really haven't considered this part of my model. That said, I feel that two things should apply:

1) If a unit moves off a RR outside of a city, it loses ALL of its existing MP's. If, however, the unit ends its turn inside of a city, then it should retain some-if not all-of its MP's.

2) If an enemy unit sits within its ZoC rating (see thread on ZoC) of a RR-then any unit trying to move along said RR will be halted along the line. If this happens, then the unit on the RR will attack/defend at a large penalty.

Note that I have not really thought all of this through, yet, but I think these two ideas satisfy the need for strategic considerations. Of course #2 would only work REALLY well if some kind of 'ALL MOVE, THEN COMBAT' model was implemented.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[rhialto]

@Aussie Lurker
Some issues with charging players for tile improvement maintenance.

- Can a player choose to partially fund rail maintenance, as you could in SimCity? Would the game effect be rail disasters or just track crumbling away?
- Can you build a tile outside your civ's territory? If so, do you pay maintenance for that tile? What if that tile, which is outside your radius, is also key to connecting several of your cities together?

 

[Commander Bello]

[...]
- Can you build a tile outside your civ's territory? If so, do you pay maintenance for that tile? What if that tile, which is outside your radius, is also key to connecting several of your cities together?

I don't think you should be allowed to build railroads outside of your territory.
First, it would make things complicated if somebody else attaches to these tracks
Second, (especially under assumption of #1 taking place) how to determine who's going to pay?
Third, this would cause the need for a more strategic build-up of your territory. You might need to found a city just to get the respective territory to be enabled to build a strategically important railroad connection
Fourth, what would happen if somebody would "pillage" the railroad outside of your territory?

 

[wit>trope]

Maybe you could charge for RR per use per unit per tile. So if you want to move a unit across 7 tiles of RR you would have to pay say 7 gold. If you wanted to move a unit across 7 tiles of RR every turn for 10 turns, you would pay a total of 70 gold. If you wanted to move three units across 7 tiles of RR for one turn you would have to pay 21 gold, etc.

This way you wouldn't have to worry about the issue of paying maintence for RR in neutral territory.

The more I think about it though option 7 is the best.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Well, the answer to question 1 is a big YES. In fact, not only should you be able to pay LESS than what you owe for infrastructure, it should even be possible to pay MORE (via budget sliders). In the area of farms and mines, underfunding them should result in less shields/food being produced from them, greater chance of the underlying tile being 'degraded', and the chance of the tile improvement being lost. As for roads and rail, I think that underfunding should lead to a lowering of both the income provided to cities by the infrastructure AND possibly a loss of CP's. Of course, OVERFUNDING your tile improvements should have the OPPOSITE effect. Overfunding might also reduce the pollution produced by certain tile improvements too (whilst underfunding will lead to a pollution increase).
Last of all, underfunded cities will have higher levels of waste (pollution) and corruption.

As for tile improvements OUTSIDE of your nation-thats a toughie. I would say that in neutral territory-YES you should have to pay for the infrastrutcure. In someone elses territory, tile improvements should cost 'double', if built in the territory of an enemy. In any other situations you would need permission of the other nation even to build the improvements-either through a R of P or trade/friendship/alliance agreement. In the case of RoPs and Friendship, you pay standard costs, but in the case of alliance and trade deals, you pay only half cost (with the other half being paid by the other nation)-abusing this system, though, could cause a diplomatic agreement to be withdrawn!
Anyway, hope that helps.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[rhialto]

So if the tile is in neutral territory, you have to pay maintenance? Does this mean that tile improvememnt ownership is independant of actual tile ownership? I can see this slowing the cpu down to a crawl.

And if you can build in other civ's territory, and improvement ownereship = tile ownership, a somewhat cheeky way to kill an enemy economy would be to improve the heck out of useless and unusable tiles.

Ultimately, I think paying maintenance for tile improvements creates too many issues which will slow down the game.

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

Look, I'll admit that its not a PERFECT system-YET-but I think the benefits it would bring to the game would far outweigh any of the issues which it might introduce, issues which I feel may be easily resolved. A possible solution is to have a flat 'your improvement, your cost' (i.e., you build it, you pay for it), and then say that terrain improvements in enemy/neutral territory cost DOUBLE what they would in tiles which you own through culture (thus still retaining the importance of culture in claiming tiles). Also, please remember that when I got your message, it was only 6:00am-and so my brain was still somewhat 'inactive' ! An interesting diplomatic situation might be you, the player, going to the trouble of building rail networks to link a backward neighbour to your trade network, then asking him to 'defer' your maintainance costs through a gpt arrangement!
Anyway, just a thought.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[yoshi]

I can tell you with almost complete certainty that there isn't going to be tile improvement maintenance in Civ4 simply due to a) it would deviate from Civ3 (on which Civ4 will be heavily based BTW) and b) that it would imply a crap-load of micromanagement (think about having to keep track of which squares are worth keeping improvements EVERY TURN). Although, you will probably be able to mod this in using Python (i.e. building x improvement on x square triggers -x gold per turn--nullified when improvement destroyed), expecting it to be in the epic game is just fantasy. Having tile improvements cost gold when first built in the epic game is another story...FOR ANOTHER THREAD. (wink, wink)

As for the comments concerning the into to this thread:

I figured I would get such a response but added a description of option (7) because I found that people had a REALLY hard time getting it (the fact that pretty much everyone who has criticised it in this thread mistook it for something else--usually option (2)--proves that even that description wasn't clear enough. It's a subtle difference but a very important one that I felt needed clearing up just to make the poll fair (which it still isn't because people are still voting for (2) when they actually would have voted (7) had I described it better.

I didn't provide outlines of the other optins because, although complicated, their basic structures are well-known around here and don't require further clarification (especially considering that has already been repeatedly done in every other related thread ).

Although I agree with Aussie, that there should be some reference to the other options so I will add links for each of them.

 

[Commander Bello]

[..] it would deviate from Civ3 (on which Civ4 will be heavily based BTW) [...]

This is off-topic, but anyway....

Where do you have this knowledge from? Didn't they mention things like "simplification", "replacement" et alia? Not to mention they claim the code to be completely redeveloped?

 

[wit>trope]

Who came up with the brilliant option 7, btw?

 

[rhialto]

Just out of curiosity, how are 3 and 7 different?

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

You know, Yoshi, I refuse to even dignify your post with a proper reply, because you always resort to outright rudeness when someone says something you don't agree with (yet get so NARKY if someone does the same thing to you).
Also, if you have such an 'inside line' to Firaxis, can you tell us EVERYTHING thats gonna be in Civ4?

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[schwanenfeldii]

Just to add fuel to the fire, here's another suggestion. This is pretty much option #3.

1) Movement on rail costs m/9 movement points, where m is the number of points that a unit starts with. Thus a movement on a rail for a calvary costs 3/9 points (the same as a road), while a movement on a rail for an infantry costs 1/9 points.

2) Add a new improvement called "central station." A city with a central station gets the railroad bonus on all the squares it works. Also, any city contected by rail to a city with a central station gets the railroad bonus on all its squares. This way you will see rail connecting cities rather than rail all over the place.

3) If we add a highway improvement, I'd make movement on the highway cost 2/9 points. This way everything works out as an even factor of 9. Units with 3 movement points prefer the highway (calvary and MA), units with 1 point prefer the rail, units with 2 points see no difference.

I picked 9 as my base number, but you could pick something else if you wanted units to move faster. I think it is important that you pick a multiple of 3 though, so everything divides easily (assuming movement on roads costs 1/3).

 

[Aussie_Lurker]

OK, I think I WILL reply to Yoshi's post-in spite of his being incredibly rude!
You say that tile improvement maintainance will increase micromanagement, but I don't see how it could increase MM any more than unit or city improvement maintainance-yet these are both in civ3, and will probably be in civ4 as well. As you build the terrain improvements, their maintainance cost is factored into the % of your budget you allocate to infrastructure. You can manually adjust the allocation-above and below this default setting-but at the costs I mentioned above.
Secondly, you so sagely say that-as this game will be BASED on civ3 (though you provide no evidence to back this up)-maintainance costs for infrastructure will NEVER be in the epic game. Well, if thats true, then equally they will NEVER take infinite RR movement out of the epic game either (especially if it means replacing it with a complex system like yours) in which case this entire thread is MOOT!!!
Lastly, may I suggest that if you cannot handle criticism (which you apparently can't) then don't be so eager to dish it out.

Yours,
Aussie_Lurker.

 

[gskyes]

After reading all the posts, I formulated my own idea and voted #6 because it is the closest resemblance. I should say that this isn't TOTALLY my idea, just pieced together from other posts.

I say scrap worker built railroads altoghter and replace them with a "rail station" city improvement. Any unit can move to a city with a rail station and be "instantly" moved to another city with the same improvement. Also, workers could build rail stations on the grid the same way air bases can be built in C3C. The game could easily draw in rails on the map to have a clear way of showing where your rail network was connected.

Use of the railnet could be limited or not. Moving from one station to another could use 0 move points (infinite movement), or could cost 1 move point (like attacking does), or each unit could get 1 "rail move".

Also, there should be an economic advantage to having a rail network (as in real life). Maybe we could simply get an amount of gold/turn proportional to the amount of cities connected by the rail network. A bonus to food and shields would be nice too.

Drawbacks do exist, though, as this is a rough idea. First, I haven't thought of a way that enemy units could disrupt the rail movement by detroying or blocking a section of the rail between cities (because they should be able to). Second, a way to enter allied cities should be present as you should be able to use your ally's railnet in the event of a ROP.

Finally, any system that is used should be simple and accesable to EVERY Civ player. I think the current system is. Some of the other options seem to require too much thought/micromanagement, even if they are more realistic. I would rather keep the current system than change to a much more complicated one.

 

[searcheagle]

After reading all the posts, I formulated my own idea and voted #6 because it is the closest resemblance. I should say that this isn't TOTALLY my idea, just pieced together from other posts.

I say scrap worker built railroads altoghter and replace them with a "rail station" city improvement. Any unit can move to a city with a rail station and be "instantly" moved to another city with the same improvement. Also, workers could build rail stations on the grid the same way air bases can be built in C3C. The game could easily draw in rails on the map to have a clear way of showing where your rail network was connected.

Use of the railnet could be limited or not. Moving from one station to another could use 0 move points (infinite movement), or could cost 1 move point (like attacking does), or each unit could get 1 "rail move".

Also, there should be an economic advantage to having a rail network (as in real life). Maybe we could simply get an amount of gold/turn proportional to the amount of cities connected by the rail network. A bonus to food and shields would be nice too.

Drawbacks do exist, though, as this is a rough idea. First, I haven't thought of a way that enemy units could disrupt the rail movement by detroying or blocking a section of the rail between cities (because they should be able to). Second, a way to enter allied cities should be present as you should be able to use your ally's railnet in the event of a ROP.

Finally, any system that is used should be simple and accesable to EVERY Civ player. I think the current system is. Some of the other options seem to require too much thought/micromanagement, even if they are more realistic. I would rather keep the current system than change to a much more complicated one.

This is quite an interesting idea. I have solutions for both problems:

1. after the second city builds a railroad station, the computer plots a line of tracks to that station. These tracks would be visible and could be disrupted.

2. economic benefits could be accomplished through the construction of the city improvement.

 

[Chazbagel]

Ill be working on the railroad, all the live long day...