implementing trains in civ2

Hi all,

I have a question about how best to implement rail units (such as an armored train or freight train) in a scenario. I'm working on a scenario that includes armored trains. I'm thinking only the human player should be allowed to use them but I wonder if there is a way to simulate it best. Perhaps making the terrain very hard to cross and road movement multiplier higher, and giving non-rail units the treat all terrain as roads ability? Scratching my head on this one.

 

For MGE, I don't have any idea better than yours.

In Test of Time, however, you can have impassible terrain, and units that can cross impassible terrain. With TOTPP, you can have 16 terrain types, so you could have some duplicate terrain, with one being the terrain with a rail network, and the other being terrain without rails, and make the non-rail terrain impassible (and give non train units ability to cross impassible terrain). With Lua events, you could even allow for building and destroying rails by changing terrain.

 

Yes, ToTPP would be best for this given it allowed impassable terrain. In MGE, I think your alpine unit idea is about as good as can be achieved.

What's the reasoning behind creating your work in MGE? There's still a group of active people in ToTPP who can help you with any learning curve, if you're interested.

 

I've had trouble getting TOT to work properly on my PC, mostly, and also MGE seems simpler and I'm more familiar with it. I'm not opposed to jumping up to TOT but I'm too busy with real life stuff at the moment to really sit down and learn it all. I still play old civ2 scenarios and obviously there's some nostalgia value there, but I am aware of the glorious improvements TOT offers.

 

Well, if you do not use oceans in your scenario you could use those as rails and turn the ship units into trains. That is the closest you can get in MGE I guess.You can actually still use the ocean tiles in the game if you use the railroads graphics as overlay. Clearly you should not use any ship graphics in such a case and don't let the computer build a city close to the coast of your real ocean, you wouldn't like to trains rolling there. AI only builds cities on grasslands and prairie tiles. But you could have ships placed there at the beginning of the scenario or by event.

 

That is a very workable idea, although for the scenario I want to implement this for does include ocean and naval units. I'm fooling around with a scenario about the Japanese invasion of china in 1937, so I might just nix the train unit, but keep the idea in mind for other scenarios. Alternatively, would it be possible to maybe mask the ocean-rail tiles with a static unit overtop? or maybe just cosmetically alter different terrain type to stand in for ocean? I'm definitely gonna fool around with these ideas to see what works.

 

If you put some rails or roads on normal grassland for example, then turn the terrain into ocean, the roads and rails will still be there - not useable for land units, but they still overlay the ocean tile and ships can move on it (It doesn't work if you want to build them on a ocean tile first, you have to change the land terrain into ocean in the cheat editor, then the roads/rails will hold).

For the ocean: there are also shores, I don't know how that will look like, you simply have to try.

The most workable idea would be: Overlayed ocean tiles surrounded by a terrain AI can't use to build a city (or maybe you don't even need settlers in this scenario?). No other of your cities there too, so no one can build ship units on your custom railroads on a continent. At the end of each track (close to your cities) you overlay a tile with a station graphics (airfield, fortress, farmland (!) or unit). Then you could simply have the train-ship units donated by (random) event or from the very beginning. Cities at the real ocean's coast could still produce your normal ships.

 

Or even better: if an allied aircraft destroys the Japanese trains you simply give them a new one by event. I don't even think the shore will be a problem, there might however be small pixel glitches on the tiles next to the overlay rails.

 

This idea is well thought out but unfortunately I don't think the scenario really needs it as I planned it. There won't be settlers in it- at least not for the computer players. I think thematically the trains work better if the scenario starts in 1931 as opposed to 1937, it seems too complicated a method to move large numbers of troops, but I think I'll fool around with it first and see if it works before deciding whether or not to go with it.