Originally posted by Gdek
Like another poster, I dislike the adjusted movement on roads. I'd prefer to have them back to a 3 movement base, and have railroads changed to something around a 10-15 base... I think it's ridiculous that you can move across an entire continent instantaneously with rails. Making that sort of change would not only make the world seem larger, but would increase the importance of airports, and increase the importance of regional forces in a sprawling empire.
Unfortunately -- and this is something that modders have been complaining about for a long time -- the manner in which railroads work *CANNOT* be changed. They allow unlimited movement. Period, end of statement.
Believe me, I'd love to be able to change it, as would many other people.
The only way to prevent units from having effectively infinite movement on railroads is simply not to have railroads at all. And that's not practical, as without the production bonuses that railroads provide, cities are pretty much stuck at Medieval Age sizes.
Now, that having been said, a rather radical solution has come to mind, but I'm not sure how well it would work, and I'm certainly not going to just implement it without a lot of consideration. But I'll mention it, to see what sort of initial response it gets....
Roads, per se, could be eliminated from the game. Road graphics would be replaced with railroad graphics, road building would be tied to Steam Power, and railroad building wouldn't be available at all. Roads (which in this mod would actually be railroads) could be given a movement rate of, say, 1/10.
The first problem is that roads provide early commerce bonuses, and that without roads, the bonuses wouldn't exist. But this could be gotten around simply by giving various terrain types commerce production *without* roads.
The second problem is that movement in the early game would be substantially more difficult, especially given the sort of changes I've made in BBW. A lot of readjusting would need to be done in regard to the whole "impassable to wheeled vehicles without a road" concept, since such terrain would remain impassable until the Industrial Age, when roads (railroads) finally become available.
The third (and perhaps most significant) problem is tied to the food and shield production bonuses that true railroads provide. There's no way to simulate this with regular roads. And while the production bonuses of factories and power plants could be boosted to compensate for the loss of railroad-generated shields, there's no way to have an improvement or wonder increase food production except in water tiles.....
On the plus side, there'd be no more "infinite movement" problem, and since railroads wouldn't be providing production bonuses, neither the AI nor human players would have any need to build them in every friggin' tile....
-- Darryl
EDIT: I just checked, and there is *not* a full correspondence between the arrangement of road tiles in the "roads.pcx" file and the arrangement of railroad tiles in the "railroads.pcx" file. So you couldn't just use the existing railroads graphics file for roads; you'd have to go through and manually rearrange the railroad tiles into the sequence used in the road tiles graphic. Not an impossible job, but not one I'd want to tackle unless I was fairly sure it would pay off.
FURTHER EDIT: As someone on another thread noted in response to this idea the other day, not allowing roads to be built until the industrial age would, of course, make it impossible to connect your cities to resources for the first half of the game. I feel rather silly. Talk about missing the obvious!
