Rail upgrade

[tu_79]

I like that whether or not to build railroads (and/or upgrade roads to railroads) are more strategically interesting decisions now, but I think the current situation may not be favorable enough for railroads.

A related issue is that Seaports are far too strong: they have the same hammer cost and give the same +25% bonus as Train Stations, but don't require a railroad connection, plus Seaports provide +21 to Sea Resources and +11 to Coast/Ocean tiles to boot. Train Stations may as well not even be an option to build in coastal cities.

How about this?

• -10% from Train Stations (i.e., from 25% to 15%)
• remove % bonus from Seaports (i.e., from 25% to 0%)
• +10% for Railroad connections (regardless of Train Station/Seaport status)
• each Train Station provides +3% from City Connections empire-wide (or in all cities with a Train Station)

, where the last change is a wide-empire bonus for completing railroad connections to many cities, which seems only thematically appropriate: a rail network connecting up 8 cities is exponentially more useful than one connecting 4 cities, after all.

This way, you'd have to really think about whether a Seaport or Train Station would be better in a given coastal city, and the same for whether or not building a railroad connection to a given city would be worth it. For example, a coastal city working lots of water tiles might prefer the Seaport, but if you had a wide enough empire – or if you'd prefer more gold over more production – the Train Station might be a better choice.

I like it.
But I'm usually easy to please

 

[Frozen In Ice]

I know it's not a bug, but I think railroads should definitely not be slower than roads.

They should at least be the same so it's worth it to start building them right away if you have spare workers. The way it is now, if you replace your roads with railroads right away, you're reducing the mobility of your units and paying double the maintenance.

I agree. I'm not playing on this new version yet that has train stations (I guess that's the beta), but if you take away the production bonus and make railroads slower it makes the whole improvement bad for quite a while. Historically, weren't railroads used to increase mobility and movement of goods and people?

 

[Hikari]

Railroads provide +2 and +2 for Villages and Towns, Autocraty can reduce maintanance for Railroads to 1 per Tile and if a Caravan using the Railroad, the Village gets an additional +2 .

 

[ritchyq]

Cheers for the discussion on this one - more in depth than i was expecting, the guys who developed this mod should be hired by firaxis immediately - rejuvenated my Civ5 gaming.