Railroad nonsense

['Copter Pilot]

Railroading your production squares, rather than just city-to-city links, is like providing infrastructure to the towns and villages near that big city, which quite correctly boosts production. Your empire does not only consist of those bigger named places; people 'live' on the worked squares, where they have farms etc., small villages with one or two factories (in industrial years), maybe your IT company has built a new house somewhere on a green lawn out of town.

 

[alver]

Hi,

I like the fact that you can't use roads and railroads at all in enemy territory. But I've been thinking of giving railroads a movement cost, 2 or 3 times smaller than roads. Can this be done in the editor?

 

[Grey Fox]

Originally posted by 'Copter Pilot
Railroading your production squares, rather than just city-to-city links, is like providing infrastructure to the towns and villages near that big city, which quite correctly boosts production. Your empire does not only consist of those bigger named places; people 'live' on the worked squares, where they have farms etc., small villages with one or two factories (in industrial years), maybe your IT company has built a new house somewhere on a green lawn out of town.

Exactly.

 

[bertram]

Originally posted by TheDS

1) Finally, we reintroduce the Superhighway improvement, which gives the +1 food/shield bonus to farms/mines.

2) Another idea, not really related: when a battle occurs, the underlying terrain of the defending unit has a chance of being pillaged (destroyed) during the combat. This will make you less likely to allow the enemy to fight in your turf; ROPs become more valuable. [/B]

1.1) to get rid of the railroads all over the place a nice idea would be to reintroduce the superhighways. this resembels the developed infrastructure of a city more than railroads every where.

2.1) i also like the idea of the terrain being "damaged" from battles. war leaves a lot missile warheads and broken parts behinds, so why not make a square polluted/destroyed after for instance 1-5 battles...?

 

[joycem10]

ive been arguing for this for a while but... why not just bring back refrigeration, farms, and supermarkets from civ II?

 

[RX2000]

Originally posted by Des203
Thank god none of you designed the actual game. Man what a bunch of dumb ideas!

Speak for yourself. I for one like hearing everyone else's ideas.

 

[louiethelesbo]

Railroads are progress...and they work. In the USA, you should take the freight off the highways and put it where it belongs back on the rail. But what would you do with 1.3 million truck drivers who can't read.

Civ3 handles railroads perfectly.

 

[Hurricane]

Civilizartion III logic:

Railroads = good.
Superhighways = bad.

 

[BiatchGuy]

yeah, I think the "wall to wall carpeting" effect is kinda lame and not very realistic, but hey, it's what you gotta do to keep up, right?

the movement issue, too...... maybe it should be 1/10. So a unit can move 10 squares per turn on railroads instead of having INFINITE movement. As it is now, it might as well be teleporters or something.

 

[damunzy]

Originally posted by louiethelesbo
Railroads are progress...and they work. In the USA, you should take the freight off the highways and put it where it belongs back on the rail. But what would you do with 1.3 million truck drivers who can't read.

I am sure it is that simplistic...now why didn't anyone else think of that? Obviously it is more economical to send stuff by truck than rail in certain situations or everythign would be sent by rail. I can't see the big wigs wanting to keep truck drivers employed when they could save themselves 5 cents on a delivery by going with rail.

Civ3 handles railroads perfectly.

Every tile covered by rail? Looks ugly, IMHO.

@ BiatchGuy:
I like the 1/10 idea...agreed that it is better than unlimited.

 

[GodsPetMonkey]

Originally posted by 'Copter Pilot
Railroading your production squares, rather than just city-to-city links, is like providing infrastructure to the towns and villages near that big city, which quite correctly boosts production. Your empire does not only consist of those bigger named places; people 'live' on the worked squares, where they have farms etc., small villages with one or two factories (in industrial years), maybe your IT company has built a new house somewhere on a green lawn out of town.

That’s how I always saw it. Seems to make perfect sense that way.

As for Railroad vs Highway, I just play with the notion that railroads 'transform' into highways over time as cars get more popular, really, both operate on the same idea, fast, easy, accessible transport. The fact that the name doesn’t change surely isn’t THAT important?

As for movement, I think its perfect as it is. Seeing you only get infinite movement over rail in YOUR territory, or in a civs territory that you have a ROP with seems sensible to me. This means you only get rapid deployment of your forces up to the borders, and really means it has more defensive uses the offensive, and seeing how its so easy for either you or the AI to do a blitz war in the industrial and modern ages (seeing attacking units get VERY powerful, and later the advent of nukes) its nice to know that re-enforcements for you border cities wont arrive 12 turns late. Besides, it makes up for the fact that Tanks only have 2 movement (I reckon the crew must jump out of the tank and push the damn thing).

Although I have to say railroad carpets look damn ugly, but I think that’s down to the graphic. Some one should make a good looking railroad.

 

[Grey Fox]

Well railroads do play an important part in modern society, it is still a good transportation part, etc. I rather take a train when going longdistance then a bus, or car.

 

[Dark Sheer]

In my opinion you can choose not to build railroad in every square of your territory but you can't stop the AI from doing that. I think the only way to improve on railroad usage is to put some movement cost on them. Either way, I will still cover every single square of the map with rails for 1 single reason : depleting resources!

I am not going to wait until a resources get depleted and appear in a square where there is no road or rail and then starts to link a road to it! Furthermore, with the AI that likes to destroy your improvement when at war, I rather have railroad which will take them longer to destroy that road which is usually one bombardment away. Anyway, has anyone thought about why it take 2 turns to build a road plus an irrigation but it takes only one single bombardment or pillage to destroy both?

 

[etj4Eagle]

Originally posted by PaleHorse76
I am sure it is that simplistic...now why didn't anyone else think of that? Obviously it is more economical to send stuff by truck than rail in certain situations or everythign would be sent by rail. I can't see the big wigs wanting to keep truck drivers employed when they could save themselves 5 cents on a delivery by going with rail. Every tile covered by rail? Looks ugly, IMHO.

For the US the real reason is that our rail network is quite underdeveloped. For major shipping it is easier and faster to send things by rail (many chemical plants have rail spurs for that very reason). However, in many parts of the US that really isn't an option. The interstate highway project solved that negligance by providing highway links to throughout the country to areas that were not being served by rails.

I agree with others that rails in Civ3 really represent the combination of a rail network and a highway network.

However, I also agree with the people who say it would be nice to avoid every tile being railroaded. Even with the nice graphics of civ3, it is still looks very ugly. And I would like to see some trade off between railroading tiles and leaving them unrailroaded. I like the idea of a "modern irrigation" improvement that can be built instead of a railroad, which gives the food bonus. And that railroads don't give any food bonuses. That would add some more strategy and make the map also look nicer.

 

[Jazz_Newton]

I like the way they work now. It works for gameplay. To quote the designer of another game, "Anything that hurts gameplay should be blindfolded and shot". Unfortunately, your ideas mainly fall under "appearance", or work on a hypothetical model of how you think the game should work

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

 

[Isak]

Originally posted by Jazz_Newton
Unfortunately, your ideas mainly fall under "appearance", or work on a hypothetical model of how you think the game should work

Is it possible to post a suggestion which isn't based on a hypothetical model of how the game should work?

I think etj4Eagle is right - the fact that there is no trade-off for building railroads is the most gameplay-upsetting aspect of them. Personally I think they should only provide transportation and no bonuses of any other kind - then two new tile improvements should be added - I'll call them Advanced Farm and Advanced Mine. Only one of these three could be on a tile at any time. This way you would have to carefully plan your railroads, and subsequently they would be vulnerable to enemy pillaging. They are not vulnerable now IMHO. If a tile of railroad gets pillaged, you'll most likely still have 2-3 routes to choose from to get to your destination.

I would never advocate making gameplay changes just to fix a graphical anomaly, but in the case of railroads, the anomaly is not only graphical. Railroads are too powerful and nothing is lost from building them. They also tend to completely destroy my enjoyment of late game tactics, devaluating regular tactical considerations like placement of troops and reinforcements.

 

[jpowers]

I completely concur with your assessment of the strategic import of railroads and the ease with which this is circumvented in CIV. In every conflict from the American Civil War to Bosnia, the destruction of key railroad lines was a major goal of the armed forces involved. If every square meter of the countryside were railroaded, this wouldn't be a strategy, and frankly, the unhappiness of your citizens would be through the roof.

 

[Raskolnikov]

How 'bout instead of irrigation + farms and RR's, there can be a Suburbs improvements. Suburbs would look more like urban sprawl rather than wall to wall railroads. It would look ugly AND be realistic!

 

[jpowers]

How apropos coming from Bellingham. This would be hilarious. It would have to be accompanied by the 'Management Consultant' unit who, through sheer incompetence, would manage to make 2 citizens in the nearest city unhappy and would instantly deplete any natural resource he touched.

 

[TheDS]

Originally posted by Jazz_Newton
I like the way they work now. It works for gameplay. To quote the designer of another game, "Anything that hurts gameplay should be blindfolded and shot". Unfortunately, your ideas mainly fall under "appearance", or work on a hypothetical model of how you think the game should work

If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

We're crying so much cuz we feel it IS broke. How useful is it to bombard or pillage squares? Not very. And it gets nothing but worse in the late game. Why even have the option?

But if you have only a few roads/rails, now what happens?

First, your Workers can concentrate on the useful stuff, like linking cities, mining, and irrigating. They don't have to spend all day building roads just to take advantage of a minor trade bonus or rails for a minor production bonus.

Second, those roads/rails are actually important now. Lose that road and your cities get cut off. If you want a little redundancy, you can have it by building a couple extra lines. Think of running power and water lines in Sim City 2000. YOu don't cross over the roads with just one power line, or just one water pipe, cuz you never know where disasters will hit you. Likewise, you can only go so long with the minimum necessary roads before you need to make some spares.

Third, if you have foreigners in your territory, they can get even more annoying than they already are. I feel you should be able to walk through them myself, but if you have a war going on, it's a lot more important to you to take those guys out before they cut your roads, or if we implement the "battlefield destruction" idea I suggested earlier (where the defenders of a battle may end up in a pillaged square) then you really want to get these guys out of your territory. You might not be so quick to grant RoP to feuding civs on either side of you.

Fourth, we get rid of all that ugly crap all over the countryside. The default graphics are not especially pleasing, and even the graphic mod I DLed doesn't help much (was designed for that purpose).

Now what to do about that production shortfall? That's why I (and others) suggested the Superhighway (and other) Improvement(s). With one of these in your city, each tile worked will get a bonus to its food or shield production, JUST LIKE WHAT RAILS DO NOW. But no ugly graphics. No hassle building all those rails. And NO LOSS OF PRODUCTION.

I suggest a single building, rather than the Civ2 approach, to continue with the streamlining-style that Civ3 has going for it. Why waste all day building farms on top of irrigation, or super-mines, and why build supermarkets and all that other stuff. KEEP IT SIMPLE. Why be overcomplicated when it's no fun to do so?