Railroads

[apatheist]

frekk, that would give a large civilization no more capacity than a small civilization. I'm obviously no fan of capacity, and I do want to reduce the benefits railroads grant a large civilization, but that goes too far.

 

[mitsho]

The day Civ is shipped with something called "Capacity Points" is the day I stop buying them. I'm sick of it already

They obviously wouldn't be called capacity points which is rather a theoretical term, but something with a bit more flavour...

Well, let's just wait and see what Firaxis' model is, and then we can still complain about this one...

mfG mitsho

 

[frekk]

frekk, that would give a large civilization no more capacity than a small civilization. I'm obviously no fan of capacity, and I do want to reduce the benefits railroads grant a large civilization, but that goes too far.

Exactly. In the real world, rail capacity is not a factor of geographic size or population. The highest rail capacities on the planet are in the US and Europe, ie in the most technologically developed areas. France probably has as much rail capacity as all of Africa.

In real history, the largest nations faced serious problems precisely because they had difficulty meeting their needs with the same amount, or even less, rolling stock than many smaller countries. Larger nations would become dependant on other means of strategic redeployment to move very large amounts of troops, probably with a much greater emphasis on shipping and air transit than smaller countries. Again ... this is true to the real world.

Rather than larger nations being "punished", this would serve as a technological constraint to their growth. In order to be able to hold together a large nation, one would need to develop technologically, as was true for all the large nations in the real world whose existance and unity was dependant on meeting the railroad challenge (eg, Russia, Canada, China, the US). Conversely, smaller nations (eg Germany, France, UK) would face very very few limitations in comparison, which was historically true (and remains true today - rail is still more popular for both passengers and cargo in these countries precisely because rail favours small, densely built areas).

 

[apatheist]

Exactly. In the real world, rail capacity is not a factor of geographic size or population. The highest rail capacities on the planet are in the US and Europe, ie in the most technologically developed areas.

Emphasis on developed, not technologically. Locomotives aren't exactly rocket science. Do you really think that the reason Chad has a poor rail infrastructure is because they don't know what steel is or how diesel engines work? The technology is there. The economy and infrastructure are not.

In real history, the largest nations faced serious problems precisely because they had difficulty meeting their needs with the same amount, or even less, rolling stock than many smaller countries. Larger nations would become dependant on other means of strategic redeployment to move very large amounts of troops, probably with a much greater emphasis on shipping and air transit than smaller countries. Again ... this is true to the real world.

For example?

Conversely, smaller nations (eg Germany, France, UK) would face very very few limitations in comparison, which was historically true (and remains true today - rail is still more popular for both passengers and cargo in these countries precisely because rail favours small, densely built areas).

It's not that simple. European countries have higher gasoline (petrol!) taxes. This, coupled with the density of the cities and the extensive use of mass transit systems, means that automobile use is much less in Europe. As a result, rail travel is in much greater demand. Europeans don't need cars around their home cities, and they don't need cars in their destination cities, so the governments and markets provided passenger rail as a means to connect the two. The use of rail between cities is a separate issue from the use of mass transit within cities, however. I would love to travel from city to city by rail if it was practical to get around those cities without a car. In most cities of the United States, however, you can't, so rail really isn't an option for me. There is at best an indirect relationship with the density of cities, and you can't say conclusively what is cause and what is effect.

 

[frekk]

Emphasis on developed, not technologically. Locomotives aren't exactly rocket science. Do you really think that the reason Chad has a poor rail infrastructure is because they don't know what steel is or how diesel engines work? The technology is there. The economy and infrastructure are not.

Well, Chad has rails, steel, and diesel locomotives. But, rail is actually a bottleneck for industrial development in Chad, not the other way around. Industry doesn't generate rail capacity, it demands it and consumes it; it's rail that generates industry. Alot of people seem to look at this backwards. In Chad, one of the reasons for its poor development is the difficulty of development of its rail systems because of social problems, which are a direct result of its social and technological heritage. And, this is reflected in the type of rail network Chad does have: a modern rail system encompasses far more technology than just diesel engines and steel. Capacity has been signifigantly increased by computerization alone, not to mention a host of more minor innovations.

Technology reflects economy and infrastructure, as well as social evolution (eg Literature or Nationalism), better than mere population or manufacturing capacity. Advances don't just represent knowledge - they are also a factor of development. Things like Miniaturization or Satellites don't reflect discovery but rather application and development. This is why you can build the Apollo Program before you have satellites (historically untrue, unless you view the Satellite advance as the development of a useful satellite network rather than just a showcase achievement like Sputnik).

For example?

All you need to do is look at rail usage in Japan or Europe and compare it to the trends in Canada, the US, or Russia. In larger countries the trend has been to make much greater use of alternatives to rail, and has been for, oh, sixty years now! Whereas rail has never stopped developing in smaller developed nations, in larger developed nations rail has seen signifigant stagnation.

It's not that simple. European countries have higher gasoline (petrol!) taxes. This, coupled with the density of the cities and the extensive use of mass transit systems, means that automobile use is much less in Europe. As a result, rail travel is in much greater demand. Europeans don't need cars around their home cities, and they don't need cars in their destination cities, so the governments and markets provided passenger rail as a means to connect the two. The use of rail between cities is a separate issue from the use of mass transit within cities, however. I would love to travel from city to city by rail if it was practical to get around those cities without a car. In most cities of the United States, however, you can't, so rail really isn't an option for me. There is at best an indirect relationship with the density of cities, and you can't say conclusively what is cause and what is effect.

Ah, but you're only comparing Europe and the US. That doesn't explain why the same dynamic is true even when you compare Canada or Russia to Europe, because they also pay high gasoline costs and have more extensive use of mass transit systems within cities. Also this notion you have about mass transit doesn't entirely make sense. Domestic air travel leaves one in essentially the same predicament as arriving by train, and yet, until recently, domestic passenger and cargo flights in the US were increasing exponentially, at a phenomenal rate. The same story for Canada.

As far as cause and effect, no, its impossible to narrow down specifics with such a vast topic, but one thing is very clear: historically, although rail is very important to larger nations, smaller rail networks have fared much much better than larger ones and continue to do so, whereas in larger nations there appears to be a greater initial need for rails but there is a limit to their usefulness. Cause and effect are irrelevant when the trend is obvious and forms a pattern that applies not just when one is speaking of the US, but comparing any geographically large entity with any small one.

Also, one must keep in mind that here we're talking not just about rail capacity as the term might be used in a broader discussion of industrial infrastructure ... we're talking about the ability to use rail for strategic redeployment of military assets. If you look at rail networks in the US during the Civil War, it is immediatly obvious that the amount of rolling stock and miles of rail did not increase since then nearly as much as the ability to conduct strategic redeployment by rail has. What accounts for the change? Anyone with any knowledge of trains will tell you that there is a huge difference between what a 4-4-0 steam locomotive and a Dash 9 diesel can do, and a huge difference between how well a network can be reorganized to accomodate military traffic depending on whether controllers are using telegraphs and inkwells or computerized communication and realtime displays.

 

[mdwh]

Infinite RR is the single worst thing in Civ, it's ridiculous.
In every game I've played over the last...10? years, I've start to loose interest the moment RR started to come on-line, from that point on, it started to become work, instead of fun.

It's the complete opposite for me. Whilst it certainly adds to the game to have the problem of "Where to station your units", to make sure there are always some nearby each city to defend, this starts to get boring after a while, and would become especially uninteresting later on in the game when your empire gets large. It makes sense to me to draw an end to that phase at some point in the game, and it gives me a sense of success when I can finally build railroads.

"Oh wait, I can't get ths city with 30 units, no problem, I'll get another 50 from the other side of the world."

Since railroads (or even roads) can't be used in enemy territory, it still takes time to move your army towards them, except if the enemy city is right on your border. Also, if you did use your entire army like this, you'd be at risk to a counter-attack whilst undefended.

My God, I can't believe that anybody actually likes the railroad system. There's no strategy to speak of when one side can instantly move to any square within his empire. You can't distract the enemy, can't launch a feint, can't divert his attention.

As I say above, the strategy is there, it just doesn't have to last the entire game period. I see Civilization as more of a strategy game regarding empire building and development, rather than a wargame like Total War - the strategies of the latter, where you can have low-level control over the details in each battle simple aren't really possible with Civilization, without vastly increasing the details of both the time and space scales (ie, turns of less than one year, and tiles representing smaller areas).

You can still divert the enemy - if they use up their entire army defending one small point, then you can still go ahead and attack them elsewhere.

People also seem to be forgetting that in the later stages of the game, you are dealing with multi-island empires, so you no longer have infinite movement between places - ships and airports limit your capacity.

How's about this for an improvement which I don't think I've seen:

Keep railroads as they are, but make the change that if a unit attacks, its turn ends.

The only problem with railroads as I see it is not the infinite movement, but the fact that I can use a large number of my units to defend, or attack enemies near my borders, but then retreat them safely to my cities to recover, all in one turn. If their turn ended with an attack, the enemy would then have a chance to kill any units I had used.

This could also be used as an improvement for sea units - imagine if all "modern" sea units had infinite movement. As long as their turn ended on an attack/bombard, or also when unloading, this would avoid the boring micromanagement of moving ships around, but would avoid the obvious flaw where you could attack a far away city and move back to safely in one turn.

 

[mdwh]

Are you sure? I drive by railroad tracks every day. I have never seen a train stop and unload its contents at an arbitrary point along the way. I see automobiles do that all the time on the road. Trains don't stop at arbitrary locations.

They stop at far more places than cities though. Between any two major cities that a train goes, few are direct - most stop at all sorts of places, even little villages. Certainly the density of stops is enough to be one-per-Civilization-tile.

Also, if trains were being used in wartime to move troops, I imagine the Government would take control of the trains and order them to stop where necessary. It's not like troops would be travelling as normal passengers alongside civilians.

 

[frekk]

mdwh - exactly so ... in the Civil War or the world wars, most military equipment was just offloaded wherever the end of the rails was that day, often just several hundred yards behind the front. Particulary in the Civil War men often jumped right off the train into battle, no special facilities required. Armour moves on very low-slung flatbeds, and at the absolute minimum needs just a short ramp to be offloaded.

 

[Rince]

My solution for the 'infinite rail' problem would be to make it finite. Units can move 3 tiles on road and 9 on rail. Simple and effective.

Rince

 

[frekk]

Simple concept, but it would add too much MM. By the time you get rail you have too many units to keep track of where they're all going (especially across larger territories). It would be very very tedious, waiting every round for hundreds of units to crawl across the land and trying to remember how much stuff you've sent where.

 

[joethreeblah]

Simple concept, but it would add too much MM. By the time you get rail you have too many units to keep track of where they're all going (especially across larger territories). It would be very very tedious, waiting every round for hundreds of units to crawl across the land and trying to remember how much stuff you've sent where.

Seems like it would add more MM if you had to figure out how many units you could move, and you couldnt even make all the moves you wanted to this turn because of capacity coins. you'd have to split up your moves over 12 turns because of the 100's of units runing out of capacitor doinks.

I think some finite number is a good idea. You can still send your dudes on long trips. What are you doing moving all 100 of them back and forth all over the place every turn anyway?

I think it would make strategic sense and would be consistant with the rest of the game to just make it 1/9 or 1/5 or 1/12 or whatever movement cost on a rail. And you would at least have to position your forces strategically to defend instead of just moving one guy at a time util you beat the enemy which is rediculous.

love,

Joe

 

[frekk]

Not really ... keeping track of capacity wouldn't be any different than keeping track of gold, and that's pretty easy. And it's not like you'd need capacity for all your units ... just to redeploy certain units to specific regions. Units already in a region wouldn't be using rail. You just wouldn't have a huge central force anymore, you'd have, first, town garrisons at the border, and behind them every so often you'd have a large force of attack units to hit anything coming across the border without using rail. Mostly you'd use rail to move newly produced units up to your borders, and you'd have a little extra to shift the weight around from one border to the other if you really needed to, but usually you'd just redirect the stream of production instead. It would be very rare to be shifting all your forces from one side of a continent to the other all in one round, instead you'd be incrementally shoring up defences here, adding a bit more reserve there, and if something went wrong or when your production is lower than your capacity, you might redeploy a few units to balance out your positioning. Somewhat similar to how airports are used now, just easier to do.

Limited strategic redeployment was a common (and popular) concept in wargames all the way back to the hex-based board and chits style wargames of the seventies. If you can manage it in a boardgame it can't be all that hard in a computer game!

 

[eg577]

Simple concept, but it would add too much MM. By the time you get rail you have too many units to keep track of where they're all going (especially across larger territories). It would be very very tedious, waiting every round for hundreds of units to crawl across the land and trying to remember how much stuff you've sent where.

It's not an unmanagable amount of MM. If you warmonger a lot before rails that is the way it goes.

 

[frekk]

It only seems that way. Warmongering before rails seems to have alot of units, but if you really look at the count it is much, much, much higher once the cities become industrialized and have grown to make use of all the productive tiles ... it just seems like less because infinite rails really reduce the MM alot. Also production is completely different ... before the modern era it's quite common to be producing your military units right at your border regions or not very far from them, but tanks and modern armour don't build fast enough to be produced in any numbers outside of your most productive cities. Meaning that the distances covered are generally much greater for almost all newly produced units. Warmongering in the modern era is already tedious enough ...

 

[I am the Future]

They should keep RR the same as in civ 3 IT made for interesting modern age warfare. especialy when you own all of europe except england and want to take units from scandinavia to a air base in france to attack england. but that is just an example.

SAVE THE RAIL ROADS

 

[Meleager]

I think it took the interest OUT of modern warfare. With infinate movement there is no need for strategic unit placement.

PS. You signature is an old joke -> but a good one.

 

[Warwind]

I though I heard that there was an ability to use enemy roads would that also apply to rails? If so that could be a problem if you have a large unprotected rail system.

 

[Truronian]

Why not make railways infantry exclusive, meaning only weaker units could moved around infinitely, while armor would have to make do with roads.

This would give the modern era infantry (marines, infantry, TOWs) a bonus over armor, as well as possibly encouraging the use infantry over mech (quicker reinforcement)

Plus I've always wondered how a battalion of tanks is moved by train

 

[bkwrm79]

That still gives rise to the instant reinforcement problem - there's no need to anticipate where an enemy might attack, no need to patrol your coastline to prevent landings, etc.

Besides, I think that tanks are moved around by train. Not without a delay when de-training, of course.

 

[KrikkitTwo]

Well I think the best solution to the railroad problem is seperating strategic and tactical movement like they did with airplanes. If an attack can be made like a bombing run, ie improve the range/speed, then the defense against from an attack could be made like the defense against the bombing run, ie units within 'tactical range' defend/counter attack. Each player then 'rebases' their units in non contested areas (with the infinite speed railroads) and then gives their attack orders... at that point the enemy's rebasings and other orders during their simultaneous turn are seen.