Railroads.

Pretty important, but I'm not sure how they would be implemented with the trade system being as it is.
 
Pretty important, but I'm not sure how they would be implemented with the trade system being as it is.
Trains could move through mountains eventually with tunnels. :mischief:
 
Aviation needs a rework. If someone called and asked me, I'd eliminate aerodomes and roll the ability to create military aircraft into encampments (after construction of an appropriate building) and move civilian airport upgrades to commercial hubs for realism.

But that's just me.
 
Railroads caused a massive and fundamental change in the way people lived, worked and thought. They also caused a fundamental change in the way nations interacted internally and externally.
To give some examples:
Before the railroad, no human being on earth had ever gone faster than 100 kilometers per hour unless they were falling off a cliff.
Before the railroad, 1000 tons of anything could not be moved all at once over a hill on land.
Before the railroad, if you were living more than 100 miles from a seacoast or river, you were not living in a city.
Before the railroad, 90% of the Human population never traveled more than 100 miles in their entire lives.
Before the railroad, no army could be supplied over land for more than 100 kilometers. Every time an army got too far from a river or coastal supply route, it started pillaging to live.

A railroad, for the first time in Human History, allowed a single collection of equipment to move 1000 tons of food, goods, or people at 50 - 100 kilometers per hour for 200 kilometers or more a day anywhere the railroad track ran. Before that, feeding a concentration of people required either that all the food be available within a few days' wagon travel from the city (radius about 30 miles even with good roads) or that the food be brought in by boat or ship.
Before the railroad a day's journey over land was on average about 30 kilometers whether you were going on foot or in a wagon. IF you were a member of the pony express or a Persian/Mongolian Royal Messenger changing horses every 20 kilometers or so, you could cover several hundred kilometers a day - carrying at most 10 - 20 kilograms of 'cargo'.
A single 19th century train could carry 2 - 3000 tons of cargo or several hundred people 2- 300 kilometers a day.

In short, railroads affected far too much to be left out of the game.

Even with the Froggy Trade and Road system in Civ VI, they can be included: the limitations on building railroads were that they needed lots and lots of iron worked into equipment and tracks, and lots and lots of Gold - in Game Terms, they were the most expensive Improvements in history up to that time (and still are: modern High Speed railroads cost more per kilometer to build than even high-speed highways).
So, you can convert your Classical Road into an Industrial Era Railroad. It takes a Military Engineer, but he expends no 'Charges'. Instead, he moves over the route and for every tile converted, it costs X Gold (amount will vary depending on whether the tile is plans, hills, marsh, floodplain, etc) AND you must have access to 2 Iron Resources to build any railroad at all.

A Railroad has the following effects:
Any Trade Route traced over a railroad Doubles its original Yields.
Any Unit moving on a Railroad costs 0.25 per Tile and ignores all Terrain modifications to movement.
In All cities connected by Railroads, All the Districts in those cities provide +1 Bonus to all the cities, even those normally too far away to benefit. Thus, an Industrial District would provide +1 Production to any city connected to it by Railroad, a Commercial Zone +1 Gold. All the cities get +1 Amenity from the Ease Of Travel and ability of their populations to move freely between cities.

There, that's a rough start, anyway.
 
Not to encroach too much into Ideas & suggestions territory, but a comment on the absence of railroads:

While the industrial era does give you factories and shipyards, stock exchanges, and powerhouse wonders in Oxford, Ruhr, and Big ben- the roads are just not very good.
Early roads are painful. At least classical gives you bridges. We definitely need a medieval road though- waiting until industrial is painful and give cyrus a massive amount of free power early on.
Even late game, roads are good but it takes forever to cross a medium sized empire.

I would really love to see some kind of railroad system both for the sake of having a need for builders in small/medium empires (you've had 4 eras to lay down all your farms & mines by this point) as well as large scale movement. Giving trade or some other benefit would really be nice too. In Civ5, cities connected to the capital by rails got a 25% production boost. While this kind of "capital connection" isn't in Civ6, I do think working in benefits for networkings your cities with rails would be nice.

Like the UN, it feels left out of the game. It's great content for the next expansion, though.
 
Not to encroach too much into Ideas & suggestions territory, but a comment on the absence of railroads:

While the industrial era does give you factories and shipyards, stock exchanges, and powerhouse wonders in Oxford, Ruhr, and Big ben- the roads are just not very good.
Early roads are painful. At least classical gives you bridges. We definitely need a medieval road though- waiting until industrial is painful and give cyrus a massive amount of free power early on.
Even late game, roads are good but it takes forever to cross a medium sized empire.

I would really love to see some kind of railroad system both for the sake of having a need for builders in small/medium empires (you've had 4 eras to lay down all your farms & mines by this point) as well as large scale movement. Giving trade or some other benefit would really be nice too. In Civ5, cities connected to the capital by rails got a 25% production boost. While this kind of "capital connection" isn't in Civ6, I do think working in benefits for networkings your cities with rails would be nice.

Like the UN, it feels left out of the game. It's great content for the next expansion, though.
I'd take even just a graphical change to get them in. Industrial era roads could look like railroads and the traders built into trains that move across the land.
What's odd is a locomotive is even shown on the picture for the Steam Power tech and on the visual representation for the Industrial Era on the R&F Wheel and timeline.
 
Thanks god, the game is not some kind of history sim, so having something "historically important" is not enough reason to include this in game.

Surely, I'd like to see railroads in the game (and my long-time wish, Armored Train unit), but it needs some really solid gameplay reason to exist:
1. Building roads and railroads is micromanagement. Civ avoided it in pretty beautiful way. If we want railroads to live alongside regular roads, we have options:
- Use similar mechanics with unit other than Trader. It would work, but the railroads drawn this way will be on top of regular roads. And this additional unit needs some gameplay role itself.
- Use some bulk building command (railroad to point), for example engineer could build railroad up to 5 tiles in length using 1 charge. That's still micromanagement, but less than building each tile.
- Have Railroad Station improvement, which automatically connects to cities and railroad stations within, for example, 3 tiles.
2. Railroads for moving units only is barely worth it. Moving units through the empires late game is not that huge issue. Some bonuses for trade routes coming through railroads are good, but this also raises the question of where the railroads are built. I'd say picking exact tiles for railroads wouldn't work here (what if only part of the road between cities is a railroad?).

Overall something like this could be part of expansion with corporations, but so far it looks like too big change for too small gameplay gain.
 
Utilities in general have only have a barely minimal representation. You can have a modern city in 2020 apparently without electricity or running water. Everything in Civ is an abstraction (New York City has "a bank," "a market" etc). But I always found it interesting that there is no rising pressure to provide water, electric, and phone/communications.
 
Thanks god, the game is not some kind of history sim, so having something "historically important" is not enough reason to include this in game.

Surely, I'd like to see railroads in the game (and my long-time wish, Armored Train unit), but it needs some really solid gameplay reason to exist:
1. Building roads and railroads is micromanagement. Civ avoided it in pretty beautiful way. If we want railroads to live alongside regular roads, we have options:
- Use similar mechanics with unit other than Trader. It would work, but the railroads drawn this way will be on top of regular roads. And this additional unit needs some gameplay role itself.
- Use some bulk building command (railroad to point), for example engineer could build railroad up to 5 tiles in length using 1 charge. That's still micromanagement, but less than building each tile.
- Have Railroad Station improvement, which automatically connects to cities and railroad stations within, for example, 3 tiles.
2. Railroads for moving units only is barely worth it. Moving units through the empires late game is not that huge issue. Some bonuses for trade routes coming through railroads are good, but this also raises the question of where the railroads are built. I'd say picking exact tiles for railroads wouldn't work here (what if only part of the road between cities is a railroad?).

Overall something like this could be part of expansion with corporations, but so far it looks like too big change for too small gameplay gain.

This would be hysterical, if I wasn't afraid that you are actually serious...

"Building roads and railroads is micromanagement" - which every single Civ game from I to V used without complaints, but now it's too much for you? Having roads only go between cities is Limiting, and even more so when your only alternative is one tile at a time from Engineer Charges.

"Railroads for moving units is barely worth it" - are you and Sostratus playing the same game? He just complained that late-game roads are 'not very good' - and I agree with him, for both gameplay and historical reasons. There is no reason that picking exact tiles wouldn't work, and if part of your connection between cities is still a road and not a railroad, then before modern truck traffic (really, Atomic Era) you et no Gold, Production or Trade benefits from the railroad - gives you an incentive to complete your railroads in city-to-city increments rather than a few tiles here, a few tiles there...

I probably did not make myself clear: I did not intend you to build railroads tile by tile. All that is required is a Military Engineer Command for 'Build Railroad" - the Engineer unit moves at his normal speed over the terrain - just like a Trader - and you spend the Gold per Tile to build a Railroad. The limitation is not Engineers, but the Financing required. This has the advantage that you can build a railroad for purely military purposes if you so desire (and as most of the countries of continental Europe historically did in the late 19th century). Using a Military Engineer for the purpose has the advantage that it doesn't require yet another Unit in the game, and, in fact, military-trained engineers did a great deal of the railroad building (West Point-trained engineers surveyed, supervised and constructed most of the US railroads: again, both gameplay and historical: they are NOT necessarily oppositional)

On the other hand, I am not opposed to relating things Railroad to a Railroad District with buildings like a Union Station, Freight Yard, Container Terminal for various benefits, or even counting the 'railroad movement' as simply being between stations or districts. The problem wth this system is that it doesn't allow the flexibility of the Engineer system, but it could be made workable, and could make the Aerodrome District and Railroad District for, respectively, air freight/passenger Trade/Tourism and railroad same-type traffic use similar mechanisms.
 
Railroads caused a massive and fundamental change in the way people lived, worked and thought. They also caused a fundamental change in the way nations interacted internally and externally.
To give some examples:
Before the railroad, no human being on earth had ever gone faster than 100 kilometers per hour unless they were falling off a cliff.
Before the railroad, 1000 tons of anything could not be moved all at once over a hill on land.
Before the railroad, if you were living more than 100 miles from a seacoast or river, you were not living in a city.
Before the railroad, 90% of the Human population never traveled more than 100 miles in their entire lives.
Before the railroad, no army could be supplied over land for more than 100 kilometers. Every time an army got too far from a river or coastal supply route, it started pillaging to live.

A railroad, for the first time in Human History, allowed a single collection of equipment to move 1000 tons of food, goods, or people at 50 - 100 kilometers per hour for 200 kilometers or more a day anywhere the railroad track ran. Before that, feeding a concentration of people required either that all the food be available within a few days' wagon travel from the city (radius about 30 miles even with good roads) or that the food be brought in by boat or ship.
Before the railroad a day's journey over land was on average about 30 kilometers whether you were going on foot or in a wagon. IF you were a member of the pony express or a Persian/Mongolian Royal Messenger changing horses every 20 kilometers or so, you could cover several hundred kilometers a day - carrying at most 10 - 20 kilograms of 'cargo'.
A single 19th century train could carry 2 - 3000 tons of cargo or several hundred people 2- 300 kilometers a day.

In short, railroads affected far too much to be left out of the game.

Even with the Froggy Trade and Road system in Civ VI, they can be included: the limitations on building railroads were that they needed lots and lots of iron worked into equipment and tracks, and lots and lots of Gold - in Game Terms, they were the most expensive Improvements in history up to that time (and still are: modern High Speed railroads cost more per kilometer to build than even high-speed highways).
So, you can convert your Classical Road into an Industrial Era Railroad. It takes a Military Engineer, but he expends no 'Charges'. Instead, he moves over the route and for every tile converted, it costs X Gold (amount will vary depending on whether the tile is plans, hills, marsh, floodplain, etc) AND you must have access to 2 Iron Resources to build any railroad at all.

A Railroad has the following effects:
Any Trade Route traced over a railroad Doubles its original Yields.
Any Unit moving on a Railroad costs 0.25 per Tile and ignores all Terrain modifications to movement.
In All cities connected by Railroads, All the Districts in those cities provide +1 Bonus to all the cities, even those normally too far away to benefit. Thus, an Industrial District would provide +1 Production to any city connected to it by Railroad, a Commercial Zone +1 Gold. All the cities get +1 Amenity from the Ease Of Travel and ability of their populations to move freely between cities.

There, that's a rough start, anyway.

Great post :)

Just a thought though... Given the (brilliant imho lol) unit movement in Civ 6 vs other editions of the game; I think railroads and automobiles are very much represented in the game right there! Its technical rather than art; but the difference in late game movement on roads (or rail if you like) is very true to what you just described :D
 
I'm assuming they've been withholding railroads because they have a general plan for them within a large theme, maybe some sort of captains of industry/corporations/etc. second expansion. Or maybe that's just my wishful thinking ;)
 
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