realistic railways?

[WillJ]

I like it, Roland. But I don't get what you're saying about airports. Why would they be less useful? The things you say above are dealing with ground and naval units, and have nothing to do with air units.

And about the look of railroads: They don't seem ugly at all to me. Well, at least not with Snoopy's graphics mod; in fact, IMO they're cool looking. And even with the default graphics, they're not that bad. And again, railroads being everywhere isn't unrealistic, either. Most industrialized nations in this world would be the same. The main issue (that's already been discussed) is the unrealism of the movement rate when compared with other movement rates, at least IMO.

 

[snowmelk]

Originally posted by Roland Johansen

What do you think about the above? [/B]

I like the farm idea and the airports idea.

I don't like the idea of the railway station and shipyard (at least not the way you described it).

I simply don't like the idea of beaming units from one place to another.
Send some battleships out in the ocean and you can hope to catch some hostile shipsnow. But they would be totally useless if ships can beam from one harbor to another.
Concerning railways: except that they don't work between continents, they would be airports. But they shouldn't.

Sending units from city to city should be restricted to airports and a low number of units per turn. This would demonstrate the ability of planes to travel vast distances in practically no time and to carry not very much.

 

[mrtn]

Originally posted by Pembroke
Why should you pay maintenance cost for railroads? Because if you don't have to pay for them you are going to build RR on every tile as there's no harm in it.

IOW it's just to balance things a bit.

Another way to force you plan your railroad network would be to remove the shield/food bonus from railroads and in addition to have a rule that a tile can't have _both_ railroad and mine/irrigation. This would force you to decide whether you want to produce food/shields on a tile or have fast movement. As you couldn't have both you would have to compromise...

I like these ideas.
But I think that RR shouldn't cost gpt, but rather a fixed amount (10 or 20 gold, or something like that). This way you wont get it everywhere. How the AI would handle this is a different question however.

 

[Ivan the Kulak]

Roland, I like your ideas. But we still need some new code to prevent the AI from building RR everywhere to bring into play the strategic transport route element and the tactics of cutting these routes. Maybe if you did have more food/production tile improvements available with progessive techs the AI would not build RR so much if the improvements were not tied into having RR on the tile. BUT:
Even though in civ2 RR ONLY granted unlimited movement, and more production for forests/mines (no food bonus) most of the time the AI still had every square in its empire covered with RR later on. In fact, it would do this instead of building farms - it was as if it was programmed to build RR on every square first, and then build farms (supermarket or not).

In CTP by contrast, I noticed that the AI tended to spend much more PW on the latest farms/mines, while only building the RR/Maglev structure necessary for basic movement through its empire. I know CTP was bad at a lot of things, but it was actually good at this aspect of management. In that game roads/railroads/Maglevs ONLY offered a movement bonus, and nothing else, which probably explains this. I'd like to see a similar model for civ4.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Originally posted by WillJ
I like it, Roland. But I don't get what you're saying about airports. Why would they be less useful? The things you say above are dealing with ground and naval units, and have nothing to do with air units.

Because instantaneous movement on a continent is already performed by railway stations. But, you're right. This argument of mine is flawed because you don't use airports in CivIII to transport units on a continent.
They're still a bit less usefull because they can now only receive 5 units. Not that usefull for an oversees invasion anymore.

Originally posted by snowmelk
I like the farm idea and the airports idea.

Originally posted by snowmelk
I don't like the idea of the railway station and shipyard (at least not the way you described it).

I simply don't like the idea of beaming units from one place to another.
Send some battleships out in the ocean and you can hope to catch some hostile shipsnow. But they would be totally useless if ships can beam from one harbor to another.
Concerning railways: except that they don't work between continents, they would be airports. But they shouldn't.

Sending units from city to city should be restricted to airports and a low number of units per turn. This would demonstrate the ability of planes to travel vast distances in practically no time and to carry not very much.

The idea behind this was to make available two kinds of travel. A strategic one where a unit travels instantaneous but it uses up all of its movement points. And a tactical one where units move using ordinary roads but are ready to fight if they have some movement points left. It would represent trains loading units transporting them and unloading them. Transport would be so fast that units can be transported everywhere on the same continent during one turn. But the loading, transporting, unloading and getting ready again for battle (this takes the most time) would take a full turn from the unit.
The gameplay "advantage" of this compared to the present situation would be that strategic placement of units would become important again. No longer can every unit on the continent attack an enemy unit that enters your borders in the turn it does so. Units in the neighbouring cities will reach the threat in time, but units on the other side of the continent wil have to use a turn in the trains to get there.

The reason to add a comparable level of travel to ships would be that they're otherwise very slow compared to land travel. Also ships can travel from any sea city to any other sea city in one game turn if you would compare to real life. However, it takes planning and time to go into battle. So again I would suggest a strategic level of movement ("beaming between shipyards") and a tactical level of movement for sea battles (regular sea movement).
I think this would be a more effective way to make ships more usefull than by giving them something like 20 movement points. If you give them 20 movement points, tactical fighting between fleets would be ruined and still fleets would be slow compared to land travel on huge maps.

Of course not everyone will like this difference in types of travel. But it wouldn't be a very large effort to make it available in the editor (see my previous post) and I think modders will use such options.

Originally posted by Ivan the Kulak
Roland, I like your ideas. But we still need some new code to prevent the AI from building RR everywhere to bring into play the strategic transport route element and the tactics of cutting these routes.

The railway station city improvement was meant as a replacement of the railroads terrain improvement. Next to that there would be an automatic upgrade of the roadsystem upon reaching some levels of technology (see previous post). How this would look graphically? I don't care. One could think of any kind of graphics you like to represent this level of roads (in the modern age some nice mix of roads. railroads and highways maybe).

Using a precision bombardment on the railway station would cut the railroad connection to the city and would be very usefull to stop reinforcements. All reinforcements would have to go by road or go to the closest city with a railway station by train (which takes a turn) and than travel the last few squares by road.

Also newly conquered cities aren't equally good staging grounds for attacks on an enemy because there probably isn't a railway station in them yet. You'd have to build it, wait a turn for reinforcements by train and then you can use those reinforcements. Or you could just use the roads (with their movement point cost).

 

[Ivan the Kulak]

Roland, I see what you mean. But you don't necessarily have to travel thru a city to use railroads. How are you going to decide which tiles are affected by the destruction of a railway station? I often have little spurs running here and there (mainly to connect to resources, so if they are bombed there will still be road, hopefully), and I don't see how a rail station can affect RR outside the city radius. This would encourage even more road/RR building by the AI to nullify this effect. I think it would be very complex to code this.

 

[Iztvan]

Originally posted by snowmelk

I simply don't like the idea of beaming units from one place to another.
Send some battleships out in the ocean and you can hope to catch some hostile shipsnow. But they would be totally useless if ships can beam from one harbor to another.

But it's not such a bad idea! I think that naval units should work more like the Air units do.
Basically, you would give your naval units (just like the air units) various orders, like "patrol" (recon), "bombard", "sea superiority" (air superiority). If an enemy convoy was headed for your cost, your patroling destroyers and fighters would spot it, and your "sea superiority" battleships and subs would sink it!

I belive that this could greatly speed up and improve the naval aspect of the game.

Originally posted by snowmelk

Concerning railways: except that they don't work between continents, they would be airports. But they shouldn't.

Sending units from city to city should be restricted to airports and a low number of units per turn. This would demonstrate the ability of planes to travel vast distances in practically no time and to carry not very much.

But we aldready have units beaming all over the board with the current RR system, at no cost in movement points! My and Rolands idea would actualy reduce the effectiveness of RR.
In theory, RR should be all about:
1. Strategic movement of troops
2. Effective transportation of resourses and workers

To be honest, i think that a cities workers should be able to use an aditional "ring" around the city, as long as that square is connected to the city by RR...

 

[Pembroke]

Originally posted by Iztvan
Basically, you would give your naval units (just like the air units) various orders, like "patrol" (recon), "bombard", "sea superiority" (air superiority). If an enemy convoy was headed for your cost, your patroling destroyers and fighters would spot it, and your "sea superiority" battleships and subs would sink it!

The concept could work. Would work in fact. No quarrel from me there...

It's just that there's this something you feel when you manually steer your battleship next to the enemy and give a full broadside.

I wouldn't like too much abstraction in this. As a solution to the problem the idea is good. It's only that I wouldn't like to just hear "our fleet intercepted an enemy fleet". This might be one of those matter-of-taste things...

Manually moving units is a "civ thing" and it wouldn't feel the same without that. In fact I don't much like the way airlifts are handled either.

I think the basic idea of having railroad as a tile improvement is good. It only needs to be toned down so that moving units via it is comparable to sea movement. Either by limiting the amount of rail around (=meaning there's a game reason why you don't _want_ to build railroad everywhere), or by limiting the movement rate factor to something finite, or perhaps both.

And now that the airlift/airport came up: scrap'em. Instead there should be troop transport planes analoguous to the sea transport ships. You can land and take-off only from airports or airfields which are also the only places where you can load and unload your basic (foot) units into and out of them. Except paratroopers who could get out when on flight (=jump) which ought to make them more useful, too. The helicopter could then be one type of troop transport with the special ability of unloading and loading anywhere. Then I might perhaps actually build some.

 

[Iztvan]

Originally posted by Pembroke

I wouldn't like too much abstraction in this. As a solution to the problem the idea is good. It's only that I wouldn't like to just hear "our fleet intercepted an enemy fleet". This might be one of those matter-of-taste things...

Manually moving units is a "civ thing" and it wouldn't feel the same without that. In fact I don't much like the way airlifts are handled either.

I get your point. Thats always a problem, how abstract do you want to handle things. I think it's ok for air units, ok maybe not for naval units.
An advantage with my suggestion is that the English actually would be able to intercept a German Seelöwe operation in a WWII scenario, that is impossible now...

Ok, another brainstorm: What if you could put your ships on sentry/intercept orders, so they would try to stop and sink enemy shipping passing through their field of vision? As a naval version of the "Fortify" order? We need something like this. Compare unit speed to unit density. Land units have speed 1-3 and move over 20-40% of the map, and there is a lot off terrain to slow it down. See units have speeds 3-5 (and most agree that's to slow!), move over 60-80% of the maps area, and are generaly much fewer than land units.

Originally posted by Pembroke

I think the basic idea of having railroad as a tile improvement is good. It only needs to be toned down so that moving units via it is comparable to sea movement. Either by limiting the amount of rail around (=meaning there's a game reason why you don't _want_ to build railroad everywhere), or by limiting the movement rate factor to something finite, or perhaps both.

Gamewise sure, your argument is solid... but doesn't "London has finished building Railway Station" sound sweet?
Seriously, the game is about strategic choises, and choosing between different improvements is intresting, just railing every available square isn't... even though it probably is realistic. Nobody is complaining about roading every square, right?

Originally posted by Pembroke

And now that the airlift/airport came up: scrap'em. Instead there should be troop transport planes analoguous to the sea transport ships. You can land and take-off only from airports or airfields which are also the only places where you can load and unload your basic (foot) units into and out of them. Except paratroopers who could get out when on flight (=jump) which ought to make them more useful, too. The helicopter could then be one type of troop transport with the special ability of unloading and loading anywhere. Then I might perhaps actually build some.

Right on the spot! We already have naval transports. What we need is Air transports and ground transports. I want hercules planes and trucks to carry my infantry into battle!
And yes, I want to be able to evacuate my "grunts" with a transport helicopter...

 

[snowmelk]

Originally posted by Iztvan

But we aldready have units beaming all over the board with the current RR system, at no cost in movement points!

Yes, ant that's one of the points I'm ccomplaining about all the time...

Ok, another brainstorm: What if you could put your ships on sentry/intercept orders, so they would try to stop and sink enemy shipping passing through their field of vision? As a naval version of the "Fortify" order? We need something like this. Compare unit speed to unit density. Land units have speed 1-3 and move over 20-40% of the map, and there is a lot off terrain to slow it down. See units have speeds 3-5 (and most agree that's to slow!), move over 60-80% of the maps area, and are generaly much fewer than land units.

Well, that sounds like an idea I could like!
Give battleships a bombard range of two, modern frigates of three (missiles) and give them a chance to bombard hostile ships moving into that range.

Gamewise sure, your argument is solid... but doesn't "London has finished building Railway Station" sound sweet?

You really like that, don't you
What about that:
Railways as usual as a tile improvement, but without increasing irrigation/mining, and additionally railway stations (goods station would increase shield/food in the city, passenger stations gold).
That would make you double happy...

 

[Iztvan]

Originally posted by snowmelk


Yes, ant that's one of the points I'm ccomplaining about all the time...



Well, that sounds like an idea I could like!
Give battleships a bombard range of two, modern frigates of three (missiles) and give them a chance to bombard hostile ships moving into that range.

Ranged Zone of Controll? Give it to me Baby!

Originally posted by snowmelk

You really like that, don't you
What about that:
Railways as usual as a tile improvement, but without increasing irrigation/mining, and additionally railway stations (goods station would increase shield/food in the city, passenger stations gold).
That would make you double happy...

Well, I think that Railway Stations are a significant part of every modern city, right along with factory and commersial dock. They should be important, powerful and cool!

 

[mrtn]

Originally posted by snowmelk
...Well, that sounds like an idea I could like!
Give battleships a bombard range of two, modern frigates of three (missiles) and give them a chance to bombard hostile ships moving into that range...

Or normal zone of control, at least. I just checked in the editor that zoc is available for naval units, I think I'll add zoc for my "Naval Power" units. Tanks for the idea.

 

[Ivan the Kulak]

Another thing to keep in mind here is that if you can't move your units to a hotspot in one turn, neither can the AI, which would make it much easier for the human player to launch invasions and succeed at it.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Originally posted by Ivan the Kulak
Roland, I see what you mean. But you don't necessarily have to travel thru a city to use railroads. How are you going to decide which tiles are affected by the destruction of a railway station? I often have little spurs running here and there (mainly to connect to resources, so if they are bombed there will still be road, hopefully), and I don't see how a rail station can affect RR outside the city radius. This would encourage even more road/RR building by the AI to nullify this effect. I think it would be very complex to code this.

There wouldn't be any tiles with railroads on them. There would only be railway stations in cities. If this railway station is destroyed then you can't travel to the city using trains (and instant 1 turn travels).
This of course takes something away from the game. You can't bomb a tile with a railroad because there are no railroads. But in the normal game you'd have to bomb a lot of tiles. Now you only have to bomb one railway station. That's more realistic if you look at the amount of bombing runs needed to destroy the connection to a city.

Next to the railway stations in cities, there would be automatic upgrades of the roads when certain technologies are invented. So roads would cost 1/5 th of a movement point after steam engine and 1/7 th after motorized transportation.
A more detailed version of this proposal is in post #20.

I'm not completely satisfied with this proposal myself. It is difficult to make a realistic playable representation of movement in a turnbased game where turns vary from 1 to 50 years. You'll have to compromise.

 

[Ivan the Kulak]

Roland, what you seem to be proposing is an abstraction whereby units will only travel on RR between cities and nowhere else. That is really going to limit the players options. I personally will leave groups of forces all over my empire, NOT near cities but on RR (I'm paranoid about nuclear attack). Lets say I have 6 cities arranged in a rough hexagon. The city on the right point loses its RR station. But, I have roads (and thus the theoretical RR) everywhere. Now, I want to move units from the left point city to a tile past the city that lost the RR station. I can still go around that city via my other road(RR) network, unless you are specifying that RR ONLY works from city to city. That IMO would not be workable. No point to even having RR if it's that limited. The RR/fortress idea cures this a bit, but do you want piles of those all over the map?

 

[Sha-Feer]

These are all good ideas. I like the idea of requiering up keep for rail roads, that would limit their use. Cause it is ugly and takes away from the beauty of the game. And I like the idea of making better irragation and mines as oppose to railraods too.

 

[Roland Johansen]

Originally posted by Ivan the Kulak
Roland, what you seem to be proposing is an abstraction whereby units will only travel on RR between cities and nowhere else. That is really going to limit the players options. I personally will leave groups of forces all over my empire, NOT near cities but on RR (I'm paranoid about nuclear attack). Lets say I have 6 cities arranged in a rough hexagon. The city on the right point loses its RR station. But, I have roads (and thus the theoretical RR) everywhere. Now, I want to move units from the left point city to a tile past the city that lost the RR station. I can still go around that city via my other road(RR) network, unless you are specifying that RR ONLY works from city to city. That IMO would not be workable. No point to even having RR if it's that limited. The RR/fortress idea cures this a bit, but do you want piles of those all over the map?

The idea is indeed to only let RR work from city to city. So your troops could use roads to move from the left city to the right city if they're close to eachother. Or alternatively, they could go to the nearest city with railway station (if the cities are far from eachother), take a train to a city with railway station close to the endangoured city. This would've used up their first turn. The next turn they'll use to travel the last few squares to the endangoured (maybe already captured) city.

And the idea was to severly limit the railroads. It was a smart move of your opponent to destroy your railway station before attacking the city (this would be great combined with a more usefull precision bombardment). It also limits the speed of conquest as troops can't be transported to the moving front very fast because there are no railway stations in those newly conquered cities (yet). The fresh troops have to go by road or use a turn to go to a city close to the front that already has a railway station.

Probably some/a lot of people won't like this change, because it's a big change and it severly limits railroads. You can't please 'em all. Some other changes I proposed were appreciated.
I would like to see some more editor functions on terrain improvements and instant-travel buildings like the airport so that we can change the transportation in the game the way we personaly like.

 

[Iztvan]

Well, I like'em! But hey, I'm the crazy bugger who wanted the naval system to work just like the air system!

This would also make improved roads a possibility, with motorized transport. Wether the roads would be instantly improved (boring!) or need to be improved with worker action (and new grafics) is another question.

 

[a_wanderer]

hello,

this is my first post but the subject is really interesting so i'll voice my opinion too ;_).

i think the problem has two dimensions;

- the first (and more easily fixable) is just the look of the road and railroad network in civ3. i personally think that actually the problem is not so much in the fact that many of the squares are with roads and railroads, but that the game joins two squares squares next to each other that both have road/railroad with numerous intersections etc, which grew even more in number as the surrounding squares get roads/rr. i mean that every square becomes a jungle of roads/rr which is useless and ugly. a single new road intersection between connected squares is more than enough, and i'm sure that this will dramatically make the vew of the map in the latter ages more 'normal'

- the second aspect of the problem is perhaps more difficult to implement. i personally am a great railway fan, so i think that given the scale of the game the concept of the railroads giving unlimited transportation is not far off the trugh but should be given some limitations:

i think perhaps the best solution is that the railway network of the country should have a 'total capacity', based on perhaps the lenghth of the network (the longer the greater the capacity) or why not ammount of money spent on 'transportation' (i.e. you put in 1 gpt in transportation - you get 10 trasport capacity, - 2 gpt = 20 transport capacity etc). the capacity itself should be distributed as a player seems fit. for example if you have 10 transport capacity - they you can choose to move a single unit 10 squares distance, or you can choose to move two units each of them for 5 squares of distance, etc. - the idea is that one unit of transport capacity should allow one unit to move one square.

the big tradeoff here is that the player should be presented with a good way of feedback as for how much ammount of capacity he has got left.

he should also choose wisely how to transport units but this i don't consider a handicap to the idea, but rather a nice additional strategic enhancement to the latter stages to the game. i think we all agree that in the late ages all the playe does is simply rampage through any opposition left with unstoppable endless divisions of tanks etc, well now one should think better of their deployment.

i know this sounds a bit too difficult, but i think the concept is easily understadable once you look closer to it. also i believe that it is the cloesst possible to reality. after all - with today's high-speed trains soon you WILL be able to move a unit from china to france in no time, but will you have the transport capacity (this means locos, passenger cars, the sheer number of trains that can possibly go trhough a single track even if you do have the rolling stock) to transpert all of china to france - no.

pozdravi ;_)

 

[Roland Johansen]

Does anyone know if the AI uses the instant transportation abilities of the airport. It's rare to see an AI controlled civilization that is strong on two bodies of land and has airports on both bodies of land. But if this happens, can the AI use the airports to transport troops?