I agree with you Pembroke. Gameplay is more important than realism. And the developers agree with this statement mostly if you look more closely at the way some things were implemented in the game. If you think railroads are realistic because one can move everywhere in one turn in the real world using railroads then consider the following:
1) Movement rates of units stay the same while the passage of time becomes slower (50 years per turn in the beginning, 1 year in the end). Totally unrealistic, but good for gameplay.
2) An ancient age unit in the game can only move 1 tile (10 miles or something like that) in 50 years. Totally unrealistic, but good for gameplay.
3) The militairy buildup for an ancient age war takes something like 1000 years and the actual war (if you go for total destuction of the enemy civilization and not just a few cities) takes even longer than that. It takes a few hundred years to move your units close to a city. If you use catapults then you're bombarding them for 50 or 100 years (one or two turns) and then you attack this city. Repeat this few hundred years conquest for the next city. Totally unrealistic, but good for gameplay.
4) In the middelages/renaissance the same lengthy movements and warfare hold, except everything is divided by 5 or 10 or so.
5) If you transport units, using an airport it takes one full turn (depending on how good you played this is 10, 5, 2 or 1 year). Totally unrealistic, but good for gameplay.
6) On a huge world ships take 20+ turns to sail around the world. The start of an exploration of America and the arrival of the ships would take something like 5 turns. If we assume that the game then uses the 10 years a turn, this is the equivalent of 50 years. The people on board would have died of old age before they reached America.
A modern aegis cruiser would take 20 turns a 1 or 2 years (or 5 years) a turn to go around the world. Totally unrealistic, but good for gameplay.
More examples of unrealistically slow movements can easily be found in the game.
Why did they make units so slow? The answer is simple. They wanted interesting gameplay.
To have an interesting representation of the buildup of cities and the growth of population, the accumalation of knowledge and the spread of civilization, time has to go slow. If a turn would represent one day or something like that, then there would almost be no difference in the size of the population, the buildings present in a city, the level of scientific knowledge and the spread of civilization.
To have an interesting representation of warfare, units need to have a limited movement rate. So time has to go slow. Say 1 week in the ancient age and 1 hour in the modern age. Then a realistic representation of warfare would be possible and movement rates of units as they are in the game would be realistic. But the growth of one population point would have to take thousends to hundredthousends of turns. Not very interesting gameplay.
The developers of the game must have long thought about this problem and than they decided that it was more important that the buildup of cities and the spread of civilization happened at a realistic pace. But they also wanted some interesting warfare in the game, so they plugged in units with movement rates that were interesting if you want to have a chalenging tactical combat. But these movement rates were of course totally unrealistic, if you look at the timescale. This way we got Civilization 1, and we all loved it
None of the civilization - like games ever changed this.
The movement of units on railroads is unrealistically fast if you compare it to the movement rates of other units and more importantly even, the interesting tactical combat is partially lost. You don't have to think about troop placement. Artillery from everywhere on your body of land can attack the enemy, while planes cannot (they have to be rebased, if they're not close). Tanks and infantry from everywhere on your body of land can attack the invaders, while ships can only just leave port and begin their lengthy voyage to the enemy. The zero reaction time of your land-based army removes a lot of tactical decisions and is not comparable to the few turns reaction time of the navy and airforce.
If the Germans in WOII would have had infinite movement railroads, then their whole army form the east front could attack the D-Day invasion, beat it completely and move back to the east front in time to stop the Russians.
In the real world, the Germans had to make a tactical decission where to place their units. Because they guessed the location of the allied invasion wrongly, this invasion succeeded.
Troop placement is important in the real world and it should be important in the game, even after railroads are invented.
If you try to solve the difference in speed between land-based forces and navy by giving ships large movement rates (30+), then you'll remove some of the interesting tactical decissions from them too. And if you try to solve it for the airforce, then rebasing should not take a turn. This also removes some tactical decissions from those units.
I would like to limit the infinite movement rates of the railroads. Whether you do this by implementing railway stations (city building) that take one turn for units to rebase to, or by implementing a limited movement rate (like 1/6) is not that important to me. Because not everybody has the same ideas about this feature (railroads) of the game, I would love to have some editor options so that everybody can change it the way they like.
Sorry for the lengthy discussion of this feature.
Edit: Typing errors.
I admit that in real world plenty of railroads have farmland beside them. I'm just seeking to find a good game balance here...
