realistic railways?

[snowmelk]

I hate the railways in Civ3 for two reasons:

First:
The infinite movement range for units.
It means moving your whole army form China to Spain in no time. How realistic is that? And it's way to powerful compared to the other transport types (airports, ships...).
Better would be a movement mulitplication by railways a little bit higher than roads (easy alternative) or trains as transport units (cool alternative).

Second:
Railways are everywhere! the landscape in a late game looks like a silver whatever, but not like an actual landscape. Look at aerial photos of countrys with high population density. Even there you see mostly grassland/agriculture/forest/etc.You don't say "Huh, lots of railways down there".
I would replace the railway effect of improving irrigation/mines by improved irrigation/ bigger mines build by workers.
Maybe make railways cost something, so they won't be build everywhere.

Anyone feels the same or likes the railways the way they are right now?

 

[cepheii]

Originally posted by snowmelk
Anyone feels the same or likes the railways the way they are right now?

I do, but there's a little Problem. If you don't have Railroads everywere, you can't move to every tile in your empire without loosing movement points, so it's much more difficult to clean up pollution immediately or kill enemy units in your territory. (well, the last pointwould be a nice tactical option )


the idea with the trains as units is !

 

[h4ppy]

I agree the railroads are one of the worst parts of the game. I think that they sould double or triple the movement over roads, not make it infinant. I also hate the fact that my units get stuck on endless loops in enemy territory and I have to restart the game. Like you said railroads also should not effect shield production more than roads do.

 

[thestonesfan]

This would be a Civ4 issue, but I think rails should affect a radius of squares, and that you shouldn't be able to build them in every square. If nothing else, it would improve the look of the later game immensely.

I really don't mind the infinite movement, as long as they would make sea-movement more realistic in relation.

 

[cgannon64]

I think the infinite is pretty realistic if you want to get technical. A turn is a year or two by Industrial, and it takes no less than a month to get around the continent by rail.

However, going by that rule, then units move pretty unrealistically.

[/devil's advocate]

Seriously though, I think railroads should move you maybe like 20x as fast or 40x as fast - meaning that a worker could travel 20 or 40 railroaded tiles per turn.

@ stonesfan: That's a good idea. Or maybe they could bring farms back but make farms and railroads an either/or option, so it looks a little better.

 

[Benderino]

There should be three levels of ground transportation:

Roads
Railroads
Highways

Roads will give you three movement (just as they do)
Railroads will give you 6 movement
Highways will give you 9-12 (?) movement

I agree with your points wholeheartedly.

 

[Slax]

Maybe it would help if the only advantage of a railway was to link cities to increase trade or resource use, or something, but no other bonuses.

Highways would give big unit movement bonus and shield, trade and food bonus.

This way the map is not filled with railways.

 

[WillJ]

I once commented on railroads being everywhere not being realistic, but then someone (forgot who) reminded me of the scale of this game: Think about it. If a standard map is the size of Earth, then it's about 12,760 km across. Since a standard map is 100x100, that's 127.6 km per tile (very, very, rough estimate, considering it's in squares, the Earth's round, etc.). Do you think a railway every 127.6 km is crowded? I certainly don't.

About movement, infinite is certainly unrealistic, but if it's not infinite, it should be something very large, such as moving across a railroad is 1/40 of a movement point or something, as CG suggested. But you can't just think in terms of realism; you also have to think about gameplay. The fact that railroads let you move infinitely is a huge gameplay issue, and it doesn't seem to be too annoying in game terms. I'm not sure whether taking this away would be a good thing, and it might be a bad thing. It'd certainly ruin some strategies. I'm sure Firaxis didn't pull out infinite movement of out nowhere, but instead tested it out in comparison with other movement rates, and decided infinite is the way to go (even though it's unrealistic). But who knows.

 

[Slax]

Railroads certainly help with late-game pathfinding.

 

[Ivan the Kulak]

Highways shouldn't help you move faster than railroads, driving entire mechanized armies that far would require an enormous amount of gasoline and other supplies, and you'd have plenty of breakdowns. By contrast, if you have enough trains you can put all your equipment on them and it will arrive at its destination in the same condition that it started in. Most large military forces with heavy vehicles still move by ship or train unless there is a tactical limit on time, in which case a great deal of energy will be spent to get forces there by air, if the nation in question is capable of that.

Giving us an option in the editor for limiting RR movement woould be ok, but we'd also need late game workers with multiple movement points for getting to the pollution that turn.

 

[NoAnswer]

I think that three steps is too much. Roads and railroads are fine, but the infinite movement is very unrealistic and takes away the need for better troop position and such. I also think that 1/40 is too much, it should be 1/9. Also abou the issue of having railroads everywhere, they should make it that you get no bonus from them, and instead replace that with better irrigation or better mines like snowmelk said.

And adding on to the train idea, they should require a train station Small Wonder (which can be built once railroads are discovered, and the civ must have at least 5 cities (size 6+).Then you can build train units, they have a high shield cost (maybe 250-300) and they have a high transport capacity but can only be loaded once per turn (like any ships) and units will lose their turn by loading into a train unit. Then they move from city to city for free so you can go all around your civ for free in one turn BUT, there has to be a catch, and the catch is that they can only stop in Cities (size 6+). ALso they can't go to the next city if the railroad is incomplete or if there are enemy units in the path, in that case they stay at their current city, they will never stop outside of a city. Maybe then they could make an fort-related thing, called a train station which takes twice as many turns to build as a fort, and they would allow trains to stop outside of cities. And finnaly there is a limit as to the amount of trains a civ can have, just like armies, you can have 1 for every 2 cities (size 6+) or 1 for every metropolis (size 12+).

 

[Pembroke]

I don't care so much whether it's realistic or not to have RR on every tile, but as far as the game itself is concerned:

1) It's plain ugly. I usually end up RRing everything because it's just a good thing to do. But it definitely is ugly.

2) It makes no strategic challenge. The best RR strategy is simply "build RR everywhere", which requires no thinking at all. Also, wrecking enemy RR doesn't hurt as much as it should. In the real life railroads are military targets. In civ pillaging them mostly just robs him the bonus shield/food/commerce but won't hamper his movement.

My proposal is to make railroads a trade off.

It ought to be so, that you can build railroad as much as you like or need, but doing so will make you forfeit something.

The easiest way to do this would be to introduce a maintenance cost (preferably modifiable in the editor). If a railroad tile cost 1 gpt to maintain you would definitely *think* where to put them. This would probably produce a much more "natural looking" railway network linking your cities with very little redundancy which would also be good because then wrecking enemy rails would really mean something...

1 gpt might be too much, but whether it's 1 gpt per 5 tiles or 10 tiles would just be fine tuning. And if it's modifiable in the editor all the better.

And while you are at it let us modify the RR movement rate, too.

 

[Iztvan]

A thought: What if train transport worked analogus to Airlift?

Rail in a square wouldn't affect moves at all, it would just work like a normal road. BUT, if you build the city improvement "Railway Station" in two cities, and the cities are connected with railroad, you can make a "Rail Move" (just like an Airlift) between the two cities.

The same system could work for sea transport between harbours. Maybe cost some gold, since you're renting/borrowing private shipping/rail stock?

 

[snowmelk]

I once commented on railroads being everywhere not being realistic, but then someone (forgot who) reminded me of the scale of this game: Think about it. If a standard map is the size of Earth, then it's about 12,760 km across. Since a standard map is 100x100, that's 127.6 km per tile (very, very, rough estimate, considering it's in squares, the Earth's round, etc.). Do you think a railway every 127.6 km is crowded? I certainly don't.

Yes you are right. But then, a lot of other things are out of scale, too. Do you think in ancient times settlers would have moved 500 km (four squares) to build the next city? Certainly not.
My point is, that it makes sense to build railways between cities, but not just everywhere. As Pembroke wrote, it makes no strategic challenge and it's plain ugly. Okay, you shurely could make better graphics, but still the strategic part is missing.

Some other people wrote, that it's quite realistic that in one year you can move an army by railway nearly everywhere:

Yes, but in one year modern ships can move a couple of times around the globe and long range planes do it in one day. Also, it would not really take a group of swordsman several decades to reach the next town. So, infinite or at least very large movement rates for almost every unit would be possibly most realistic.
But, of course, it would be rather boring, wouldn't it? You can't make movement fitting to the time periods of a turn in Civ3 and I don't ask for that. Just the relationships between the movement types should be more realistic.
When an enemy crosses your borders you can move your whole army with railroads from everywhere in front of his nose before he reaches the first city. No, please! That's what I don't like.

And finally, I have to agree with Pembroke again. Railroads should be a realistic strategic target to slow down the enemys movement. Additionaly, units loaded on a train should be a much more vulerable target than a division moving through the landscape.

 

[Ivan the Kulak]

I don't see why you should pay maintenance for RR track - once it's laid the actual upkeep costs are very low, compared to a nation's GDP. Since it's tied in to the food supply (replaces farms from civ2) that would seriously unbalance the game.

RE: the strategic movement - I can see the point there. But, as it IS tied into the food/production chain, you can't expect the AI NOT to build them everywhere. The only way to cure this is to bring back the farms for extra food and don't give RR a bonus towards mines, except those on hills/mountains and production bonus resource tiles, and code the AI to build less RR. Then you could have a bombard dialog box pop up when you decide to bombard, asking you what you want to attack, from there you could choose to attack the RR improvement. This kind of setup would give you a better shot at cutting vital enemy transport routes.

All this would require a lot of recoding, so I don't expect to see it anytime soon (maybe in civ4).

 

[Iztvan]

Paying maintenance for roads/railroads is probably not an option... I don't think it would be possible with the current program. If you couldn't pay upkeep for the roads/railroad, would you randomly loose some of your road?

If you used my idea for railway stations, you would get some sort of upkeep cost for railroads, even if it would be based on the number of stations, not the length of RR-track.

It looks like a lot of people miss CivII's Farmland... well, I'm one of them. Looked darn pretty, and gave the map an new look in the later era. I like it when the graphics change with age.

 

[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.

Again, I do know that there are plenty of examples in the real world where you have farmland beside rail tracks, but that's not the point. The idea is to have a drawback for building railroads so that railroading mindlessly your entire territory will be counter-productive.

 

[John Falkner]

Originally posted by Pembroke
1) It's plain ugly. I usually end up RRing everything because it's just a good thing to do. But it definitely is ugly.

You are right!

 

[Iztvan]

Agree.

But really the problems isn't RR everywhere, it's ugly RR everywhere! So all that is needed is a "pretty RR graphic mod"?

Think of the RR as "improved infrastructure" instead of just RR.


On a nother note, It would be great if there were some kind of advantage in having RR to resources. Perhaps instead of´the current model:
* Road = resource attached to trade network
we could have:
* Every resource has X movement points range (depending on tech?), so if you had iron in Spain, you couldn't build Swordsmen in China, unless you had RR/Airport, perhaps Harbour?

 

[Roland Johansen]

The uglyness of railroads everywhere is not the only problem. The lack of strategy involved in placing your troops is more important to me. And the discrepancy between land movement and sea movement is bad too. So my proposal would be something like Iztvan's railway stations.

I propose the following changes:

-With the invention of Steam Engine we get an automatic upgrade on the movement of all roads form 1/3 movement point to 1/5 movement point and roads get a more modern look (just like city graphics change between eras).
-With the invention of Steam Engine we get the ability to build a new city improvement: the railway station. Land units on the same continent can move between cities with railway stations in one turn and lose all their movement points doing so (something like the Airport).
-With the invention of Industrialization we can build a new terrain improvement, an improvement of the ordinary mine. This modern mine gives 1 extra production compared to the ordinary mine (just like mine + railroads in the present game).
-With the invention of Electricity we can build a new terrain improvement, an improvement of the ordinary irrigation (the farm). The farm give 1 extra food compared to the normal irrigation (just like irrigation + railroads in the ordinary game).
- With the invention of Refining we get the ability to build a new city improvement: the Shipyard. Ships on connected bodies of water can move between cities with shipards in one turn and lose all their movement points doing so (again like the airport).
-With the invention of Motorised Transport we get another automatic upgrade on the movement of all roads form 1/5 movement point to 1/7 movement point and roads get again a more modern look (just like city graphics change between eras).
-Airports should only be able to receive 5 units a turn and be able to sent 5 units a turn. Maintance of airports should be 0 and cost to build 80 because they're not as usefull anymore with the addition of railway stations and the limitations I suggest.

The only things that have to be changed to the game in order to achieve the above is the ability to add new terrain improvements and a limitation to the instantaneous movement of airports (to certain units and connected bodies of land/water). That should be doable.

What do you think about the above?