Remove the build charge consumption for building roads

[Lynnes]

See title.

Imo it's ridiculous that every single road-tile you build with the Military Engineer consumes a build charge, especially on larger maps, where you sometimes want to build longer roads. There it becomes absolutely disproportionate to the alternative of using traders, which on the other hand not always is an option.

I couldn't find a way so far to disable build charges for certain improvements or roads.
Any ideas?

 

[isau]

With the way the game is coded the best way to fix this would be to give charges to a different unit and give that unit the ability to build roads. That way you could give the unit a whole bunch of charges (10, 20 or more) and it would be a none issue.

You probably do not want to make road building cost no charges at all though. If you did, the optimal but frustrating strategy would be to place roads on every single tile.

 

[Lynnes]

Good call, since roads don't require maintenance anymore, people (and the AI?!) would plaster the whole globe with roads..
I like the idea of an additional unit, thanks!

 

[isau]

FWIW one possible and simple edit that would probably take care of this would be to just take away all of the various things a Military Engineer can build and give them to regular Builders. Then increase the Military Engineer's charges to 20 or something. Very straightforward and easy change with no new unit needed.

The only negative would be that Builders can get more than 3 charges from policies and wonders and so on. But that may not be a big deal.

 

[Lynnes]

Hmm, sounds good, but I'm using the Military Engineer as an upgrade/ replacement for the Battering Ram and Siege Tower already (yeah, no more Siege Towers in modern eras! This aspect really annoyed me from Day 1!), so I kind of like the option to support the troops with additional building opportunities.
So I'd still prefer the additional unit, but thanks for the suggestion!
I just hope the AI will use it as well, but the Military Engineer and Builders both use the same UNITAI_BUILD, so I think it will work when I assign this to the new unit as well.

 

[LeeS]

You could try something along these lines

<GameInfo>
	<Units>
		<Update>
			<Where UnitType="UNIT_BUILDER" />
			<Set BuildCharges="5" />
		</Update>
	</Units>
	<Route_ValidBuildUnits>
		<Update>
			<Set UnitType="UNIT_BUILDER" />
		</Update>
	</Route_ValidBuildUnits>
</GameInfo>

Which moves the road-build ability to the Builder Unit, and increases its charges to compensate. I've also been playing around with the Builder's Cost Progression but have not reached a satisafactory result so didn't add that code to example of what I've been doing.

I'm not sure the AI is ever actually going to use the Builder to make Roads. I'm not sure I've ever seen it use the Engineer Unit to do it either. But to be honest I hadn't played enough games through to that point where the Military Engineer becomes available to an AI player to determine whether I am merely seeing confirmation bias in a small set of games played before I moved the ability to the Builder. I've been looking for whether the AI uses Builders to make roads, but it is not always easy to determine this.

 

[Lynnes]

I'm not sure the AI is ever actually going to use the Builder to make Roads. I'm not sure I've ever seen it use the Engineer Unit to do it either. But to be honest I hadn't played enough games through to that point where the Military Engineer becomes available to an AI player to determine whether I am merely seeing confirmation bias in a small set of games played before I moved the ability to the Builder. I've been looking for whether the AI uses Builders to make roads, but it is not always easy to determine this.

Thanks a lot, that's what I already did (without increasing the build charges though), only to see if the AI is going to use it. I have yet to start a new game to see if they use it or not, but I'll report my findings here!

Five base charges sounds reasonable for road-building, but when this goes up to 7 with civics, or 8 with civics as China, do you think the Builder might become too powerful?

Hmm... maybe I could compensate this by disallowing the construction of districts and wonders on forests, jungle and marsh, so the general consumption of build charges increases, because you have to spend more of them for removing features.
But I don't know if this wouldn't be too much of a change for such a small thing like road-building, and I'm also not sure if it's even possible to forbid the construction of districts on features, since in contrary to improvements with their <Improvement_ValidFeatures>, there only seems to be <District_ValidTerrains> and <District_RequiredFeatures>..