Removing Railroads?

[Willem]

Originally posted by Akka

You can't change the "unlimited movement" of RR.
Though, you CAN change the bonuses that road gives : go into the "Terrain" part of the editor, then change the bonus given by a road

Not really, unless you want to add more bonuses. About all you can do is set it to 0, but then you're not able to build roads at all. Which means that you can't connect to resources either.

Though you can adjust the movement rate.

 

[connor]

What about this?
The human uses railroads to make it more challenging by only linking cities and possibly resource areas that would require rail connections, such as coal, oil, and iron. This could allow rails to function essentially as major highways between cites. The human would have to be honest. Also, you could make your railroad moves limited per turn between cities, this would take discipline of course.
The AI would naturally build rails everywhere allowing them to boost production and be more competitive with the human.
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It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.

 

[Willem]

But that wouldn't work if you had any automated Workers, you'd have to do everything manually; which would be a real pain.

 

[Mojotronica]

I like railroads the way they are, even though it's not intuitively realistic. Railroads are simple and elegant. The rules for them are straightforward and comprehensible. Taken in the context of the existing complexity of the game, I think the Sid & the Gang's rules for them are very satisfying.

Each turn in the game takes at least a year. Given a year, units in the real world could move a lot more than the 1 to 9 spaces allowed in the game by non-rail movement.

Railroad's enhancement of the economy simulates the production and agricultural boom brought about by industrialization. In this way, railroads serve a double purpose.

As for the ability to bring a massive defensive smackdown on an invading rival, anything that reigns in expansionist dreams of victory by conquest sounds good to me. As time goes by, borders have tended to become more set in stone worldwide. There's not a lot of nationalist expansion in the world today, and railroads help to simulate that.

The only drawback I see is that the AI is not as good as a human at using railroads. But this is at least partly compensated for by setting them to a high difficulty setting.

 

[TheNiceOne]

Originally posted by Mojotronica
I like railroads the way they are, even though it's not intuitively realistic. Railroads are simple and elegant. The rules for them are straightforward and comprehensible. Taken in the context of the existing complexity of the game, I think the Sid & the Gang's rules for them are very satisfying.

This is a very good point. I think the unlimited movement is blatantly unrealistic and removes the strategic need for correct placement of troops, but I think I would hate having to use 15+ turns to move my workers from one polluted square to the next.

It is easy to think of more realistic ways of implementing railroads, but I'm not sure that I would enjoy playing with them.

Each turn in the game takes at least a year. Given a year, units in the real world could move a lot more than the 1 to 9 spaces allowed in the game by non-rail movement.

Yep, so the movement speed, build time and everything else (except for the railroad movement) does not in any way relate to the time scale in the game. During the beginning, you'll easily need 200+ years to move between two neighbour cities. That's even worse than Ulysses' 10 year travel home from Troy. So the time scale argument is simply meaningless.

Not that you said something I disagree with, but I just wanted to say it

 

[Pembroke]

Originally posted by Mojotronica
I like railroads the way they are

Well, yes... but at least Firaxis ought to have given us the choice.

In fact being able to edit RR movement and bonuses in the editor would be a major boon to mod creation.

For example: scenario that is set in ancient/medieval period that has "poor roads" (road) and "good roads" (railroad) with appropriate graphics and movement costs.

I think that if it's possible then Firaxis ought to open in the editor:
- road/railroad movement costs (default: 3 / "infinite")
- road/railroad bonuses (with zero and negative amounts possible)

 

[Globetrotter]

Yep, could be when engineering is discovered, you get paved roads, then when mass transit is discovered, you get concrete (for higways), etc...

Plus what i mentioned earlier regarding the RR & Trains

 

[Mojotronica]

The editor is not nearly as good as the one for Civ 2... It's really too bad.

Mostly though, I would have liked to be able to incorporate "events" into the game.

 

[MummyMan]

I'm in favor of limiting movement on a railroad or at least creating a new unit (train) that could be build by a city that is at least connected to another city by RR.

What about modding the helicopter? Its useless anyway, i guess if someone was good at animating they could make up a train that carries or whatever. I'd rather just have decreased movement points though

 

[Hygro]

I always wanted to mod the railroads to give extra commerce as well (but then raise tech costs).