Routes on Water

[Nightinggale]

I have been wondering about adding routes (roads) on water. If we allow a costal transport to sacrifice itself to build a certain type of route, then we can make a plot with a ferry. We can then make it cost something silly like 20 movement points meaning land units will always end their turn on each water plot they walk on.

The good part about it is that it makes small one colony islands more useful as they will become reachable with the current pathfinder and as such semi or fully automated units can figure out that they can pass between islands. It could also be a shortcut between two places on the same island (say across a huge bay). For balance reason it should only be possible within your own cultural border and costal transports means it will only be on costal plots.

It has always annoyed me that small islands are so micro manage intensive to use. Most of the automation is restricted to one island only. I have also been wondering about the AI because automated units tend to use the AI code, meaning if human owned automated units are inefficient, AI owned units will most likely be inefficient.

Ideally I would like to be able to set up trade routes, assign transports to them and set them to allow unit transport. If the pathfinder can figure out that they can "teleport" from colony A to B that way, then we get the same goal, but in a less "cheating" way. However it will require a whole lot more development time as it doesn't fit into the existing code. Land units moving on routes is something native to the existing code, meaning it can be expanded quite easily. Also I think the BTS ability to sacrifice a worker (work boat) when building an improvement is still present in the dll, but not used in xml.

[EDIT] This thread is split from the Water Improvement "Fishing Nets" thread as they really are two different features, hence belongs in two different threads. Because the thread has been split, a few early posts (mainly #4) refer to both threads.

 

[rah]

Yeah, this would be one of those, if it's easy, probably good, but if really tedious and a lot of work, choose to work on something else.

 

[cammcken]

I'd be okay with it so long as it's balanced — although you should keep in my mind that the pier and docks already serve the same purpose as necessary investments for unlocking water tiles' full potential. I really like the dynamic of the current set up: Water tiles with piers and docks provide 3 , which is the same as a hills tile with the fully upgraded cash-crop improvement or a flat tundra tile with a fully upgraded trapper's camp.

As for ferries, I don't think it's that necessary. Yes, single colony islands require more micromanagemant, but the same is true with any colony. Especially now with coastal ships, I don't see any big difference between setting up routes using boats or using wagons. An even better feature would be an automation for existing transport ships allowing automatic ferrying of units across two designated points, if it were somehow possible. Oops; I read you're post more carefully and realized you said this already. The original concept would, however, be extremely useful to native nations. It's currently unrealistic that a nation separated by water can't help its other half during war.

 

[raystuttgart]

I have been wondering about adding routes (roads) on water. If we allow a costal transport to sacrifice itself to build a certain type of route, then we can make a plot with a ferry.

Please not a "Road".
Gigantic bridges over the oceans did not exit in those times.

If at all it should be an "Improvement" Coastal Ferry that would make it possible for Water and Land Units to enter the plot.
It is also pretty easy to do by itself. (Not talking about coding AI though to use the concept.)

But there need to be restrictions.

Otherwise it will break immersion for Human Player.
We cannot trade immersion of Human Players for a feature that basically only AI needs.

A) Such early Coastal Ferries were not going across huge ocean distance, only to really close coastal islands (usually still belonging to the same city).
So it would need to be max. 1 Water Plot. Thus it must be prevented that 2 Coastal Ferries are built right next to each other. (Which is easy though.)

B) It also should only be allowed if the Improvement Coastal Ferry can really connect / bridge 2 land plots.
(Otherwise it will look very stupidly. Needs to be coded in DLL however.)

C) Coastal Transports (small and big) must be the only Units to be able to build it.
And yes by doing so it would need to be destroyed.

D) The Movement Costs could and should stay as it is. There is no need to make the concept overly complicated.
Coastal Ferries were almost as fast as most other small ships.

Problems:

• There are only very rare cases where you really get in problems because only 1 plot disconnects an island from a continent or another island.
  
• Human Players could usually still use ships and it will be quite difficult to teach AI the whole concept.
  
• The effort to code this into Transport Automation is probably not that little either.
  
• Thus it is quite a lot of effort for little benefit. (If we don't care about teaching it AI, it is relatively simple though.)

But actually I would also consider that a feature of its own.
It is quite a different concept than what I wanted to suggest: "normal Water Improvements on Bonus Ressources".

We should probably not mix such completely different concepts.
We do that way too often already in all the threads.

Otherwise people will not know anymore what they actually vote for in the poll.

 

[devolution]

This is mostly an AI issue and it's already on my TODO list. When I originally introduced coastal transports they were supposed to carry AI colonists as well it's just that I haven't gotten around to implement that yet. As for automation for players, I agree that we should expose more of the AI functions which would allow us to add an automation for "migrate and join a better city on a different landmass" that will be usable for both the AI and the player.

The idea of having coastal transports work as "relocatable" routes is an interesting concept that I don't think any mod (BTS included) has ever implemented. A quick "hack" to test it out would be to give the units to be ferried a temporary canMoveAllTerrain tag which would effectively make them amphibious (unused tag from BTS) . However, I think this would make more sense in a BTS modern era.

Update:
I recall now that I actually implemented colonist migration for the AI but I ran into some issues which prevented a satisfactory implementation without overhauling the existing AI unit transport system.