[R&F] The Industrial Revolution should not just mean "more hammers"

Civ isn’t a history simulation. At best, it’s a simulation of a particular view of history; a particular narrative. Part of that narrative is exploration and expansion (see elsewhere). But another part is the inevitable advance of technology and productivity.

Civ isn't a simulation. But does try to represent history. So, how does it "represent" history? Well, Civ mostly does it by creating analogues of real historical "things". Some times this is very abstract: Civ doesn’t have slavery, but it does let you assign citizens and choose governments and slot policy cards like “triangular trade”, and between the lines you can see the game is assuming some slavery is go on somewhere. Other times Civ is more direct: eg Civ represents espionage by letting you build actually spies. A lot of this works really well.

But Civ has no idea how to represent the Industrial Revolution. It just gives you some more hammers, and hopes for the best.

Hang on. Isn’t there a tech for "Industrial Revolution"?

The Industrial Revolution was a significant moment in human history. Some say it is the only true "Revolution" the world has every had (not counting, you know, fire, farming and possibly sliced bread). This is because it's the only 'Revolution' that radically altered the political, societal and material fabric of society, instead of just chopping off some heads and changing which elites called the shots.

So, how does Civ represent the Industrial Revolution? Well, there’s a tech called Industrialisation and then a few other techs and civics and some new units you get around that time and after. These broadly boost production (you get factories, and your mines produce more hammers for example), and boost housing (more growth means more production).

The Industrial Revolution was a singular moment in history. A radical change in how society worked, which unleashed enormous destructive and creative forces upon the world - globals wars, slavery, but also public health, vaccines, antibiotics, electricity, cards, iphones. And in Civ, this singular moment in history is represented by... some more hammers?

Only in Civ would you want to live between overlapping Factories...

Factories were a big deal when Civ VI first came out. Factories give a regional production bonus, and initially you could stack those bonuses, so one city could be boosted by multiple Factories. Industrialisation (which unlocks Factories) was therefore a game changing moment.

But later on, Firaxis decided this was unbalanced (and, hey, maybe it was) and they nerfed it stacking Factories bonuses hard.

Thing is, as I think @Sostratus has pointed out elsewhere, Civ VI was originally balanced around this regional factory stacking. Removing this has maybe caused some problems around the cost of late game units, buildings and districts. Maybe that needs to be addressed at some point. But I think there’s a more fundamental problem with how Civ represents Industrialisation.

It says it in the name: Revolution

Common sense says the Industrial Revolution should provide extra hammers. Maybe the game needs to add something to replace the loss of Factory bonus stacking and or counter the high cost of late game units and districts. But ultimately, I don’t think more hammers alone can adequately represent the Industrial Revolution.

The Industrial Revolution changed the course of human history. It was Revolutionary. It should the Revolutionary in Civ too. Giving you more of something you already have - more hammers - is not a revolution. It’s just another bigger serving of the same cake you’ve been eating since the Ancient Era. It's a bigger cake of hammers.

Game changing; not game breaking

As I've said before, I'm not trying to post ideas here, because this is not the ideas and suggestions thread (and God help any thread that ends up there, and all her sale upon her).

In some other threads, I've put forward some suggestions, really just to help clarify what I see is the problem.

This time, I don’t really have a specific solution to this particular problem. All I can say is that Civ needs something big to reflect the Industrial Revolution. Not just more hammers, or a new technology that lets you produce ... more hammers. But something needs to happen, so that suddenly there is a whole new dimension to the game.

The Industrial Revolution should unlock new mechanics, and have an impact on the scale of, say founding a Religion.

I’ve have posted a few suggestions elsewhere. One thought I've had to maybe unlock some ‘energy’ concept at some point in the game, so you have to supply your industrial society a certain amount of energy (via eg powerplants), which might in turn require you to have copies of certain strategic resources, so as to keep your cities growing. Another idea, although still not very game changing, is maybe gaining extra trade routes and or some other boost by having a certain number of factories and also strategic resources like coal or oil (which would help make strategic resources in the mid and late game more important than just “now I can upgrade my knights to tanks”). You can read more about these ideas in my signature. But I don't think those ideas really get at the problem either - because they are also just more hammers.

Perhaps the Industrial Revolution is when you can start pooling production between cities (maybe only those cities in a particular region), or you get a modern tax system allowing you to adjust or boost per citizen yields (favouring culture science etc), or can combine trade routes like how you can combine units into corps or armies? But I have no idea how anything like that would work, or how it would really capture the idea of an Industrial Revolution.

Perhaps instead of being a good thing, the Industrial Revolution should instead be a point to increase the challenge for players? Perhaps suddenly loyalty or amenities start working differently and or become tougher to deal with?

Or perhaps...

The Revolution will not be televised: but you can download it from Steam

...perhaps, perhaps, perhaps... there is no way a game like Civ VI can really represent something like the Industrial Revolution. Civ is really just a big boardgame about murdering people, building stuff, and then using the stuff you built to murder more people, or maybe build a rocket to Mars. Maybe a game like that just can't tackle a massive societal change like the Industrial Revolution?

There are also other problems which make it hard to really get into representing the Industrial Revolution. The fact that, for stronger players, the game is normally over by the Renaissance or Industrial Era doesn't help. Nor does the fact that Industrial Zones are not particularly strong Districts.

But, although I don't know how, I do think perhaps there is something that can be done here. The Industrial Revolution should be a big deal. It should be a point where the game changes gears, and you really feel it and see it. It needs to be more than some more hammers, more units and a new policy card. Perhaps the next Expansion will tackle this. Perhaps the seeds of a Revolution have already been planted. I really hope so.

[Post Script: Civfantatics really is one of the best places I've found on the internet - great mods, wonderful debate, passionate and clever people. I've made a few long posts recently, and would like to thank anyone that's read them and liked them. Likewise, I'd like to apologise to anyone who had found them tedious, self indulgent, poorly proof-read, or otherwise disagreeable. Either way, for various (not at all unhappy) reasons, this will be the last of these long posts for some time, and, apart from the Civ of the Week Posts, probably my last post of any description for a while.]

 

It would be hard to represent the industrial revolution properly in a game that doesn't really have a true health or disease mechanic.

 

A few things I thought should happen in the industrial revolution:
-Factories should give -1 housing for every city in range. This is at least a basic pollution mechanism.
-Factories should probably be something like +3 production in the city that built them, and then +production equal to the adjacency bonus of the industrial zone in other cities. Whether to stack or not is another choice, but this also gives a bigger advantage to higher adjacency bonus factories. Or even if it's the reverse, but basically building a factory needs to be more than +3 production.
-To simulate urbanization, citizen yields in buildings should probably double around then. Whether that's done at Urbanization, Industrialization, or somewhere in between (maybe each district has it happen at a different tech?), that would also align nicely with the notion of more people going to work in cities and less working out in the fields.

But yes, the fact that in real life, factories, urbanization, industrialization, and railroads all came around as massive changes to society, and in civ they're just so-so, is a bad thing. Of course, you also can't have one civ suddenly double all output in their empire at once - it also needs to coincide with a larger flow of technology between nations. Like, the game basically should move to the industrial era and then all civs behind the leader get like double science to catch up. A lot of societies industrialized very very fast in real life.

 

There were some similar discussions not long ago :

I particularly remember
https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/railroads.629143/
https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...ries-in-a-game-without-consumer-goods.631337/
but there might be more ...

When you want to implement a better "Industrial Revolution", you should first analyse all the historical factors leading to Industrial Revolution (e.g. see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revolution ) and then check the Civ 6 design of things like population, migration, growth, resources, raw materials, transportation, production, machines, employment, markets, consum, individual wealth, ...

Civ 6 is a game, not a simulation ... unfortunately ... and to change this you would need to do a complete rework of the design and maybe also include some of the colonisation mechanics like specialized citizens producing transportable and tradeable commodities.

 

Neighborhoods should give gold adjacency bonuses to factories.

 

In my opinion, the biggest downside, gameplay-wise, of this early change was that players could start treating IZs like EDs - just make sure all your cities have coverage and call it a day. As the game stands today, there is no reason to build a factory in a city covered by one except if you want to pay 3 maintenance for a great engineer point, or to help the one city boosted by Magnus (or an edge case where you have James Watt.)
I want players to have to think about investing in a new IZ to boost their production vs building another victory district. Re-enabling factory stacking would be too much; as the Op points out, the first civ to get factories would simply explode and overwhelm everyone. Some people have suggested limited factory stacking; I would advocate for a home city bonus on top of the aura. (See how they boosted the ED buildings in R&F.) Unlike the Zoo and Stadium, which I see as "cost centers" meant to be an inefficiency of having a booming empire, the factory and power plant should be a little more substantial. For example, whether inherent or unlocked by policy or boosted by policy, perhaps factories give their home city production equal to the IZ's adjacency (like shipyards) while retaining their aura. That way, players have a strong incentive to build more IZs if they are in good locations, even if you already have factory coverage.

But stepping away from my IZ addiction for a second, the "Industrial Revolution" can be a game-pivotal moment in more ways than yields. As @acluewithout was getting at with his thread about how civ6 loses its tie to the map after the early/mid game, there is an opportunity for tying things back to the map. The very first game of Civ6 I played, my remark to a fellow civ player was that it surpassed all previous incarnations in the area of building. It's just plain fun to build up your empire in Civ6, between the terrain and district/wonder planning. Again, I don't want to overstep into Ideas & Suggestions, but the industrial age is the perfect time for that "building game" to reinvent itself for the last phase of the game. This would mean something along the lines of giving players a reason to majorly reconfigure their empire- whether it's placing a railroad network, carefully planning new districts (neighborhoods / IZs being more interactive?) and figuring out how to keep everything growing, or what have you. That may even mean pushing the IZ back closer to industrialization and adding some city center buildings- civ5's forge, stable, etc- to fill the production gap (and grant engineer points.) The we have a huge burst of new things to play with all coming at once.

Now, to look at Civ & history for a moment: obviously, real life civs who had access to industrialization implemented it at incredibly different rates. Britain had a massive leg up because they 1) had easily extractable coal on their island and 2) had a society well suited to the new paradigm of an industrialising economy (relatively little regulation allowed them to set up factories and export goods more easily than say, the french.) Historians plz have mercy
On 2), perhaps players need to invest a couple policy slots to get the most out of these changes - slotting more than Craftsmen (+100% IZ adj.) to maximize their production. As above, perhaps a card would unlock the full potential of factories, or gives a production boost towards IZ district and buildings; this is just to give different civs options. Embrace the new ways to catch up to your opponent? Maintain the current policies to keep science and gold at their peak, and try to fend off others?

On 1), I recall back in Civ5 that factories required coal. Since only ironclads also needed it, coal was really just your factory budget, but there's no reason we can't figure out clever ways to work resources into the mix. Players can have one eye on their transforming nation, and the other on the outside world- full of resources and materials to power their ascendance. I'm not exactly sure how to make that look, but securing access to iron, coal, and oil is one goal to push players to interact with other countries - or make them interact with you, as Montezuma comes charging in to wrest control of your coalfields near Seoul!
In terms of tying players back to the map post middle ages, the Renaissance/Colonial period could be about securing foreign continent's luxuries* - while the Industrial period is about getting their strategic resources. (And/Or, bringing a new relevance to your domestic bonus resources - aka raw materials!)
*What I mean by this is introducing mid game reasons to have intercontinental interactions. Trade route bonuses, Luxuries from your non-home continent yield more if you control the tile #imperialism and provide more amenities if you have access to them #trade dealz. Just a way I see this post tying in as an extension of OP's prior one about the map.

TL;DR: making the Industrial Revolution significant for gameplay in Civ6 without throwing balance to the wind can be done if it's focused on a renewed interest in "building" in your own nation and giving you reasons to interact abroad.

 

THe industrial district itself has some adjacency bonuses though, so it may be worth building lots even if they have overlapping coverage.

 

It certainly does - even though I put them almost everywhere, many players (especially when the difficulty is higher) find the idea of placing a 400+ production district plus a 175 production workshop to get an extra 6-10 hammers per turn for the last 100ish turns of the game, to be a losing proposition when they could be placing more campuses. I was specifically referring to factories and power plants, which in most cases have near-zero value once the city is already covered. 390 production for 1 GE point is steep. It makes the industrialization and electrification process go very fast - you only need a handful of factories and power plants to cover most empires. Not great for keeping people engaged in 'one more turn!'

 

I think this is a big - BIG - problem with current game balance, and one that is not at all discussed enough. Building things in late game is just excruciatingly slow. This may not be so much of a problem for T3 buildings, because it means you basically just skip them. But it's a real problem with military units, because it means that any player who starts losing their old military units are royally screwed, because building new ones takes so long. This hits the AI particularly hard, because it is so bad at preserving its units.

I really like the suggestion people have put forward here, that instead of Factories (and Workshops and Power Plants, for that matter) being either local or regional production, they should be a mixture of both. This would give more incentive to build more industrial zones. I also agree that there should be secondary effects regarding industrialization, both in terms of citizen yields, and then my old dream of actually putting resources into production in factories to provide new luxury resources.

 

I modded my game where most of the units past the classical era are cheaper. some reduced by something like 20, others over 100. i don't think i have a unit over 500 production at this point.(a single unit not referring to corps and armies) tho i have noticed that reducing the base unit cost does make corps and armies cheaper.

i found this helped the AI a fair amount in maintaining a good army. i can probably try either putting them on the workshop or putting what i did here on the forums if people are interested. the changes i made were based on how i play in SP. i dont play MP. i could probably tweak it some more, but i am pretty happy where things are currently.

i do agree tho that late game units, buildings etc, are way too expensive, and the balance between production and science aren't in the best shape currently.


anyways, as for the ind rev. i think it could be done better. i would not be suprised if the next ex pac was about it. adding things like railroads(how do we not have this already...), and other mechanics around this era to make things more dynamic.

i do like the idea that factories provide a bonus to their home city equal to the adjacency on top of the normal boost. i don't like how they are meh to the home cities.

 

As it happens, I just finished reading Behemoth, a book about the history of Factories and industrialization, so let me see if I can lay out the results and consequences of the Industrial 'Revolution' that the game should be trying to mimic:

1. The cost of virtually everything, in terms of the effort in time and 'production' needed to acquire it, went down, in some cases dramatically, quickly, and permanently. This effect, in fact, has kept right on accelerating until the present: Industrial automation indicates that it will probably continue to accelerate, reducing further the 'real' cost in Time and 'Production' to Build Things.
2. The relationship between Workers and Society was altered fundamentally and, so far, permanently: whereas before industrial factory production the craftsman or skilled worker was the measure of how things were made everywhere, the Factory system put a premium on unskilled or semi-skilled labor, even child labor, and highly capitalized machinery to produce cheaply and in quantity. This meant a wholesale disruption of the 'working class' - old skills became obsolete, work became part of a system and even the timing of people's lives changed to accommodate the factory hours and the requirements of the machines.
3. Virtually simultaneously, non-animal power (steam) was applied not only to factory machinery, but also to both sea and land transportation. On the sea it was an incremental change: crossing the ocean became somewhat faster and more reliable. On land the change was almost unbelievable: average speed of travel increased by 1000% or more (horse = 5 - 10 kilometers per hour versus early steam train = 50 - 100 kilometers per hour) and the amount that could be carried increased by even more (wagon = 1 - 4 tons at 20 - 30 kilometers per day versus early train = 200 - 300 tons at 150 - 300 kilometers per day). People and goods could be moved in ways simply impossible before. Biggest consequences were that people could travel for no economic reason - for Fun - further in a half-day than they could have, with effort, in a week before, and for the first time in History food by the 1000s of tons could be transported virtually any distance to inland cities. Food supply locally no longer had any real meaning when computing city population growth, only access to steam railroad or steam ships mattered.
4. To concentrate the monstrous costs equated with building factories and machinery and railroads, stock company financing concentrated wealth beyond all but a few individuals (Fugger, Must, Croesus) before, into the hands of entrepreneurs and corporations everywhere. The useable wealth available for production and construction increased at least as dramatically as speed of travel and availability of manufactured goods.

In other words, the Factory comes connected to and combined with steam transportation, massive social change, and massive financial change all at once. The Industrial Revolution was actually a Social, Economic, Scientific, and Financial Revolution, and virtually none of this is reflected in the game as it stands.

At a basic level, this means that the 'cost' of building anything, including military units, is fundamentally changed by the Industrial Revolution. Let's take something as basic to the game as sending out a Settler and getting a city started from scratch:
Pre-Industrial: a group of people, be they Pre-Classical Greeks or Medieval Scandinavians, move into new territory. They have animal-drawn wagons/carts or sail-driven ships for transportation, a few metal-tipped hand tools for construction, and are utterly dependent on the materials in the new location, because they cannot rely on much coming to them from 'Home'.
Post-Industrial: a group of people arrive with steel weapons, tools, preserved food and Money: they can build and buy at a vastly greater rate than their earlier counterparts, and steam-powered machinery can be shipped to them quickly (steam locomotives were shipped clear around South America to San Francisco for the Central Pacific Railroad: shipping a 40 ton piece of machinery would have been a Wonder just 100 years earlier, in 1860 it wasn't even remarkable).
So, in brief:
- Production Per Population Point after Industrialization is greater than it was before.
- Gold Per Population Point, especially as realized by Stock Markets and Corporation Financing is much greater than before
- Mobility of Population is vastly greater than before, reflected in how fast population can move into new settlements (see San Francisco again - from hamlet to city in less than 15 years, courtesy of acting as Support for a Gold Rush)
- Mobility of Resources and Food is virtually unlimited compared to Pre-Industrial transportation: Any Resource or Food Source anywhere that is accessible by railroad or steam ship is available to any other point accessible by railroad or steamship: local 'city radius' becomes meaningless.

Pretty obvious that the game has a long way to go to show anything like these changes. My emphasis, though, is that ALL the changes have to be implemented: it was the combination of radical changes that made The Revolution, and changed everything that came afterwards, including Social Policies and Civics: Communism and Universal Suffrage Democracy are both direct results of the Social changes from Industrialization, and the mass armies equipped with tanks, planes, artillery and motor vehicles are simply unthinkable without an Industrial Base to build and supply them.

 

Yeah, there's certainly some interesting things that they could do. Definitely a few ideas about changing adjacencies might be an interesting way to tweak things. Like, modern cities are all about clustering things together, so while a campus in the mountains might make more sense in the olden times to get science, in the modern age it should be about having downtown universities where the real science is discovered.

I do think having a form of corporations like we had back in the civ 4 days would go a long way. That was a great way to make use of multiple resources that were otherwise useless, and was a new way to play the map, since I would go and settle a tundra fishing village or coal mine, knowing that was going to give me food/production/culture/gold/etc... in my entire empire when my corp was spread.

 

My main point was that the Industrial Revolution needs to be about more than just more hammers.

One reason why is gameplay balance. You cant just give people a huge jump in Hammers when they unlock the Industrial Revolution, otherwise the person who gets there first will just dominate the game, and no one will catch-up with them.

But the other reason is that “just more hammers” doesn’t really do justice to the Industrial Revolution.

A few more hammers is fine. But my point is Civ needs to provide other “non hammer related” bomuses, possibly some new negatives or challenges, and perhaps some new mechanics.

Some examples:

- Sure, Factories should provide hammers to their home city and regional bonuses. But how about they also provide a regional housing, amenities and or growth bonus?

- How about if the IR suddenly let amenities apply to more than 4 cities?

- Maybe having X factories could unlock powerful “Industrial” Wild Cards. These have poweful bonuses, but also maybe high gold costs?

- What if more late game mechanics were linked to owning facotories and or certain resources? Maybe you cant have a tier 3 government until you have three factories?

- Maybe there could be a late game Great Person - Great Industrialists. You’d need certai tier 3 buildings to compete for these?

- Maybe there should be special Industrial Project, that once complete you get a huge era score jump and culture?

- Maybe Civs that reach the IR exert more loyalty on Civs that havent?

Side note: speaking of stacking Factory regional production bonuses, it’s interesting Magnus now allows you to do that again as a promotion. I think this sort of confirms that stacking was very much part of the original design for Civ, and that perhaps FXS had been looking at how best to reintroduce it.

More side note: more generally, I think there is probably a more general conversation about boosting Tier 3 buildings. It seems to me all of them should probably provide mixed yields (eg Powerplants should give amentities in additon to hammers), %yield boosts, regional effects (eg Research labs should give science to all cities within 6 tiles) and or allow you to run more effecient GP projects.

 

There is, however, another evidence - the game clock. It suggests that initially things were supposed to be even slower

 

I largely agree with the OP, the IR should have much more of an impact, it changed pretty much everything. But the obvious counter argument is that it's just a game. And by that I don't mean that it can't be done but I fear that trying to do reality a lot more justice in Civ would make it so complex that for a lot of people it would stop being fun, the game would become too niche.
There are a lot of things in the game that make very little sense when compared to RL but are just there for gameplay/balancing reasons. Like the seemingly random use of required resources for units. (I need niter to build a single bombard but not for building a frigate with two dozen cannons, etc.)
Personally I would love more complex, more things interacting with each other but Firaxis has to look at the bottom line.

 

I don’t disagree with that. And perhaps that is precisely why Civ VI does currently undersell the Industrial Revolution, plus perhaps a dash of their original plan (stacking factory bonuses) not working out, and not having time or resources to replace that mechanic with something else.

That said, I think the building blocks of doing something more, without totally gimping the game, are there. Something around the Era mechanics, amenities / happiness, or policies.

• I’ve said elsewhere that Civ should do more with policy cards. Dark Age cards are great and so are Legacy cards. More could be done with those.

• But in particular, I think some special “Industrial Revolution” cards would be very cool. These would need to be more than just extra hammers - again, perhaps amenities or %science and culture boosts. Whatever. You’d only unlock these cards if you had met certain criteria, eg x factories, and perhaps temporarily lose them of that infrastructure was destroyed via war.

• I think Industrial Revolution cards, plus added a general buff to Tier 3 buildings, a specific Era score reward, and maybe making coal and oil more important, that would probably be enough to make the Industrial Revolution feel more important.

I think another tack would be to link significant population growth to industrialisation. The game sort of does that already with Neighbourhoods (which no one builds). But the game doesn’t really nail it.

A big jump in growth would be interesting - poor citizens would mean more production , but it would also put more demands on happiness and loyalty. You could imagine a dynamic where unlocking Industrialisation causes your cities to explode beyond your control, and you’re then forced to build Factories, Powerplants and Neighbourhoods which are reworked to provide amenities to support all these extra people.

As I tried to say in the OP, I think the real issue with Civ and the Industrial Revolution is that it feels very focused on just more hammers, when there are lots of other mechanics that could be dragged in.

...That’s also maybe a little unfair of me too, because in a sense all the things you unlock after Industrialisation are part of how Civ represents the Industrial Revolution - but if so, then maybe those elements suffer from not being expressly linked to Indistrialisation and or maybe need to timed together more to make a more distinct “peak” around the time of Indiatrialisation.

 

Economy in Civ games is a state controlled economy like in Stalin's Soviet Union. The player (= Stalin) decides where to build the state's factories and how to use them, where to deploy population as workers or farmers. There are no private factories, no private market, no salaries, no unemployment, no consumer goods, no import nor export of food, raw materials, manufactured goods, no consumption of goods by population besides 2 Food per turn ...

Real factories are expensive to build and expensive to maintain. Early factories produced cheap consumer goods for a world wide market pushing away local craftsmen. (E.g. import cotton from the colonies, turning it into cloth and selling it in the Empire.) Private companies developed their own technologies to increase quality and quantity of goods produced. Technologies can be protected by patent. By buying out a company (or in war), another company or a state can take over patents and technologies.

Example :
After losing WW2 Germany had to transfer its patents, copyrights and trademarks to the allies.

Spoiler :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_reparations#World_War_II_Germany

Example :
Today China with its growing home market for around 20% of mankind is taking over thousands of companies all over the world, aquiring industries and technologies in europe, farmland and mines for resources in africa, etc. Especially western technologies and industrial knowhow is used to build up modern industries in China which may dominate world market as market leaders in the coming decades.

 

I miss pollution management from previous civ games (and CTP as well), which is very important aspect of modern civilizations.

 

The tech and civics trees do advance too fast, though. Late game stuff taking forever to build makes this problem worse.

 

One way to address this - and the mid- to late-game concerns - may be in how railroads are introduced (if they are introduced to Civ 6).

What if there was a system whereby:

• The bonuses from Factories depend on the number of resources connected to them by railroad
• The bonuses from Factories extend not based on a 6 tile radius but rather based on the extent of your railroad network (the idea of Factories having both a local and aura bonus is a good one and combined with this)
• Railroads cost significant upfront investment and/or gold maintenance per tile per turn so you need a lot of bonuses flowing across a line of track to make it worthwhile to construct
• A Harbour building ("Container Terminal") could be constructed to effectively connect railroads across water
• Railroads also increase tourists and gold when connecting tiles that provide tourism (National Parks, etc.) to large population cities

Then when you move into the Industrial Revolution, you basically get a new game to play with the map figuring out how to most efficiently link your natural resources to Factories to cities, with a view to also connecting tourist locations to lower the cost of the network or to boost tourism if you're going for a cultural victory.