A continuation of a discussion we were/are having in the
SDK Changes thread, this is a discussion about how one possible feature, allowing a unit to "wait for a train", allowing a train to "pick up passengers", and allowing trains to move units, should work, or if it should be abandoned. It is also generally about transport and travel of units, however for now I want to focus on the trains.
Here are some relevant posts by Kailric and I.
Kailric said:
2. Looking into the trade routes and just thinking on how to add in Passenger pickup commands. Its really going to take some fancy coding to get it to work seamlessly. But I wonder though how useful these commands will be? Like when I suggested this I was thinking if you had cities spaced out long ways apart this would be a neat command to move units about but how far apart does the player place his cities... not very I would think. I try to keep mine close together. That being so even with roads it would normally take no more than two turns to move a Colonists from one city to the next. Thats probably faster than actually "Waiting on the Train". So I am thinking unless some game mechanics are changed these commands wont be used often.
Some ideas or suggestions:
-There could be hazards for trying to "trek across country" by foot. This would be very historically correct as well. Indians, Starvation, getting lost, or bad weather, where some of the major events that could happen to travelers. There could be some kind of random check for each plot a Colonists has to travel across. If say the Colonists encounters bad weather he could become immobile for a turn. Or you could charge Health points for each plot a Colonist crosses on foot. Just a couple ideas off the top of my head. But something like that would make "waiting for the train" a more viable option.
TC01 said:
Several people have suggested making rivers an actual feature, which you can send ships across. The suggestion I liked best was making rivers a feature that took up most of a plot (whereas the current rivers are minor rivers and streams), that have an incredibly high movement cost for non-water units. Then you could build bridges as an improvement across them and railroads and roads over the bridges. I kind of liked the idea.
Chibiabos also suggested that we could make Canyons impassable features found along rivers... this might also work.
We could add blizzards (like in the FFH Age of Ice scenario) to frequent the Rocky Mountains area, thus making travel near there dangerous. Once the west coast section is added to the mapscript this will become more meaningful.
We could also make random events that cause colonists to become ill, or suffer bad weather like you said. They would only trigger outside of your borders. Perhaps promotions like "Woodsman" and "Mountaineer" could also decrease the likelyhood of such events occuring.
Kailric said:
-Instead of having the train pickup a Colonist there could be an automatic transport feature. Much like Civ4 is, once you have railroads movement is basically free right? So maybe something like if you had a railroad between two cities Colonist could move between those two points in one turn. A feature such as that would be more useful.
TC01 said:
I don't know how much of a graphical challenge it would be to design, but perhaps we could make this work like it does in Planetfall? In that mod for Civ 4, your land units can cross ocean tiles as long as they are inside your territory. When this happens, your unit looks like it is "attached" to a transport ship.
Perhaps when you move a non-train onto a railroad, we could make it look like there's a Locomotive or other train unit in front of it, as if it is "riding the train"?
Here are some questions you might want to consider when discussing this:
1. Do you typically build colonies close together or far apart? I.e., would the train commands be useful? (The discussion on those commands begin in
this post and ones below it in the main mod topic.
2. Should we implement "dangerous travel", such as blizzards or random events causing sickness or bad weather?
3. Would changing rivers as described above be a good or bad idea?
4. Would it be better to just make units able to move very quickly on a railroad,
as if they were being transported?
