Why City Connections are not intuitive

[Elhoim]

Thanks to TCS mod, we can now check which city is connect to each, and found out why I don't find it intuitive.

Basically, a city in order to be connected to another it needs to have a direct road connection, it doesn't count if it goes through another city (I modded the game to have 20 trade route range in antiquity for testing).

I started to suspected it when I made a merchant create connections from cities to towns, and saw that new roads where being made around the cities the road was going through. Hopefully it can be tweaked in some way that connections through other cities are considered connected as well.

 

[Krikkit1]

Having it effectively one large network (as long as each part has a road or coastal/port) connection would make far more sense and have far less micro weirdness.

 

[Leyrann]

I have a bit of a rough idea of what they're supposed to be doing by now, although it's difficult to actually make that happen, and it includes walking merchants between settlements and checking whether you need to make connections.

In my opinion, the right way to go about it is to just connect nearby settlements, and any network of connections by definition connects all settlements with each other, independent of the precise route. This already happens with naval connections anyway, as far as I understand it. Then, every town gets it's own little interface where you can select which city or cities the town should send food to, and it evenly distributes it's food across all selected cities.

 

[Evolena]

Keep the range limit, allow passing through another settlement.

 

[Krikkit1]

I have a bit of a rough idea of what they're supposed to be doing by now, although it's difficult to actually make that happen, and it includes walking merchants between settlements and checking whether you need to make connections.

In my opinion, the right way to go about it is to just connect nearby settlements, and any network of connections by definition connects all settlements with each other, independent of the precise route. This already happens with naval connections anyway, as far as I understand it. Then, every town gets it's own little interface where you can select which city or cities the town should send food to, and it evenly distributes it's food across all selected cities.

I'd say just have all towns automatically even split among all connected cities.

 

[Eramas]

I'm currently having the same problem. Trying a one city challenge, I have 9 towns, but only 4 of them provide food to the city, the remaining 5 don't have a direct road connection so they don't send any food, disappointing.

 

[Elhoim]

Keep the range limit, allow passing through another settlement.

Yeah, the range limit is fine, and would make trading towns more interesting.

Also another solution would be towns sending the food to towns if there's no city in range, and then those towns can send it to a city.

Right now it's a mess that's only seen thanks to the modder's work. Here Capua and Mediolanum are visibly connected, but they are not until you send a merchant. This is why it's important to have good UI feedback, this is stuff players and devs could have seen and improved.

 

[Elhoim]

Another messy situation. I have a merchant in Rome, I can build roads to Ravenna or Mediolanum. The moment I build a connection to one, the other one can't be connected.

 

[Leyrann]

I've actually had an issue where I could connect two settlements from one end, but not from the other end.

There's a lot of weirdness going on with this system.

I'm going to repeat my call to simplify the system to 'everything in a network is connected to everything else in the network, food is either evenly distributed among cities, or can be manually distributed according to player preference'.

 

[Elhoim]

I'm going to repeat my call to simplify the system to 'everything in a network is connected to everything else in the network, food is either evenly distributed among cities, or can be manually distributed according to player preference'.

Yes, this so much.

 

[Elhoim]

Another issue:

- In order to connect cities on the coast, the city center must be next to the coast. For example, this city doesn't connect with Rome even though Rome has a fishing quay.

- BUT if they are on the coast, they connect with all coastal cities even if they are in a lake!

I'm amazed at how many issues a CRUCIAL system like this one has. And given Firaxis track record I don't know how much they will fix it, and it's something out of the scope of mods.

 

[Riconatic]

Also there are some pure bugs.

I had game where my capital dropped out of connection in age transition. TCS ui mod showed it connected, but resource assignment screen said no connections and I was unable to assign. Few turns later it connected in resource screen.

 

[Taefin]

The complexity of the connections system is just so discordant with the general trend of simplification. I agree it should be a single network, and a city center should not need to be coastal.

 

[Hildebolt Von Berenreuthe]

Does anyone know how connections work vis-a-vis the treasure fleets system? I have played a game recently on Continents map and many of the distant lands resources are inland, and they therefore apparently don't seem to count towards treasure fleets. Can't find any decent information about that, but it seems bizarre that you can only return treasure fleet resources if they are based in a coastal city.

 

[Elhoim]

Does anyone know how connections work vis-a-vis the treasure fleets system? I have played a game recently on Continents map and many of the distant lands resources are inland, and they therefore apparently don't seem to count towards treasure fleets. Can't find any decent information about that, but it seems bizarre that you can only return treasure fleet resources if they are based in a coastal city.

As bizarre as it is, that's how it works.

Again, is incredible how weak is the state of this system considering how crucial it is to many subsystems (towns sending yields to cities, treasure fleets, railroad and factories).

 

[Elhoim]

Sigh, this is broken beyond belief. Roma doesn't connect with Patavium (even though the road goes there from a previously razed settlement) and I have no way to connect it with a merchant.

 

[MasterPaw]

if you allow connection trhough cities, it makes the town specialization giving influence from connection less interesting as every town would grant basically the same influence?

i missed that connection was used to trasnfer town foods, i thought it was split equally

 

[Elhoim]

if you allow connection trhough cities, it makes the town specialization giving influence from connection less interesting as every town would grant basically the same influence?

Yeah, that's a good point. I don't mind the connections having a limited range, if it worked correctly.

i missed that connection was used to trasnfer town foods, i thought it was split equally

Yeah, it does, and if there's no city connected the food goes to waste (the town doesn't grow when specialized).

 

[Leyrann]

if you allow connection trhough cities, it makes the town specialization giving influence from connection less interesting as every town would grant basically the same influence?

i missed that connection was used to trasnfer town foods, i thought it was split equally

Then change that to 2 influence for every settlement within X tiles.

 

[peter79]

To be honest they just need to look at Old World and do that. In Old World you just press a key and it highlights all connected tiles.