Infinite Road & Railroad Sprawl

[polypheus]

One thing that was extremely annoying about Civ1/Civ2 was the infinite road & railroad sprawl situation that would occur.

Because of trade and production bonuses, you had to build roads and railroads everywhere. But of course since most people would build cities close together, you ended up in a situation such that the entire map is covered with roads and railroads!

Not only does this make the land look like an ugly web of road and railroads, it really takes away from gameplay.

With so many roads and railroads, it really becomes impossible to strategically destroy them since they are everywhere.

I hope that in CIv3, the Infinite R&RR Sprawl phenomenon does not occur. An easy way to do this would be to eliminate the trade/production bonuses which create this situation. Another method might be to tax your road & railroad system based on its size.

With a much more toned down network of roads and railroads, gameplay will be much improved! Hopefully Civ3 will eliminate Infinite Road & Railroad Sprawl!

[bagdar]

The roads may become even more important because of enhanced trade. On the other hand, we shouldn't be able to build endless railways, because then our mines would expire... This is interesting!

[Ralf]

Originally posted by polypheus
One thing that was extremely annoying about Civ1/Civ2 was the infinite road & railroad sprawl situation that would occur.

With a much more toned down network of roads and railroads, gameplay will be much improved! Hopefully Civ3 will eliminate Infinite Road & Railroad Sprawl!

In Civ-1 it was even worse: heres a quote from the designer's notes in the old Civ2 manual:
"We thought maps filled with railroads in every square were just plain ugly, so we introduced farmland, supermarkets and super-highways to encourage a more well-rounded approach to civil engineering."

Some further alterations & tweaks to the R&RR bonus system must be added in Civ-3, because above counter-measures is not good enough at all. In Civ-2 railroads on every shield-producing city-area tile automatically gave you increased shield-output.

That meant that each and every city-area forest-, mountain-, mined hill-, desert-, shield-grassland-, plains-tile where automatically prone to railroading. Most grasslands was perhaps prone to improved farmlands, and some plains where transformed to improved farmed grasslands as well. Even so, there was simply to many railroads & roads in Civ-2. Even terrain-types like glaciers could be mined (and after that railroad-beneficial). Tundra + some jungle & swamp could be transformed, and after that railroad-beneficial.

I suggest the following enhanced counter-measures to be added:

- Railroads should now ONLY boost shield-output from mined hills & special resource-tiles.
No benefits on other tile-types; neither trade, food or shield ones. The increased movement-benefit is worthwhile enough in order to encourage the player to RR-connect all his cities, plus perhaps adding some strategical shortcuts & RR-knots as well, for more effective war mobilisations and more secure domestic resource-trade. Also domestic & forreign resource-trade becomes more beneficial with railroads. Once ALL of your cities have been RR-connected you perhaps get some other reward or bonus as well.

- Make building roads through irrigated tiles a slighly mixed blessing:
No roads through irrigated tiles means that the max 50% increased food-output can be maintained. Building roads through irrigated tiles means only 25% food-increase, but you get instead the increased 50% trade-benefit. Railroads through irrigated tiles also decreases the max food-output, but the decrease is NOT cumulative with roads. The benefits from late-game super-highways & supermarket city-improvements (if still there) should only further emphazise above slight difference.

Another method might be to tax your road & railroad system based on its size.

Yes, why not? Roads & railroads have always had a certain maintenance-cost associated with them. Not too much however - just enough so it gradually becomes economically unsound to have half or more of your empire-squares covered with railroads, and 75% or more covered with roads. This factor combined with above tweaks would be enough to finally thwart those ugly end-game spiderwebs once and for all.

[Inverse Icarus]

thats a good idea, taxing the road/rail system.

but is there time to impliment it?

[eNo]

Did CivII RR actually give that much of a bonus? I never built much of those because I used rails for connecting cities (I didn't think it was worth building much more of those. I needed my engineers to clearcut and irrigate all of Asia ). I did have a large road-web but didn't think it looked that bad. After all roads are pretty extensive in real life.

I don't like a road tax too much, mainly because I'm such a fan of roads and such a tax on the early game would probably be annoying but a railroad tax I wouldn't mind too much. Railroads are higher maintenance arn't they?

[Iskandar Reza]

how about taxing the road/rail system, and also an option to not pay the maintainance cost? you can still use your roads, but it'll get ... it'l get..... i forget the word.. you know what i mean.

you can always repay for the maintainance later, but it'll be costlier, since the roads have already been neglected for so long, and it's ... that word eludes me....


arghh!!!!

[Ralf]

Originally posted by Iskandar Reza
arghh!!!!

Im not quite sure what your aiming at, Iskandar, but I think you trying to say that if one allow "feature A" to be implemented one must also allow the whole damn alphabet as well, and then... well, where the hell would it all end?

I dont agree, but OK - fair enough. Lets say we skip the R&RR tax-idea. Any constructive ideas of your own then? Was everything perfect with the roads and (especially) railroads in Civ-2? Whats exactly is your opinion?

[Inverse Icarus]

the roads would DETERIORATE, as in pillgage themselves

[Ralf]

Originally posted by UberKruX
the roads would DETERIORATE, as in pillgage themselves

What the heck is the matter with people in this forum? Perhaps Iskandar Reza was right. Lets scrap the whole R&RR tax-idea, before it goes any further.

[TechWins]

I really hope a better idea has been implemented or will be than this idea. I mean I give you credit for thinking of it but it just seems too complicated. Something I thought of is to have Superhighways as a minor wonder. When you build it your railroad goes up from 1/2 point to infinite movement. Maybe something to this effect could be implemented into the game.

[Ralf]

Originally posted by TechWins
Something I thought of is to have Superhighways as a minor wonder. When you build it your railroad goes up from 1/2 point to infinite movement. Maybe something to this effect could be implemented into the game.

This topic isnt about the move-rate on railroads. Its about how to tweak the game so that it becomes a lot less beneficial to have the lion-part of your city-areas/ your empire more or less covered with railroads. Its just too damn ugly, if not else. The Civ-2 team tried to counteract it somewhat, but the measures they added was far from enough. What about my original ideas:

- Railroads should now ONLY boost shield-output from mined hills & special resource-tiles.
- Make building roads through irrigated tiles a slighly mixed blessing.

[To_Serve_Man]

Here are a few ideas -

• Take away all Road and RailRoad land bonuses and only allow them faster unit movement
• Make other map improvements to supplement the loss of the additional RailRoad shields/additional Road trade arrows
• Tax Infustructure
• Change the way Roads and RailRoads are built
• keep them the way they are in Civ2 but make the art look nicer on the map instead of icky gray lines or wavey brown lines. Maybe smaller, less noticable?

[Ilkuul]

Originally posted by bagdar
...we shouldn't be able to build endless railways, because then our mines would expire...

This is slightly off-topic, but... "our mines would expire"? Did I miss something? Where was it suggested that mines/resources are liable to expire? Aaargh!!

[To_Serve_Man]

One of the Firaxis employees said that resources could be exauhsted in one of the previews. I'm not sure which one though. It wasnt to long ago.

[rah]

Actually I'm surprised at the negative outbursts about too many railroads and roads. Especially from a lot of people that otherwise have posted in favor of increased realism.

If you looked at a map of the Eastern US broken down into squares you would not be able to find a square that didn't have multiple roads and railroads in it. If you looked at Chicago, railroads abound every couple of miles. So it terms of realism, I would expect every square of a city proper to have roads and railroads in them.

Just make them not so intrusive in the graphics and minimize some of the benefits.

RAH

[Ralf]

[QUOTE] Originally posted by To_Serve_Man

Take away all Road and RailRoad land bonuses and only allow them faster unit movement.

Too much and too little salt in the food, is not tasty either way. I think that very few want to get rid of the R&RR trade/shield-bonuses all together. I just want downtune them somewhat further, since the countermeasures in Civ-2 wasnt enough.

Make other map improvements to supplement the loss of the additional RailRoad shields/additional Road trade arrows.

Any suggestions? Personally, I just want (some) new military enhancements on terrain-squares (like navy-bases). Civil enhancements and some other military imrovements is best implemented in the form of traditional city-improvements, I think.

Tax Infustructure

I am a little ambivalent about this one. Maybe, if there is a simple and non-complex way to implement it, without stretching the RR-rax idea too far.

Change the way Roads and RailRoads are built

Are you trying to promote the CTP "Public works" concept?

keep them the way they are in Civ2 but make the art look nicer on the map instead of icky gray lines or wavey brown lines. Maybe smaller, less noticable?

Perhaps. The main issue is however about how we can get less end-game RR "spiderwebs", without loosing out production-bonuses.

Originally posted by Ilkuul
This is slightly off-topic, but... "our mines would expire"? Did I miss something? Where was it suggested that mines/resources are liable to expire? Aaargh!!

Click on THIS THREAD and read below, posted by Dan Magaha, FIRAXIS:

"7) Resources *do* deplete, depending on use. When this happens, you need to find a new source of iron/oil/uranium/whatever if you want to continue cranking out units that depend on that resource. You *can* find new resources inside your city radius as well."

Originally posted by rah
Actually I'm surprised at the negative outbursts about too many railroads and roads. Especially from a lot of people that otherwise have posted in favor of increased realism.

The critisism is not about "lack of realism". You missing the point, rah. Its a gameplay- and graphics-issue: Its far to easy to slide around effortlessly on late-game AI-civ empires, that is more or less covered with RR:s. Also; too dense and commonly available RR-spiderwebs just looks plain ugly.

[rah]

No I didn't miss the point. You missed the most important line in my post......


"Just make them not so intrusive in the graphics and minimize some of the benefits."

Which would include movement and tile benefits and the look.
Addressing all of your issues, so which part did I misunderstand.

If you're going to quote me, please don't go half way.


RAH

I have posted in many threads on my ideas to limit RR use.

[Ralf]

Originally posted by rah
"Just make them not so intrusive in the graphics and minimize some of the benefits." [...]

If you're going to quote me, please don't go half way.

OK, Im sorry. Sloppy mistake from my part.

[rah]

No problem,

There have been so many threads on roads and railroads, it has been hard to keep track of what everyone has posted in all them.
I actually thought i had posted earlier in this thread, but I had not.

But while I'm here, how about the realism part?


RAH

[johndmuller]

Rah, I'm with you on the graphics, it would be nice if the roads and railroads were not such a dominant feature on the screen; after all, while you can see roads and (barely) railroads from a plane, they are hardly overwhelming and the view from a plane would be only a few tiles at most - the game view is from well on your way to space, where you might not even make out a city.

Of course, you want to be able to see them easily when its your turn and I suppose I could toggle the view to something else if I didn't like looking at RR's....

[rah]

Heck, they could be real discreet, with an option to highlight while you're building them..
If the goto commands worked right and you were only allowed to use railroads from city to city or a train station, (similar to an airbase), You'd really never need to see them at all.

RAH
Naw, too simple

[polypheus]

While I agree that the spider web of roads and railroads make the graphics ugly, this isn't even the most important point.

The main reason is improved gameplay more than anything else. What I'd like to see is a much more toned down system of roads and railroads so that there would be a lot more open space that contained tiles without any roads and railroads on them. You'd still have roads and railroads connecting all the cities together and such but it would look more like a point to point connection and not a big spider web of R/RRs covering every damn tile! In other words, the R/RR grid would be much more coarse.

With R/RRs everywhere, terrain effects for movement simply becomes a non-factor and disruption/destruction of a R/RR network becomes impossible as there are too many tiles to pillage and it takes too long to do.

The only way to do that though is to tone down the trade/production bonuses so that building R/RRs everywhere no longer is necessary. But a penalty of some kind for having too many R/RRs will be needed as well because people would probably still build huge spider webs of R/RRs just to effectively "negate terrain".

It is this "terrain negating" effect of having R/RRs everywhere that I object to the most.

[Theben]

Huh. I never had a big problem with the huge road/rr nets cast around my empire. By late game I've usually gone perfectionist and am trying to "perfect" my cities, so I want rr's everywhere. However there are 2 things I've done different than most players- toned down the look of rr's and I fill in areas of my main continents with "national forests". The latter started out as an effort to keep my allies and other civs from settling in the non-used tiles of my continent and later kept it because I think it looks nicer.

btw, Ralf, the rr's only add +50% to shield producing tiles- which means that rr's give no benefit to grassland/plains squares except for movement.

[To_Serve_Man]

Any suggestions? Personally, I just want (some) new military enhancements on terrain-squares (like navy-bases). Civil enhancements and some other military imrovements is best implemented in the form of traditional city-improvements, I think.

I agree new military improvements would be nice.
Umm, well I was thinking along the lines of making Roads and RailRoads only important for movement. This way you wouldnt need mass webs of RRs to get bonuses. Just one route to all your cities. To make up for this, we can make normal tile improvements like Irrigation, mining, etc upgradeable. Example of this would be Farmland upgrade in Civ2 after 'Fridgerator I think. Or like CTP with the advanced farmlands and fish nets. Logicaly, you would be able to make the upgrade with a worker unit like Civ2 (irrigating irrigation) after you researched the correct tech.

As for new tile improvements, well I dunno. I'll save it for some other thread.

I am a little ambivalent about this one. Maybe, if there is a simple and non-complex way to implement it, without stretching the RR-rax idea too far.

Heres how we tax it. First off, it depends on the year and current technolgoy. For example, in 3000bc, roads didnt need much upkeep. They were just beaten paths that were traveled on often. So it wouldnt cost much (this goes along with gameplay cause you would have much in the begining part of the game anyway ) Ok, so as technology advances, better roads develope. Like Cobble stone, pavement, railroad, etc etc. The for advanced, the higher the cost per so many road(or rail) tiles. Its some amount. Not much. Like.... uhh, 1 Gold per every 4 road tiles made. And 1 gold per every 3 railroads. But this would change with technology. So it might be 1 gold per every 10 in 3000bc, but when you research Construction or something, it goes to 1 gold per every 9.
So people who want big bonuses with huge webs of road and rail will have to pay.
But this is kinda unfair. So maybe to give something to the 'Webers' out there, we could make certian techs give road and rail a little Extra bonus. So there is a bigger price since you want more of that bonus. Or maybe not, cause we do want to get rid of the webs.

Are you trying to promote the CTP "Public works" concept?

mm.. maybe?
Actually I had more of a SimCity idea in mind actually!
To make road and rail, you would drag and drop. It would take X turns build. You cannot build road or rail any other way. Just click City A then click City B and a road is made. You cant build rings around cities, the game Forces you to only make roads between cities.... just some idea I had.. I never really thought of it much. I don't mind if you make fun of this one

Perhaps. The main issue is however about how we can get less end-game RR "spiderwebs", without loosing out production-bonuses.

Well, some Spider-webs in the world look very nice and pretty.
What i'm getting at is if road and rail look nice, then it will be ok to build webs since they dont hurt peoples eyes to see them but infact look purdie in the game

Suden thought gang-
What if we Limit the number of Road and/or Rail connections a city can have. Maybe certian city improvements can be build, tile improvements or techs can increase the number of connections a city can have. So you cant build roads all around the city otherwise they would be considered connections? hmm? just trying to brainstorm.

[Theben]

Suden thought gang-
What if we Limit the number of Road and/or Rail connections a city can have. Maybe certian city improvements can be build, tile improvements or techs can increase the number of connections a city can have. So you cant build roads all around the city otherwise they would be considered connections? hmm? just trying to brainstorm.

One big

I don't want taxes on the road networks either. Too big a can of worms.

The only 2 things I think would help are to 1) give trade bonuses to the tile, and not dependent on roads, and 2) make them look nicer.

In the List we were actually suggesting #1 with the added bonus of about 5% increase in Food/Production/Trade because with a road less materials would be lost en route to the city for processing. This was upgraded- up to IIRC +25% with rails- as newer roads/rr's were put in place. It would only have worked with M@ni@c's x10 idea, so I'm not asking for it now. But to have roads & rails w/o benefits exceeding costs is silly.

[NeoBlade]

Ok,IMHO,I like rails the way they are..of course,I like to win.However,after playing Alpha Centauri,I'm plenty used to limited movement thanks to the eons it took to get mag tubes if those weren't a priority.

I loved rail webs myself,they looked..cool...but I never had the time to make them,I left it to the compy.Its acctually a bad thing to make web rails,it compromises your nation to spys.A few spies get in and next time next turn half your nations been converted.-_-...any one who makes a web net's a fool in mine eyes.Of course,I tend to make very good use of spys with my uber democracies that churn out tons of spys and "buys" enemys.

Now..I have a couple suggestions.

One-Instead of limiting rr movepoints,maybe you should alter gameplay.Like some above said,make all turns happen at once,so it becomes more like a real time chess game.

Pause for Resource management
when a player finishes(human or AI),they signal that,when everyones done,the Fight phase begins.When everyone runs out of movepoints it phases back to resource management of turn number two weather everyone eles is finished fighting or not.

Resource management means setting diffrent things and makeing adjustments as needed.So,now the fightings realtime and the micros more "turn like" makeing management possible.This is,in a way,sort of like RISK or SHOGUN,in which fighting and resource management are seperated.

Its a tad..diffrent,but hey,its time to let go of the known and try the new...I think as we enter a new age(weather you know it or not) we should start updateing various aspects of our gameing systems.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by polypheus
With R/RRs everywhere, terrain effects for movement simply becomes a non-factor and disruption/destruction of a R/RR network becomes impossible as there are too many tiles to pillage and it takes too long to do.

Why is this a problem? Why do you think empires built railways? To transport troops! Why do you think that destroying a railway network should be easy?

[Kc7mxo]

Railways were almost always a commercial endeaver. Very rarely, except during ACTUAL war did government's lay rail. The primary purpose of rails are for trade.

A

[Kc7mxo]

Railways were almost always a commercial endeaver. Very rarely, except during ACTUAL war did government's lay rail. The primary purpose of rails are for trade.

And why would railroads decrease the amoutjn of food supplied? They don't take up much space. You can farm right next to em. ANd they'ver great for transporting what you produce.

Personally, i would like there to have been a canal system as well as railroad system implemnted. And second, i think infiinte movement on railroads should be removed. Also, it woudl be nice if they enemny couldn't use railroads that were in your cities radius. Where are they getting the trains anyway? Did they bring them on the boats? Hah.

[Deathwalker]

I agree, though I belive that the infinite rail was a mistake, you should have something like three times that of road but not infinite.