We really want to avoid having to build “workers” or some other construction unit to build out of city improvements. But at the same time, we’d like it to be more interesting than simply clicking “build road to city X”.
What do you think?
Nice...I love that idea, especially if some fallen fiend can cast a pollution spell on it and ruin everyones megabux trade.
Great thread everyone, I had no idea what a dark horse roads were.
Maybe roads automatically spring up in between cities that are prosperous trading centers over time...as long as you have a trade treaty, or between your own cities.
You could stop trade, or break a treaty with certain actions or edicts...and you could work to improve any existing roads by making them smoother/wider/paved with improvements, but for the most part have them be something that merchants create on their own?
I vote for organic tracks that connects places where there are lots of foot travel. It can be caravan's routes or where you march your massive troops. Tracks provide minor speed bonus to travel.
I vote for Roads that need to be build, utilizing man power and material (e.g. stone). In terms of the best UI on how this is done, allow us drawing waypoints for the workers. (Waypoints, should be a standard feature of this game anyway as I've mentioned about a year ago)
Referring to my old post Roads, Fortress and the Great wall on the Strategic Map, forts and defensive walls should be buildable on and off roads, offering Choke points for caravans and other units. Let us paint on the map with roads, fortress and walls.
YES!!!! Paint the Map with Roads, Fotresses, and Walls. I LIKE!!
Haven't read everything said thus far, but here's my two cents:
Organically grown roads are a good idea, especially if they scale based on city size, research, etc. That said, more control is necessary for multiple reasons. If, for example, you want to restrict movement to a certain city, you should be able to choose existing roads and shut them down. This could be useful if you want to slow an enemy advancing down one of your roads towards your city.
Second, there's the military perspective. To any army, roads are really freaking important. Logistics are argueably the most important part of any military campaign-- it doesn't matter how well trained or numerous your army is if they're freezing, starving, and weaponless. If you want to be able to quickly reinforce an army sittting on a strategically valuble point, organically built roads aren't going to do it, since that point may not have any of the economic factors that drive organic road growth. I don't know if a builder unit should be used, some sort of magical means, or you just have the troops themselves build the thing, but player directed roads are a must.
At least, that's what I think. Sorry if I copied
What I meant above is that, roads while important, there should be some other buildable structure allowing players to setup some 'gate' controlling the traffic flow (either friendly or enemy's assaults). Forts, Castles etc are control points that I wants to draw enemies to fight with me. Without these buidable structures, road is as adv to me as to my enemy.
thread too long...
anyway I like one of the ideas suggested on the first page where roads can receive upgrades beside the standard "cobblestones". I was thinking of something like what the Inca did where you would establish way stops or watchtowers or toll booths associated with the road that would provide bonuses beside movement such as health regen or more wealth
That's actually how it works in RL. It's the reason that part of the preparation for a defense is to start blowing up roads and bridges leading to the place you're defending. Something you also see a lot is the wholesale destruction of roads behind retreating armies, to deny them to the enemy (that could actually look pretty cool w/ magic)
This is an excellent idea. An organic road system will create a useful and lucrative transportation and commerce network through your realm, but it's going to become a liability if the enemy is poised to exploit that mobility to roll up your cities. That's when you cast Roadwipe, and the roads are overgrown with hedgerows and oak trees. Or smothered in lava, or blasted with craters and trenches, or buried in rockslides and swallowed up by earthquakes. There could be several ways to do it, each with its own tactical implications. (E.g., lava roads are impassable for a few turns, or so long as the spell is sustained, and then they cool down and become useful roads again.)
I like the idea of road maintenance a lot. I really liked how in Middle-Earth a lot of the old roads were still around, but barely; and most had disappeared entirely. If roads need to be maintained, then it allows us to have empires/kingdoms diminish over time, without necessarily being eliminated completely.
I would like games to be winnable without the need to kill every last unit/city of every other faction. Road maintenance--while a very small component--helps get that closer.
Road maintenance as a phenomenon in the world driven by city development, trade, spells, etc. whereby roads appear or disappear, develop or degenerate -- that sounds good. Road maintenance as a per-turn fee draining your budget? Blegh. It would be rather inelegant to slap an inherent counter-charge on the trade income that roads provide when we could instead assume that whatever costs exist to roads are reflected in a notional reduction to trade revenue that doesn't clutter up the balance sheet.
Organic roads, certainly. I don't want to have to waste my time telling the game where to put each road, when all I want to do anyway is build roads from one city or outpost to the next.
And as for upgrading? Well, just think of the similar case that was mentioned in another recent thread, of houses. All houses in all your cities automatically upgrade whenever you have the proper city size / technology / whatever. Why on earth would roads ever operate any different? If manually upgrading every house tile is no fun, is randomly upgrading every road tile going to be?
Jeez, a bit late for this one. Having read about half the thread, organic roads sound great and could be fascinating to watch develop. I reckon after a certain amount of time and trade a rudimentary road could come about which will offer a bonus to time or trade value. This could be taken into account by all other traders thereafter:
without something like that would you just get a patchwork of boring straight line roads everywhere? I want to see major thoroughfares develop. You could have several grades of dirt track (foot, horse and caravan) to get new routes to be attracted towards more developed ones.
King fella could decree roads with a click and a drag, represent it with a flag every few tiles and have it cost upkeep per flag dependant on the quality of road he's trying to make. Cost will drop as it goes through these levels and only he can make a good dirt track become a good road, only at the point of 'good road' do you get good military (friend and hostile) bonuses and can build patrols and towers and whatever. You could have some button to show how much trade is going through your routes, black for low, red, orange yellow, white for high to help out.
The roads should be built by a bunch a geezers who run out of the cities. Personally I don't see it necessary to penalise the cities in question for that.
hey it would be cool that if you had a road connecting a city to one of your fringe towns and that fring town gets destroyed by monsters or an army it would become a ruins tile over time if you don't rebuild it. after it becomes a ruins tile maybe the road gets all grown up with weeds and looks unmaintained because of lack of use. then monsters and stuff start spawning out of the ruins and attack the closest settlement. that would be neat.
Excellent point. I retract my earlier support for road maintenance.
I maintain my support for organic, basic roads, and for deliberate, improved roads.
I want to re-iterate my previous idea since no one made a comment about it earlier:
This simple system will allow players to construct roads and other improvements around their cities without being forced to micromanage construction units. This system will also allow improvements to be (relatively) realistically constructed around cities: the larger the city the more advanced/further away improvements it can build.
Here is an example image to demonstrate my system:
Its an interesting idea. Edit, that is what you said. I misread it.
So you have 5 citys in total that generate 76 infstrsucture points. You are buidling a road leading between the citys. A road costs 10 points, this turn 7 roads are built near the city?
Out in the wilderness roads cost 30 points andyou can only build 2 per turn? Builds them in the oder you planned.
I like it.
That limits the expansion rate like workers do but its far easier to manage. (and gives the user another fun resource!)
Limiting the spam of roads should be done via a desire NOT to have roads somewhere (via some danger or bouns), not by fear of crippling your econemy or simply because its so slow or tedius to accomplish.
Yes!! By George I think "Progress" has got it!!!
-er, one modification I would make would be that there is only one 4, starting from the City that originally que'd the road. Therefore it would only travel along 5 from City 1 all the way to City 2.
Also, throw out the "other" form of Road building, and merely have it be an "improvement" project of City 1, using City 1's resources.
The Diagram, however, nearly perfect
great diagram
Here is an in-depth example written for the developers. I assumed all of this would be hidden from the player to make things as simple as possible. Again, this is a description of how the system would be working "behind the scenes".
Let's say the large city generates 12 infrastructure points a turn while the small city only generates 4.
Cities would be programmed to spend their infrastructure points on the nearest possible improvement simply due to efficiency. This is because of how the costs work:
From the small city's point of view, the closest road tile that is under construction (road tile A) only has a total cost of 8. Meanwhile the (again from the small city's perspective) the road tile that is closest to the large city that is under construction (road tile B) has a cost of 40. Naturally the small city will work on constructing road tile A since it will only take 2 turns rather than work on constructing road tile B which would take 10 turns.
Now from the large city's perspective road tile A would have a total cost of 46 while road tile B would only have a cost of 14. So again logically the large city would work on constructing road tile B rather than road tile A.
All of this would be happening in the background. As far as the player is concerned improvements get built fastest when they are closest to a city (depending upon how transparent the dev's would want the system).
For one last example: let's assume that the player is building ONLY one improvement, and it happens to be close to the small city. From the large city's perspective the total cost is 500 while from the small city's perspective the total cost is 45. The two cities will work together on constructing the improvement:
After writing this it's clear that it would be easier for developers if they simply weighted a city's point spending rather than actually converting the base cost of the improvement (rounding errors would mess things up). The end result would be the same - the large city would simply be contributing 1.08 points a turn to an improvement with a cost of 45 rather than contributing 12 points to an improvement with a cost of 500.
Again this would be the internals of the system which would not be displayed to the player in such a detailed manner.
If you have a per-turn pool of roadbuilding capacity that has to be used that turn or it's lost, it will create a couple of related problems:
1. Micromanagement of roadwork. If the player doesn't always have each infrastructure pool building new roads, points will be lost to no benefit.
2. Proliferation of roads. With roads as a waste product of cities, they'll be everywhere and not special.
There are two ways I can think of to band-aid these problems, and both of them are bad:
1. Road maintenance. Now the road system is crufted up with road micro, and the budget is crufted up with the fallout from building roads.
2. Slow growth. Balance infrastructure points so that full-bore road building has restrained results. This is bad because now the player's painstaking road management has only trifling consequences.
The bottom line for me is that road mechanics should reward attention but not demand it, and certainly not demand it consistently. Even a simple Simcity 1 model where you lay out a road and it is built in exchange for money accomplishes this in a modest way -- the player who is concerned with roads can build them extensively, but it's also possible (in a MoM-like game, not Simcity) to play without roads and use other tricks, like a combination of fast scouting parties, large forces massed in cities, and dimensional gates.
But the better way to handle this is with organic roads, where players can, when concerned with roads, build and manage cities with an eye to the roads that will arise in consequence (or cast relevant spells). When NOT concerned with roads, players can disregard the process and still get a road network, although maybe not an optimal road network for their purposes. And players can deliberately sacrifice roads for other things, for example, by building a recruitment-oriented city that's full of houses and mustering grounds but short on anything that would assist road-forming trade links. It's a system of meaningful decisions without being a system of chores.
Well, I think that the road development should only be the job for one city. The city the road is budding out from. If roads are your priority, then build roads with your big cities, to the smaller cities. If other things are your priority then build roads from the smaller cities to the bigger cities. The latter option would take longer ... however ANy of the cities connected to a Road can upgrade that Road. If City 1 and City 4 are connected to Road Network Z, even if City 4 build all/most of the roads, City 1 can upgrade them.
(a road network would mean connected "outside" of the city. A road that runs through a city would be cut in twain by the city, for purpose of designating road networks.
Most theoretical road networks would only consist of one road, but if you build a forked road, or snake a secondary road from a primary one, you get a "road network". Any City connected to the road network can build a secondary "branch road" at any location along the network. Additionally, any city can choose to upgrade either the entire network, or only the primary "river road" between points A and B.
Magicke was definitely onto something with the idea of rivers being useful for commerce. As I recall, Civilization handles this pretty simply by giving a trade bonus for working river tiles, and Elemental could probably benefit from a very similar system. Perhaps a river connection should give a trade bonus, river or lake presence in the city zone should give a food bonus, and rivers should count as links for the purposes of resource distribution (if applicable). Trade across bodies of water might or might not require an appropriate building (as Civ does with harbors).
I hate infrastructure points.. I don't want yet another number to keep track of and spend.
Personally, I like the idea of organic roads that appear over time without player intervention. I think this returns to the idea of the world of Elemental being organic and unique each time the player starts a game, however I can certainly understand the hesitation with this idea or the wish for something more controlled.I like Progress' idea, as it functions simply and easily and makes sense. Having said that, I'd like the option to automate the road building function; Civ IV's addition of automated road construction was a heaven-sent.
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