Railroads--your thoughts...

[kserra11]

I really wish there was a way for me to edit the movement values of railroads...

Personally, I don't like the unlimited movement of RR's...and would love the option of changing it to 1/10 or 1/15....

I think it takes away from some of the strategic value of the game, since you no longer really need to worry about troop placement since you can respond to an attack within one turn...

Have there been any changes or ideas that you've come up with to alter or re-balance the effects of Railroads?

I'm at the point now where I might just eliminate railroads and increase roads movement to 1/5 or something...

Thoughts???

Kevin

[Jaybe]

Rails as they are are probably here to stay because of core-engine coding and the substantial simplification it lends to AI military decisions. AI units can stay hunkered in their cities and come out to strike at will.

An alternative to reduced movement of RR is to disallow rail movement adjacent to an enemy unit. This would involve moving by rail, then additional movement to come adjacent to the enemy. For slow-movers, this becomes a 2-turn process for an attack. It also (again) complicates AI programming considerably.

--
If you eliminate rails, you will also be removing RR's effects on irrigation/mine production.

[mrmitchell]

If you increase roads, remember that affect lasts through the entire game, even in the Ancient ages.

But doesn't an army going across the country in 5 years (game time) make sense?

[Sarxis]

Railroads as they are have been a hallmark of CIV since the beginning.

[MrWhereItsAt]

A difficult question as ever, kserra. Modern countries can strike at each other within a matter of hours, and how do we reflect this in Civ? As it is, it takes years if not decades of gametime for this. The problem is less about having RRs confer infinite movement as it is about the decision on how fast to have turns progress. When each turn is a year or more, you want land troops in the modern era to get anywhere accessible to RRs (or roads, really) within a turn. But at the same time if you have Ships with enormous numbers of moves you can strike and sail to safety before your opponent can even get a look in. This will always be impossible to resolve with a TBS.

I think that RRs as they have been implemented in all Civs are the best way of going about it - they preserve gameplay and balance ahead of maintaining the reality. If you have a better way please by all means tell us, as we'd be dying to hear.

And I am sure Firaxis and Breakaway (plus every other TBS company) would be just as interested.

[Peter Triggs]

From the Civilization Games General/Future Forum:

Originally posted by Torkkeli
Also do not forget that the hardcoded value for railroad movement must be removed. It would be optimal if it could be customized in the editor, say, from infinite to increasing with technologies (steam, electricity, maglev).

Originally posted by hexagonian
Infinite movement - Another one of those gameplay elements that need to be removed or made editable. Geez if Firaxis is so in love with this 'feature' they could make rail movement 1000 tiles - at least it would then be editable

An obvious solution and if they did this you might find that you prefer to play without infinite rail movement.

[Plotinus]

There's something wrong with the movement in Civilization anyway. I mean, if George Bush wants a ship somewhere, he doesn't have to wait five years for it to get there (although things might be interesting if he did). And it's not just in modern times - it didn't take Hannibal decades to travel from Spain to Italy with his army. To be realistic, all units should have massively increased movement. The problem is that this would make the game unplayable, because one player could send all his units crusading into the enemy's territory and wipe him out in a single fell swoop before he has a chance to respond. And that's because Civilization is turn-based. If (shocking heresy) it were *not* turn-based, then it might be possible to make movement and so on make a lot more sense without screwing everything off.

[Paddy]

Originally posted by Plotinus
There's something wrong with the movement in Civilization anyway. I mean, if George Bush wants a ship somewhere, he doesn't have to wait five years for it to get there (although things might be interesting if he did). And it's not just in modern times - it didn't take Hannibal decades to travel from Spain to Italy with his army. To be realistic, all units should have massively increased movement. The problem is that this would make the game unplayable, because one player could send all his units crusading into the enemy's territory and wipe him out in a single fell swoop before he has a chance to respond. And that's because Civilization is turn-based. If (shocking heresy) it were *not* turn-based, then it might be possible to make movement and so on make a lot more sense without screwing everything off.

hahaha interesting, would what ol' Hannibal would have thought of G.W.

As to myself, I love the rail systems, and think of them more as something my local government could really use.

[Space05us]

If (shocking heresy) it were *not* turn-based, then it might be possible to make movement and so on make a lot more sense without screwing everything off.

leave now and dont come back...

Civ is turn based because thats how its been, that is Civ, change that and its no longer Civ, its just another one of billions of RTS.

Personally, I don't like the unlimited movement of RR's...

and just like Civ being turn based is because it is Civ, railroads provide infinite movement, for that is Civ. Although having a way to change the movement values for RR would be nice for scenarios and for people like yourself who want to change that aspect of the game.

[kserra11]

The key would be to just have the option of changing the value...then people can edit it and perhaps find a happy medium for their styles...

Personally, I don't really pay attention to the length of years that go by per turn...one turn is one turn in my mind...

As stated before...while everyone is saying that in the modern age, an army would be able to move cross-continent within a year is true...but if you use that logic...so should a ship or plane...

What has happened is that the very mobility of these vehicles which makes them the striking force of modern militaries has been downgraded by the "blitzkrieg" abilities of land forces and the inabilities of air and sea units to match that speed...

Kevin

[Willem]

Originally posted by MrWhereItsAt


I think that RRs as they have been implemented in all Civs are the best way of going about it - they preserve gameplay and balance ahead of maintaining the reality. If you have a better way please by all means tell us, as we'd be dying to hear.

One of the issues that keeps coming up is the discrepancy between land movement and sea movement. And awhile ago someone brought up the idea of having a rebase option similar to aircraft, which I thought was a good idea. That way ships could be relocated very quickly, but once they arrive at a port, they revert to their limited movement rates for local manueveres/patrols.

[UnityScoutChopper]

Willem, that's a fantastic idea! Two thumbs up to the person who came up with it.

[Tall Stranger]

Interesting.

Off the top of my head, my only concern would be to limit such a capability to modern, non-transport ships or somehow prevent it from being used as a way to dump massive numbers of ground units into a city. If we can have this capability arrive around the time of airfields, it might work. Otherwise, building a single harbor on another continent and having a good number of transports could let you land huge numbers of knights or cav and crush the AI.

[YC4B4U]

It isn't the first time this has been discussed and it won't be the last time...

The unlimited movement of railroad does reduce the strategy in the game with respect to placement of units and the creation of strategic reserves. But this would only effect the users as the computer doesn't have a strategy to speak of anyway.

I personally don't like the re-base option. In my current game I moved a Carrier to the opposite side of my enemy then re-based a bomber onto it (on the other side of the earth and straight across the enemies land). The same idea applies to ships - it would take the strategy out because it allows the quick relocation of naval power. Although I don't like the re-base ships idea, I am sure the Russians would have like it in 1904...

Basically it is a turn based game and you live with its limitations.

[geniemalin]

I would like to see a re-base ships option. The problem of unit-dumping can be solved by allowing only empty ships to re-base.

[Xorbon]

A possible compromise (for Civ 4 perhaps...) would be to still allow infinite railroad movement, but units would only be able to use them to travel from city to city. That is, you'd have the unit board the rails in one city, and get off in another.

To move units to tiles other than city centres, units would have to use roads. Speaking of which, when "motorized transport" (or "automobile" or whatever...) comes around, roads could be upgraded (by workers) to "highways" which could provide a further increase in movement over roads (say, 1/6 or 1/9 of a movement point per 'highway' tile).

[Shogun Gunner]

Originally posted by Paddy the Scot
hahaha interesting, would what ol' Hannibal would have thought of G.W.

G.W. would have asked him if Hannibal was "for him or against him"

Being that Hannibal is from North Africa, GW would have been suspicous of his ties to Libya

About railroads... well, the way I look at it is that the timescale issue is solved for land, but not water. Again we see the falloff from real life/history to civ. But I can live with that...playability is a priority.

My solution, or rationalization, is that I think of the scale of a campaign, not a battle, when it comes to battles. The turns are a year, and your unit was fighting a series of battles...or relocating to a new theatre of war via railroad, etc.

Although I don't like the re-base ships idea, I am sure the Russians would have like it in 1904...

Yes! The Japanese were ready for them, weren't they! BANZAI!

[MrWhereItsAt]

Originally posted by Plotinus
There's something wrong with the movement in Civilization anyway. I mean, if George Bush wants a ship somewhere, he doesn't have to wait five years for it to get there (although things might be interesting if he did). And it's not just in modern times - it didn't take Hannibal decades to travel from Spain to Italy with his army. To be realistic, all units should have massively increased movement. The problem is that this would make the game unplayable, because one player could send all his units crusading into the enemy's territory and wipe him out in a single fell swoop before he has a chance to respond. And that's because Civilization is turn-based. If (shocking heresy) it were *not* turn-based, then it might be possible to make movement and so on make a lot more sense without screwing everything off.

This is more or less precisely what I was hoping my post said.

And there is an interesting idea there with the rebase of ships, Willem, but still does not solve the fact that a ship in RL can travel a hugely greater distance in a year than a ship in Civ can travel in a turn. An idea I just had to avoid a ship zooming in, attacking and then evacuating to safety befoer it can be countered woul dbe to have many ships lose some/all of their remaining moves upon attacking. Some, like the Privateer, with a better type of hit and run attack tactic, could have the ability to ignore this movement loss. Then you could grant ships enormous numbers of moves in the modern era and still allow naval combat to play out. What does everyone think?

[Shogun Gunner]

That's actually a very good point about gameplay Mr. WhereItsAt. Since the SP mode is not simultaneous movement, the other civ must have a chance to intercept, engage. If you choose to scout and return to port that still doesn't give the opposing navy a chance to intercept. They should have that opportunity.

With a lot of ships, with huge movement values, you will be hardpressed to understand the theatre of operations. Say you want to move your carrier and escorts near a land mass. A much larger number of ships would have the potential of intercepting and fighting. Seems like that would just make stacks of naval units fighting out massive Jutland type battles.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Tall Stranger
Interesting.

Off the top of my head, my only concern would be to limit such a capability to modern, non-transport ships or somehow prevent it from being used as a way to dump massive numbers of ground units into a city. If we can have this capability arrive around the time of airfields, it might work. Otherwise, building a single harbor on another continent and having a good number of transports could let you land huge numbers of knights or cav and crush the AI.

That could easily be solved by only allowing re-basing when you discover Combustion, when the modern ships become available. And having a distance limit like we now have with aircraft would help as well. For cities on another continent, it might take two or three jumps in order for the ships to get there.

[Willem]

Originally posted by Xorbon
A possible compromise (for Civ 4 perhaps...) would be to still allow infinite railroad movement, but units would only be able to use them to travel from city to city. That is, you'd have the unit board the rails in one city, and get off in another.

To move units to tiles other than city centres, units would have to use roads. Speaking of which, when "motorized transport" (or "automobile" or whatever...) comes around, roads could be upgraded (by workers) to "highways" which could provide a further increase in movement over roads (say, 1/6 or 1/9 of a movement point per 'highway' tile).

That's what I would have liked to have seen myself. I think it's ludicrous having Railroads all over the landscape, they should only connect one city with another. They could easily have found another way to boost production in the modern era, like hydro poles with Electricity for instance. I think electrification did more to boost productivity than the railroad ever did.

[Willem]

Originally posted by MrWhereItsAt
An idea I just had to avoid a ship zooming in, attacking and then evacuating to safety befoer it can be countered woul dbe to have many ships lose some/all of their remaining moves upon attacking. Some, like the Privateer, with a better type of hit and run attack tactic, could have the ability to ignore this movement loss. Then you could grant ships enormous numbers of moves in the modern era and still allow naval combat to play out. What does everyone think?

Not bad, but there's no reason why you can't have both. I think it would make it easier to move units with a rebase function than it would to watch them chug their way to their destination. Anything that will save some game time would certainly be welcome as far as I'm concerned.

PS Another option would be to have the ships take a reduction in movement once they're inside a cultural boundary, just like land units can't use the roads.

[kserra11]

while it's clear that some people would want to alter railroads and others wouldn't...

no one has given a clear reason why we shouldn't have the OPTION of changing this...

if we can change the ratings of roads, why can't we touch railroads?

personally, if given a choice, I'd make RR's a 1/12 movement rate...but with the CHOICE I could alter this as I see fit...

again, just give me the ability to alter railroads...if infinite movement is a part of the Civilization experience for you...great...but I and many others would like the opportunity to tweak this rating...

any official thoughts?

Kevin

[Outsider]

A whole nother option would be to continue to allow railroads unlimited movement distance, but limit how many units/tiles can be moved by rail each turn. The basis for the number of unit/tiles that can be carried could be based on any of a number of factors.

1) Total number of rail tiles within the country.
2) Total number of rail connected cities in the country.
3) Population in the country
4) Rail connected population in the country
5) Number of "railyard" city improvements biult/captured.
6) Shield expenditure on "locomotives/rolling stock"

I would prefer #5 or #6 myself, as those do not necessarily encourage solid railroad construction (as #1 does), nor does it result in a country that has recently acquired railroads to have a high capacity system immediately or in very short order (as #2-4 do)

One could even allow bombardments of rail lines to have a chance of destroying carrying capacity in addition to disrupting the actual connection.

Example of use :
Country A is 20 tiles across and has land borders on its extreme east and its extreme west. Its military (land) consists of 100 units, 20 of whom are in garrisons, 30 of whom are on either land border, and 20 of whom are maintained as a central reserve, able to reinforce either border, or beat off seaborne invasions in the center.
The country is well connected by rail, and its rail capacity is 300 unit-tiles. Moving the entire reserve of 20 units to either border would take (20*10=) 200 capacity. the remaining 100 capacity could be used to move an additional 5 units (5*20) from the opposite border to the threatened one. Moving the entire (non-garrison) army the lenght of the country would take (80*20) 1600 capacity, or 5 turns and change.


Another option that could be used in conjunction with the above one would be to limit the number of units that can move by rail through any given tile in a single turn. Even if one runs trains nose to tail, only so many will fit on the track, after all. Unfortunately, this would encourage putting rail in every tile.

[Xorbon]

There's an idea that I got from a crappy strategy boardgame called "Onslaught - D-Day to the Rhine". In that game, you can move units in one of two ways: either by normal movement, or by strategic movement. Normal movement is similar to Civ movement in that each unit has its own movement rate (in hexes) and can go their movement rate or less each round. Strategic movement gives a 3x multiplier to a unit's normal movement rate. However there are restrictions as to when you can use strategic movement. Basically, the restrictions are that your unit has to start-off being at least a certain distance from enemy units, and the unit cannot come within another given distance of an enemy unit while moving. This was to allow far-away units to catch-up to the frontline units.

I think a similar ability could be given to Civ sea-based units. The multiplier could depend on map size. First, for a unit to use strategic movement, it would have to be put in "Stategic Move Mode" (SMM) (there would be restrictions as to when you could go into SMM). Further, there would be restrictions on where you could move the unit while it is in SMM.

Restrictions could include: a) the unit can't have already performed an action (including moving, attacking, etc.) during the same turn before being put in SMM (to keep the unit from hitting-and-running);
b) the unit would be restricted in what actions it could perform while in SMM (eg. no attacking, bombarding, unloading troops, etc.);
c) you can't start-off or move to be adjacent to another non-allied civ's unit*;
d) you can't start-off or move through another civ's territory unless you have a ROP with that civ;
e) the unit could not move into a tile that would cause a previously unexplored (i.e. blackened-out) tile to become 'explored' (to keep units from exploring the world too quickly);
f) galleys and caravels (as well as similar units) wouldn't be able to travel across terrains in which they have a chance of sinking (i.e. seas or oceans); and
g) units being carried by ships in SMM would be unable to perform any actions (other than rebase - for air units) either.

*except for subs that are hidden

Ships in SMM would still be able to move (of course), disband, upgrade, and have units load on board.

I may have missed some details, but that's my idea.

Sorry for the novel-length explanation.

[Bleyn]

Personally, I think with the 1 year time scale of the shortest epic turns, infinite railroad movement is reasonable.

And I agree that something needs to be done about the disparity between modern sea and land movement. The rebase idea is a good one, but I don't see why any of the suggested restrictions to prevent unit-dumping are really needed.

For one, rebasing can only occur between your own cities anyway. And rebasing a loaded transport would be equivalent to air-transporting those units. And would be a realistic representation of the difference in volume sea and air transport are capable of handling. Even now most of the major intercontinental transportation of military hardware in the US arsenal is done via sea transport. This is simply because it is a LOT more economical to transport the heavy equipment via sea than it is by air. There are very few planes that can transport an M1-A2 Abrams Main Battle Tank. There are a lot of cargo ships that could do it. And any of the ones that the US DoD would use could easily carry multiple tanks, all of their crews, a full ammo loadout for them, spares and more. To transport the same amount of equipment via air would take probably 1.5 to 2 planes per tank.

If unit-dumping is really a big concern, what I think would be a reasonable way of dealing with it is a movement cost to loading/unloading on the transport. For example, with a modern transport, and say an 0.5 MP cost to load the transport, fully loading it would cost 4 MPs. Make rebasing the ship cost its full movement allowance, ie. no rebase if the ship has already been charged MPs that turn. This would create an automatic delay of a turn in shifting units overseas if they weren't already prepped and loaded on a transport.

Another factor that could be mixed in is bringing back the Port city improvement and requiring it in a city for rebasing. If this is one of those city improvements that is automatically destroyed when a city is captured, having to rebuild it before using rebasing would be a reasonable and realistic thing.

[Tripledoc]

I would like that you would actually have to build trains. Each train carries X number of units, and is the only unit gets a movement bonus, or unlimited movement on rail. Need iron and coal to be built. The cost of a train would be high, reflecting the real investment they were. Of course trains would be capable of being captured.

The process of loading units would not be be too cumbersome, and resemble sea transport. What it would do is that it would make it harder to move troops back and forth between the fronts.

[Shogun Gunner]

Originally posted by Tripledoc
I would like that you would actually have to build trains. Each train carries X number of units, and is the only unit gets a movement bonus, or unlimited movement on rail. Need iron and coal to be built. The cost of a train would be high, reflecting the real investment they were. Of course trains would be capable of being captured.

Ouch.

I llike Railroad Tycoon...it's a pretty cool idea. But in no way do I want to mix it in with civ.

Even if it were one train unit for three military unit, many of my games have 100 or more military units in the industrial age. I don't want to build 10 or 20 train units too.

Too much.

[:) Smiley]

How about a city improvement such as a freight terminal that would allow rapid rail movement betwen cities with them?

[Rommel2D]

For some reason this seems to provoke emphatic reactions, but the timescale of a civ turn has nothing to do with tactical combat considerations. Civ combat is about balance. A horseman moves further than a warrior, and that is good. No need to calculate the size of a tile or the MPH attained by the various units to see if the ratio is appropriate.

The RR system in Civ is very weak and due to be re-worked, just like air combat was for Civ3. I've read and given alot of suggestions in the past. For the most part, the effects of fundamental changes would be hard to predict without playtesting. There is one change that would have a clear balancing affect: RR transport should be point-to-point, same as an airlift, only without the airport requirement. Loading equipment or troops on a train is similar to loading them onto a plane. If units can't unload from a plane and attack the same turn, why can they off of a train? RRs still maintain their usefulness due to quantity and location of movement, but it is no longer faster to send troops from Alaska to Southern Chile by train than by plane. The ability to limit the range and number of train trips by some factor would be even nicer.

As for sea transport, there was a thread a while back with Skywalker and some others with some good ideas about increasing movement points and balancing it out by using a patrol/intercept system.