Roads...

[Pocus]

Hi all,

a suggestion :
I find that the terrain feature is a nice one, but its rather annoying to have fast (strat move 2+) units still crawling thru the whole game in the same provinces... so perhaps a province with a castle can be considered to have a road (treat the terrain as plain for movement purpose)??

any thoughts?

[Cohen]

Or it should be considered a new building "build road" ...
and the cost should change based on the terrain ...

Ie: Doing a road in the mountains should be more difficult that to do in plains.

A road could count 1/2 movement in plains and famrs, and 1 in waste, forest, mountain and swamp (if we allow to build road i n swamp)

[PvK]

Road networks are not the same things as fortifications. The "anti-mad-castle" folks wouldn't like another reason to put a castle everywhere.

I'm with Cohen that if added, roads should be a seperate thing and based on terrain. I'd also add that a seperate road should be needed for each direction. It shouldn't be one cost to build roads everywhere in a whole province.

In general though I think the absence of road construction is ok. The game is about destruction, war and sorcery, and taking time to construct world-spanning road networks seems out of place (and too fast, though the huge fast forts are that way too). The graphical element would be messy to add to the game's freestyle maps.

Also it would reduce the importance of terrain to be able to remove some obstacles this way, even if it took a dozen turns (which many players would no doubt whine about if it took so long anway, even if it's only one year of game time. I can hear it already: "Waah! Roads are very useless if they take so long to build an Autobahn through the Alps!").

Perhaps though, adding them as a map feature would be good. Some provinces could be connected by road, removing the terrain's effect on travel between them.

PvK

[Arralen]

easy answer:
no way, the developers wouldn't code this into the game - too much hassle, to few gain.

long answer:
Unless you're using a castel spamming strategy, it wouldn't make much of a difference. But it would (most likely) require major code changes, so likelyhood for such a change is very low.

Better solution would be that the map designers
a) have an eye not to 'break' their map by spamming special terrain all over the map seemingly at random.
b) keep in mind that a terrain type 'counts' for movement purposes in every direction, not just to the north where they have drawn the mountains.

An especially bad example is the cradle map .. it features choke points and interesting map-making ideas galore .. but you can't tell from looking at the map where you may move, except that most likely it's only 1 province in any direction because there's so much swamp, mountain, waste and whatever on the map.

There's another drawback to this "terrain spamming": Anything that isn't plain/grass has way lower population and supply values. While having fewer pops partly compensates for the high number of provinces per nation, the low supply values make even moderate sized armies starve, what hits especially the AIs hard. But even some player with nations that have no access to nature magic might get into some trouble here.

more, and back to topic later ..

[ June 02, 2004, 16:04: Message edited by: Arralen ]

[Saxon]

If you want roads, take Pythium.

[Pocus]

Originally posted by Saxon:
If you want roads, take Pythium.

??? I dont see the point. A legionary moving in swamp will stop as other units. What I propose is to create a simple road rule by understanding that a castle in Dominions show the mark of a budding empire. Coding wise, it would asks for a mere handful of minutes to make the test. I'm not saying that Dominions is Civilization in an heroic fantasy setting. New buildings would not fit the gameplay.