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.

[Cohen]

Well, new buildings could be nice, like some "castle required" building like a training camp (troops produced there gets 1 experience start), or defensive postation/trebuchets (sieging force suffer some casualty when sieging, depending of defenders strenght) and something similar.

I believe he told to take Pythium because historically Romans were the first to use roads for moving fast their armies and to keep armies supplied. I mean, to use roads massively, since roads were built a very short time later the army conquered the province.

[Saxon]

The reason I mentioned it is that it is in the manual, the nation description talks about them using roads. As I am in the office, I can not check, but I believe that there is some movement bonus associated with the nation, which is because of their road building. The inclusion of roads would change the balance against this race.

Logistics are at the heart of war and any would be conqueror should have to grapple with the issues associated with it. Bringing troops together at the right time and the right place is critical and the limited movement in Dom II emphasizes the need for long term planning. I agree, roads are an essential part of modern logistics, but with the exception of the Romans, they did not play a big part in wars for most of history. The Franco Prussian war in the late 19th Century and the American Civil War a bit earlier were noted for the revolutionary effect that the railroad had on warfare. Sudden concentration of forces became more common and possible, rather than the mark of a genius.

In my opinion, roads do not have a big role to play in Dom II, but you know what they say about opinions…

[HJ]

Originally posted by Saxon:
The reason I mentioned it is that it is in the manual, the nation description talks about them using roads.

This used to be the case in Doms:PPP, where Pythium was able to move further within its own borders than other nations. Now I believe this is represented by stratmove of 2 for legionairres, whereas other heavy infantry mostly has 1. If I'm not mistaken, that is.

[ June 03, 2004, 09:52: Message edited by: HJ ]

[PDF]

Originally posted by HJ:

quote:

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Originally posted by Saxon:
The reason I mentioned it is that it is in the manual, the nation description talks about them using roads.

This used to be the case in Doms:PPP, where Pythium was able to move further within its own borders than other nations. Now I believe this is represented by stratmove of 2 for legionairres, whereas other heavy infantry mostly has 1. If I'm not mistaken, that is.

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In fact Pythium lost the ability in Dom2 : the strat move of 2 is more often than not "killed" by intervening terrain, plus the fact that a Pythium army usually doesn't comprise only nation troops- Archers come to mind .
But Pythium is powerful enough without ...