07-02-2004 18:44									#1
	Transport Ideas Support Apolyton or Terrorists Win

There are several related issue here. To whit:

* Roads and rails - economy boost and infinite movement
* Airports - training for air units, airlift ability, economy boost
* Harbours - food, mineral, training for ships
* City radius

City Radius
--------------

I propose that ancient cities can only use tiles within 1 space of the city. There are two specific city imrpovements to increase this radius:

Paved Roads - Roman era roads.
Superhighways - modern freeways

Each of these increases the city radius by 1. Superhighways cannot be built unless the city already has paved roads.

Economic Benefit of Transport
--------------------------------------

Currently, roads provide a trade bonus, and rails provide a mineral bonus. I propose getting rid of these bonuses. Instead, each of the city radius improvements should provide an across the board boost of 25% to food, industry, tax, and science.

Paved Roads - with this tech, every worked grass/plains/desert tile produces an extra trade arrow.

Superhighways - with this tech, food and industry each receive a 25% boost. This reflects approximately the same bonus that the railroad tile improvement had.

The economic benefits of sea improvements are probably best left as terrain improvements, but that's another topic.

Tile Improvements
-----------------------

Tracks - very basic roads. Buildable once you have the wheel. Allows movement at 2/3 terrain cost.

Roads - Roman style. requires Engineering. Allows movement at 1/3 terrain cost.

Highways - modern style. Requires Automobile. Allows movement at 1/5 terrain cost.

Undersea tunnel - allows land units to move underwater at 1/5 terrain cost. If a tunnel tile is pillaged, all land units in connected tunnel tiles are destroyed die to the network flooding. Can only be built on continental shelf tiles.

Canal - allows ships to enter land tiles. Considered shallows (ie no battleships, carriers, or dreadnoughts) for movement purposes. Very expensive to build - think Panama/Suez. Land units treat it as highway for movement due to support road networks running alongside. Ships in a canal defend as if in a harbour due to lack of maneouver space. Cities that were previously unconnected to the sea can now build sea improvements and ships. Can only be built on solid flat ground (grasslands, plains, desert, not sand seas) next to a sea tile. Forest and jungle must be cleared first due to the immense amount of support required for this kind of engineering feat.

No railways! That's a city improvement now.

The Rapid Transport Network
-------------------------------------

The following city improvements allow rapid transport across the map:

Airport
Railway depot
Harbour

The general principle is as for Civ 2. A unit must start in the city, the destination must have an equivalent improvement, and it uses all the unit's movement for the turn. The difference is:

* You are not limited to a single unit per turn.
* Each unit costs gold to move. This is 1 for sea, 3 for rail, 5 for air (costs might require tweaking). This cost will be modified according to the weight of the unit. Tanks cost more, spies cost less.
* Harbours require that the destination be within a certain number of tiles to enable the link. This is 12 for trireme tech, 24 for caravels, 36 for galleons, 48 for modern transports. The exact distance allowed should be modified by the total map area.
* Rails require that the two cities be connected by roads or highways. It is assumed that major cities will have rail links if they have road links.
* (graphics idea) The computer finds the shortest path between each city that has a rail depot and the nearest 2 or 3, and draws the road/highway graphics from a modified graphic set that includes a rail alongside the road.
* If a hostile unit in the appropriate realm (land/sea/air) is within 2 tiles of the shortest path between the two cities, the journey is not possible, and may not be attempted.

The exact cost of using the RTN (Rapid Transport Network) buildinsg should be carefully balanced. It should be enough to make it a real decision, but not so much that it is priced out of the market.

Note that the sea transport does not replace the usual transport sea units - it supplements them. Without rapid sea transport like this, Roman Empire style nations are very diffiult to produce. You'll still need to build transports to reach coastal areas that you do not control.

As well as providing the RTN functions, these buildings should also provide a substantial boost to trade.

Certain units may also require that one of these buildings be present to allow them to be built. For example, Jet fighters require an airport city improvement, and cruisers require a harbour. There should be multiple kinds of port facility improvement, with different kinds of ships requiring progressively more advanced harbours. The facilities that allow a galleon to be built are different from those that allow a dreadnought to be built.

	13-02-2004 05:30									#2
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Good ideas. I believe that "sealift" and "rail-lift" functions would decrease micromanagement.

	16-02-2004 03:08									#3
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A slight revision:

I think we should drop the canals idea. Building a canal on this scale is an engineering feat way in excess of founding a city. And the whole point of having canals in there was to prevent players from having to build a city on an isthmus to emulate a canal.

* The amount of engineering to build a canal is huge.
* The nature of such a transport link would inevitably cause a city to rise up anyway. Panama city wouldn't even be half the size without that canal.
* Forcing the omputer to remember which side of the city a ship is on is rather finickety.

So, I say keep the present system where a city on an isthmus automatically has a canal. It simulates the fact that such trade links cause cities to form around them anyway.

On the sea lift side, I'd add a clipper between galleon and modern transport.