I imagine people would not be able to fortify regions that already have a fort in them.



The problem is that this sort of system lends itself to abuse easily. You can build a fort in the edge of a region you want to claim, where it can be reinforced by a city or two, and then prevent everyone from taking it unless they risk besieging that fort where it can be easily reinforced. It is cheesy to be unable to colonize a vast region, because someone built a small fort on the border.



Fort mechanics lend themselves better to games like Age of Wonders 3, where there are no set regions, but rather areas of control. Forts there are a cheap and practical way to spread your control over an area that doesn't merit building a city over. In addition, choke points are more likely to exist in that game than in EL (too bad there are so many fliers in AoW3 that choke points become irrelevant quickly).

"HappyHead" wrote:
Doing so would vary up the paths the roads would take enough to take care of the cases you are referring to and allows for an illusion of trade and commerce between villages of various regions and cities.

Sorry, but it would not "take care" of them. Like most other automatisms suggested, it would reduce rate of occurrence, but could never truly fix them (I know of two bottlenecks within my current game where they would not fix)). As for any illusions of trade and commerce: I couldn't care less. Most big street projects were built not because of any nice commerce considerations, but due to military necessity and imposed by higher authorities (see Roman Highways or German Autobahns).

For civilian motivated traffic engineering, take a look at water transport improvements (shore grading, locks, canals).

Yes, as a civilization, many streets will be built for transport - both military and civilian - between two neighboring cities. But any selfrespecting dictator can send out a troop of pioneers or common soldiers to order that damn street built for military reasons.



Thus, both from perspective of lore plausibility as well as my own enjoyment of the game, I want to be able to impose my own streets where the necessity of my nation demands it. Lorewise it's just plain good sense. Gamewise, it'll give me more control and less the feeling of being subject to luck, without adding too much micromanagement (assuming the costs prevent it being globally mandatory for every tile - that would be ... bad).

"Iilyophelia" wrote:
I actually think roads are perfect as is. It makes the location where you choose to put your city more meaningful.

Can't say I agree. True, you have to take another aspect into consideration, but so far most times FIDs consideration have far outweighed future trouble due to inefficient roads.

"Iilyophelia" wrote:
Also, roads heavily interfere with the ability to pillage. Roads to every minor faction village would be horrible for factions that depend on you not being able to get to that village before they're done pillaging ;P

Aye, as a global passive along with the regular road network, this would be bad on pillagers. However, you should be able to do something to protect your most vulnerable systems if you're willing to pay the price for it (which should be enough to make it impractical to defend all vulnerabilities without foregoing expansion and development.

I actually think roads are perfect as is. It makes the location where you choose to put your city more meaningful.



When I build my cities now, I look at where roads are going to end up going.



Also, roads heavily interfere with the ability to pillage. Roads to every minor faction village would be horrible for factions that depend on you not being able to get to that village before they're done pillaging ;P

... What if roads just auto-connected to pacified minor faction villages as well as main cities?

Like, when the roads improvement is built on a city, a road system shoots out of every pacified village too that connects to both the city of it's own region as well as any nearby villages, even villages of other regions...

Doing so would vary up the paths the roads would take enough to take care of the cases you are referring to and allows for an illusion of trade and commerce between villages of various regions and cities.



Depending on how involved you want roads to be, you could overkill and have all land improvements like watchtowers and extractors also have road connections, but I think just minor faction villages would suffice.

Just a thought.

The-Cat-o-Nine-Tales wrote:
I'll be honest, one of the main reasons I'm reluctant to allow complete manual placement of roads are my memories of the ugly road networks back in SMAC and Civilization IV (and earlier, I believe): Roads as far as the eye can see, forming a single, massive grid.

Oh, I wouldn't want that either. Especially, I wouldn't want this to turn into micromanagement hell. Which is why I proposed to have each manual tile cost dust. Combined with the auto-street layout there will not be much of an incentive to blot out the world with roads ... it will just be less bothersome in those few exceptional cases observed so far.

By making road builders and road construction expensive, you will only build them when needed and only in strictly limited number (I myself would never have more than 1-2 of them, assuming the cost of my example module above, even on huge maps).

I'll be honest, one of the main reasons I'm reluctant to allow complete manual placement of roads are my memories of the ugly road networks back in SMAC and Civilization IV (and earlier, I believe): Roads as far as the eye can see, forming a single, massive grid. Endless Legend's generated roads feel more "natural" to me, even if I would have liked to see more differentiation in the roads than "road" or "dirt path (not actually a road)," and actual networks within each region.

hm, can't say I can really get warm with the idea of adding additional nodes for autoconnects, the game already has enough to fight over. Resource collectors already give you additional nodes on a sector that have strategic worth, though it may be beneficial to make them easier to wreck a bit, making Hit & Run a more profitable strategy.

I really don't think an additional automatism for road building is worth the effort. In most cases, the current system is perfectly fine. I'd simply love to have a manual tool to fix the few loose ends. Because in the end, improved automatism can only reduce the rate of failure. Only manual road construction capability can absolutely eliminate it.

wilbefast wrote:
Interesting... a lot of the game's rules are based on the idea that a region only has a single city though. I'm concerned this would create a slew of finnicky edge-cases: what happens, for instance, if multiple players fortify the same region?

Then you have a contested neutral zone, which is fun!



But yeah, the game's not really coded to allow that to happen. The closest thing I can think of are the cultist converted villages. If a fort wasn't allowed to build boroughs or FIDS improve then it might be possible to steal that code.





What is most interesting to me is being able to put more 'city' hexes into the fields of combat, so that the players have a little bit more control over the terrain before battles. Also being able to contest/take neutral territory without expanding with too many cities seems interesting to me. You could have actual no-mans-land without boarders up against one another.

KnightofPhoenix wrote:
I imagine people would not be able to fortify regions that already have a fort in them.



The problem is that this sort of system lends itself to abuse easily. You can build a fort in the edge of a region you want to claim, where it can be reinforced by a city or two, and then prevent everyone from taking it unless they risk besieging that fort where it can be easily reinforced. It is cheesy to be unable to colonize a vast region, because someone built a small fort on the border.



Fort mechanics lend themselves better to games like Age of Wonders 3, where there are no set regions, but rather areas of control. Forts there are a cheap and practical way to spread your control over an area that doesn't merit building a city over. In addition, choke points are more likely to exist in that game than in EL (too bad there are so many fliers in AoW3 that choke points become irrelevant quickly).

Silly idea : what if these are "markets", not forts (since markets are usually located at the intersection of several roads), and each player may build only one per region ?

Hello,



currently, the only way to build roads known to me is that building that automatically connects neighboring regions that have been settled. Now, in general I really approve of this: It is simple to handle and will - mostly - cover their infrequent usage. However, I would really like to have a way to build my own roads, through just the hexes I want. Because while the game get's those right enough most of the time, it doesn't do so always. In my last game, all my late game units and settlers had to travel out from the core regions where my most ancient and well established cities were, out to the frontiers and hostile borders (Pangaea type of map, huge, empires far from each other). Each time, they had to take a significant detour (auto-generated roads aren't often straight in the right direction), and enter the wilderness on several counts.

This meant a deployment of troops to the front lines took about 5 turns, where it would have taken little more than one turn with a straight route.



By all means, keep the current automatic road generation - very easy to manage, even in a huge empire - but please also add an option where I can build an efficient road whenever the need strikes.



Cheers,

Bosparan

ZenTractor wrote:
doesn't claim a region and cannot grow more than 3 population. Cannot build FIDS improvements.

Interesting... a lot of the game's rules are based on the idea that a region only has a single city though. I'm concerned this would create a slew of finnicky edge-cases: what happens, for instance, if multiple players fortify the same region?

ZenTractor wrote:
I think I'd rather something like:



Fortification wagon

Equippable by settlers only

Colonise becomes Fortify: doesn't claim a region and cannot grow more than 3 population. Cannot build FIDS improvements.

Automatically builds roads to adjacent regions.



So you can build a 'half city' somewhere, even in your own regions, or in neutral regions, which people can fight over.

As interesting as this sounds, I think it's outside of the scope of EL. But I'd be glad to be proven wrong ^^

I think I'd rather something like:



Fortification wagon

Equippable by settlers only

Colonise becomes Fortify: doesn't claim a region and cannot grow more than 3 population. Cannot build FIDS improvements.

Automatically builds roads to adjacent regions.



So you can build a 'half city' somewhere, even in your own regions, or in neutral regions, which people can fight over.

Actually, I think the current automatism is perfectly fine as it is ... as far as automation can take you.

I just want a unit that can build roads, for those few instances, where I need to adjust manually.

All better automation does after all is reduce the number of cases where it is insufficient - it's virtually impossible to eliminate all instances via automation though. Allowing manual intervention fixes all instead.



Imagine the following trinket:

Name: Shovel of Diligence

Cost: 100 Production, 20 Titanium, 20 Glasssteel, 10 Adamantium, 1 Population

Effect: Grants the "Build Road" Action to the unit



Build Road Action

Cost: 50 Dust

Effect: Build a piece of road in the current hex and attach it to all adjacent roads.

That's why you play Vaulters on huge maps. lol



Joking aside, I can understand why it annoys you. I would have loved if they had developed this system a little further by adding technologies/improvements that expand your road network. If there were techs that added resources deposits or watchtowers as nodes for the road network, you could probably improve its advantages for military redeployment quite a bit.Of course, there probably would need to be a limit, only connecting towards other "minor nodes" within 10 tiles or something like that.

Sure:

Imagine 4 sectors: A, B, C and D, all settled by the player

A is adjacent to B and C

D is adjacent to B and C

The shortest practical route from A to D would be a straight line, on the border between B and C

Both B and C however were settled based on FIDS considerations and the cities are far away from their common border. Both B and C are mountainous, and the path to and from their respective cities is curvy and inefficient.



Following either road will be considerably longer than a straight line would have been. The terrain would have allowed such a straight road, but it currently will not be built. If both B and C are long sectors, this can add up to 5+ Movement Points wasted on each crossing. Play on huge map size and you get the chance to have several such crossings in a single deployment path.

Can you give a screenshot? The algorithm seems to always pick the shortest route it can, but it can only cross the boarder once; between both regions. Sometimes a cliff will be in the way of the 'expected' route, and the hilly path up the cliff dips into a third region, invalidating it.