Re: [Freeciv-Dev] railroad movement

[Peter Schaefer <schaefer@xxxxxx>]

Nicolas Brunel wrote:
> 
> On Fri, 3 Sep 1999, Reinier Post wrote:
> 
> > On Fri, Sep 03, 1999 at 10:43:22AM -0400, Laurent Vibert wrote:
> > > Like it would be interesting to have canals, why not give the possibility
> > > to engineers to build road on the sea, just like the England-France
> > > tunnel (a new wonder ?). The engineer should be on a boat to do that, and
> > > it would be more natural to restrict this possibility to the coast: no
> > > tunnel on the high-sea.
> >
> > I would love to see this when accompanied by a new tech (Waterworks).
> >
> > --
> > Reinier
> 
> To learn more about Waterworks, the windmill wonders and discover new
> ideas have a look at
> http://www.freeciv.org/~hop/wishlist
> 
> Bye,

I looked at it and the part about goto reminds me that:
Proposal:
Moving over railroads may have a cost (in "freeciv(3) mode").
This means that 1 move should be equal not to 3 parts, but maybe to 12 or 60 
parts.

Arguments:
It costs lots of time to find a path over the entire railroad network;
the network raises the number of tiles the pathfind has to search by
the size of one rail network component, basically in one step of
a pathfinding algorithm.

This can not really be fixed 100% by numbering rail network components,
since an enemy Zone Of Control can break movement over it.
(This would be an alternative plan: no ZOC on railroads).

Having a railroad movement cost would divide the number of
railroad tiles added by a factor of 4 for a starting point in 
the center of a large continent.
Even having only a movement cost of 1/24 for railways would help;
but that is hard to do because it is hardwired everywhere that "1 move=3 parts".

Also, the Ai might decide to move every unit once over the entire network 
at no cost to detect stealth units and spot unspotted tiles.
This can be fixed by having this magic AI moves limit, but that is a hack isn't 
it ?

Closing Sentence:
If someone thinks this is a good idea, please go ahead and give us a patch that
changes all the "1 move=3 parts" code !



-- 
Peter Schäfer - mailto:schaefer@xxxxxx, schaefer@xxxxxx
Softwärschmieden produzieren behämmerte Software.
Real software smiths do it with the hammer.