[Freeciv-Dev] Re: Railroads and AI

[Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Jun 16, 2000 at 10:15:30PM +1000, Robert Rendell 
<rob@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> was heard to say:
> Asher Densmore-Lynn wrote:
> } 
> } You know, that sort of makes me wonder -- are railroads in the best interest
> } of the defender? *I* would mine the suckers and blow them to kingdom come if
> } there were rails in a section of country I was losing...
> 
> One mechanism I'd quite like would be if railroads inside a city radius
> didn't work for invaders - there are still roads they can travel on, but it
> doesn't seem right that trains are sent out to help hostile troops tromp
> across your land (and probably right up to your city).
> 
> Of course, this would break compatability with Civ, so it would have to be
> an option.

  Just to throw this idea out there:

  Maybe what's needed is a "train" unit -- a ground transport unit which can
carry some number of units and can only travel on railroads, but only spends
(say) 1 movement point per turn regardless of terrain.  You could even have
multiple train types, each with different capacities, speeds (10 MP units :) ),
defense values (?) and so on.
  To non-train units, then, railroads would be just like roads.

  Anyone think this might work?  It'd make railroads much less useful; OTOH this
might actually be a Good Thing.  And being able to waylay your opponent's
trains would be fun :)
  We'd need a couple of new flags -- "railroad-only" and "ground-transport"
at a minimum.  The "uses 1/3 MP on all terrain" flag might be useful for giving
the speed bonus--although I think that restricting ourselves to multiples of
3 for movement time might not be good in the long run..
(or can the standard transport flag be used? I'm not up on the ruleset stuff..)

  Daniel

-- 
/----------------- Daniel Burrows <Daniel_Burrows@xxxxxxxxx> -----------------\
|     f u cn rd ths,    |    The only thing worse than infinite recursion     |
|     u cn gt a jb s    |    is infinite recursion.                           |
|    a cmptr prgrmr.    |                                                     |
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