[Freeciv-Dev] (PR#6376) settler connecting road without bridge building

["John Wheeler" <jdwheeler42@xxxxxxxxx>]

[guest - Thu Oct  2 15:47:05 2003]:

> In the attached savegame, I told a settler to connect Lahore and
> Bombay.  I don't have bridge building yet, but damned if he isn't
> going to run that road over the river anyway (he's got an 'R' on
> him!)

The big question is whether he can succeed in building the road; if 
so, that's a bug in the road-building code.  Otherwise, it's just an 
obnoxious side effect of poorly functioning connection code.

If you don't have bridge building, rivers should be considered 
barriers (as I presume oceans are) to be avoided by the connection 
code.  Also, connecting roads should never go through difficult 
terrain (e.g. mountains) if the overall distance is the same.  
(Putting railroads through mined hills and mountains is an entirely 
different matter.)

What I expect would be more efficient to program is adding waypoint 
capability (such as goto and patrol have) to connections.  (I think 
all this would entail is copying code in control.c from 
request_unit_goto() to request_unit_connect() .) Then the user (or AI) 
can decide the best route.

-- 

++JohnWheeler