[1.0]Dear God Auto-roads...

from Elemental Forums

I know.  This horse is already dead.  But please consider changing the logic of auto-roads so that they're created in a smart manner.  See the picture below for another example of bad roads.  Seriously, if I was my sovereign I'd probably cut off the hands of the construction engineers that decided where these roads were placed.  

It doesn't help that roads through the Wildlands don't actually gain any benefit to movement.  It acts as if there is no road at all despite the road very obviously existing.  

 

5,352 views 9 replies
Reply #1 from Elemental Forums Top

It's not the Engineers fault, they were just following John Henry.  He was really drunk at the time.

Reply #2 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting BernieTime, reply 1
It's not the Engineers fault, they were just following John Henry.  He was really drunk at the time.
End of BernieTime's quote

Those drunken engineers...

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

The Political Machine 2024
Reply #3 from Elemental Forums Top

(hides empty cases of Quendar and Pariden Wine)

Who says we were drunk? *hic* I swear *hic* that it was John Henry's fault.

(aside) Who *hic* is John Henry, *hic* anyways?

~ random engineer in the Department of Highway Construction, Wildlands Division, Dangerous Duty Section (thanks for the Dangerous Duty Pay scale and unsupervised triple overtime [for building the highway by hand through the wilds in a season], six times more than normal! Of course we want to go through the wildlands - it's not like the monsters ever attack us! By the way, what happened to George? One moment, he was here, the next we have a beautiful Ice Sculpture).

 

On a more serious note, yes it would be nice if the roads laid out by the autoroad function were placed more intelligently, but I don't think that that will happen. You might try giving a hero Path of the Governor and hope for the Road Builder trait, or try to find a recruitable hero who already has the Road Builder trait (not sure that that is the exact name, but it's something like that). I don't know how well this works, since I've never tried using it.

Reply #4 from Elemental Forums Top

You have to wonder from this example if the road algorithm avoids rivers at all costs.  If it just crossed the river it would have a direct route.

Reply #5 from Elemental Forums Top

The pathing algorithm certainly seems to avoid rivers at all costs, if you let it decide how your units are going to go to that very far away location that's just on the other bank of this river that we can take a year or two to walk around. And I suspect that the road placement algorithm is at the least based upon the pathing algorithm.

Reply #6 from Elemental Forums Top

John Henry, famous American semi-fictional character that helped build the railroad through the  Mountains.  Read a book ;)

http://www.ibiblio.org/john_henry/analysis.html

Ballad of John Henry's Hammer sung by Johnny Cash
http://youtu.be/xxReOxRwS-g

I actually prefer the version done by Tennessee Ernie Ford
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=64GHrP3bCWk

Reply #7 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Publius, reply 5
You have to wonder from this example if the road algorithm avoids rivers at all costs.  If it just crossed the river it would have a direct route.
End of Publius's quote

That path makes a lot of sense actually. I think that it's impossible to build a diagonal bridge so it can only cross the river at straight angles, so that means that it could only waypoint out of Erirark at that angle.

From that point it could have gone straight south and then crossed the river for a shorter path (Still inside Wildlands mind you) but since that resource was nearby, it snapped to the resource for prettier roads. If it wasn't for Wildlands that's actually almost the best road you could build.

Reply #8 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting joeball123, reply 6
The pathing algorithm certainly seems to avoid rivers at all costs, if you let it decide how your units are going to go to that very far away location that's just on the other bank of this river that we can take a year or two to walk around.
End of joeball123's quote

I noticed that a few times, and wondered if that's a side-effect of some implementation shortcut in the path finding algorithm. If you wanted rivers to always consume all remaining movement points as they do, the simplest implementation is to set the terrain movement cost to +Inf (or something similarly high); however if you are not careful to discount this cost, it will mess up the path finder cost function.

Just idle speculation, of course :)

Reply #9 from Elemental Forums Top

Quoting Zironicum, reply 8

That path makes a lot of sense actually.
End of Zironicum's quote

Maybe it makes sense algorithmically, but that's about all.  It makes no gameplay sense whatsoever.  It's not the path an individual would create for themselves.  The roads, which have options to remain mostly inside my faction's influence actually end up almost entirely outside of my country's influence  And al this gains you no benefit while exposing you to several problems.  Your units are dealing with the wildlands monsters.  The roads through the wildlands, because they're considered "enemy territory", actually provide no movement benefit.