Bridges? Bridges!

What would you like to see in Freeciv? Do you have a good idea what should be improved or how?
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Arbogast
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Bridges? Bridges!

Post by Arbogast »

I noticed that many people play island-based maps, as is my case.
A frustrating thing is moving from island to island. My solution is to park a galleon or a transport in a way that it touches one coast from one island on one side and the same thing in the other side, so the boat becomes a bridge. And if you have two water squares between the islands, then I use two boats. Not very efficient or elegant solution, to say the least. And the vulnerability! Terra forming is only a partial solution, since you can do it one time out of two/three.
So why no implement BRIDGES? If they could expand to 3 or 4 water squares that would be peachy. Strength? enough to resist more than one attack. They could be reinforced too. And so on... :)
ahfretheim
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Re: Bridges? Bridges!

Post by ahfretheim »

The way bridges and other naval constructions are built in real life is these big barges with huge pile drivers and drills on them that push stilts in to the sea floor. A unit that describes reality that way would probably make the most sense. In addition to being able to build bridges, these could also build buoys, and maybe instead of the offshore platform city improvement you could have offshore platforms as sea tile improvements as well, and maybe they could also go in to cities to improve harbors, increasing the trade output of sea tiles. Such a unit could become available with Steam (steam engines are the first economical source of that amount of sheer force) and would basically be an engineer at sea, but would have whatever the real name of those ships is.
cazfi
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Re: Bridges? Bridges!

Post by cazfi »

Of course those would be very long bridges indeed, in a typical map where side of one tile represents hundreds of kilometres. But I see your point in gameplay perspective making travel easier (and anyway alien ruleset already has underwater tubes that can be thousands of kilometres long). 2.5 will make it easier to implement at least some of parts of your request in your own ruleset as you can define road types in ruleset - add road type "Bridge" that can be built on oceanic terrains only.

There's some shortcomings (some of which are already fixed in 2.6 development version):
- As it's separate road type, moving from normal road to bridge is not considered movement via road (in 2.6 road types can connect to each other)
- You can't limit the length of the road, except in this case you could have it require also adjacent land tile, which would mean that max length would be from one oceanic tile adjacent to land to another.
- If you are not requiring adjacent land tile, bridge building can also start from any oceanic tile (in 2.6 you can define extra requirements for road starting tile)
- Thhey are not "attacked" any more than any other infrastructure. They are destroyed by pillaging, unless ruleset prevents that too.
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Arbogast
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Re: Bridges? Bridges!

Post by Arbogast »

Oh boy! this is encouraging!
I did not know that a "tile is hundreds of kilometers long". So make it just three, nay, two tiles long.
As for the technical side, when to implement it,for instance, I rather leave that to the "smart boys".
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