Roads – my ideas on better game design for them.

[Gloosx_inn]

Roads are a great concept, but the current design makes them painful to use.

What's really connecting people in a big world? Roads. They are super important and they are really fucking common everywhere around. With common roads, the geopolitical distribution and the in-game community itself could change drastically to a better good.

Do we have roads in haven? For sure. Are they common? I won't say so. Could we have better game design for roads so they are common and great? Pretty much.

I was collecting opinions on roads via in-game chat for a week now, and here is what i got on the subject:

• Roads are useful, people use roads
• Only roads you know of are useful, random roads are dirt
• Roads have no visibility on a mini map by default, only option is paving them
• Roads are boring and time-consuming to build when it comes to paving it
• Only viable method of building a nice paved clean road which is long enough currently is bot
• Roads consume a lot of TW so in general roads are a luxurious option for early / mid game hermits w/o high WIL stats

Giving all these opinions, i can say that roads in the current state are suffering with 3 key things:

• Visibility
• Convenience
• Cost

My vision to solve these issues:

Visibility and Convenience
Tiles along the road should slowly turn into dirt each time road is used. In a reasonable amount of time, like weeks of road exploitation, the whole road should become 3-tile wide dirt, like the natural roads we have now. This will cover both *visibility* AND *convenience* issues at once since dirt road will be visible on a minimap and the frequent used roads would be nicely outlined while trash roads will decay quickly.
Also, once you can road established, you can proceed straight into paving it with stone.
Cost
Just retain TW cost on unpaved roads as it is, make dirt roads consume half of that TW. Make stone paved roads consume quarter of that TW. Nothing really special, just a TW cost reduction reward for establishing and paving a whole road nicely making this great road cheap, convenient and easy to use.

Share your opinions on the subject guys

In the end, wan't to present you this picture i quickly drafted on how the map in the real world would look like, so how could it look if we had better roads game design:

[AtoB]

A while back there was viewtopic.php?f=48&t=59271 - sadly that guy gave up on telling people to use search.

[Gloosx_inn]

A while back there was viewtopic.php?f=48&t=59271 - sadly that guy gave up on telling people to use search.

Dude, in this post there is a complete rework of the roads mechanic proposed, i'm asking for little thing which is pretty easy to implement, yet it will make a great change: just make roads visible by generating dirt along them. That's it.

[AtoB]

It's one of the things in there. What's so hard to understand about 'bump existing stuff instead of posting it again'?

[Gloosx_inn]

It's one of the things in there. What's so hard to understand about 'bump existing stuff instead of posting it again'?

What's so hard to understand that i'm not necro-bumping the overwhelmed thread with overcomplicated ideas but rather just post a small enhancement with the most impact as a separate thread?

[shubla]

But how about decay? How would decay mechanics work with these roads.
In a game called wurm, people built roads and tunnels on the servers, and later in the servers they were most abandoned, but still remained. Kind of stupid I'd say.

[shubla]

As an addition to previous message:
I think that devs don't really resist the idea that places where there is a lot of traffic would somehow turn into stomped ground or something. But the main problem here is how to implement such things efficiently.

[FrankMcFuzz]

I like this thread cuz I can see my house from here!~

[MagicManICT]

A while back there was http://www.havenandhearth.com/forum/vie ... 48&t=59271 - sadly that guy gave up on telling people to use search.

Dude, in this post there is a complete rework of the roads mechanic proposed, i'm asking for little thing which is pretty easy to implement, yet it will make a great change: just make roads visible by generating dirt along them. That's it.

i'm not necro-bumping

The reason I'm not merging them is that they are a different line of thought. The other person is simply pointing out the suggestion of the roads turning to dirt (or other changes as used) has come up, and over this period of time, nothing has come of it. Also, we prefer you follow up a previous thread with new information or ideas rather than making a whole new thread. This game is 10+ years old and a lot of ideas have come up over the years, some implemented, some considered, and making a new thread only complicates the discussion. If you have an issue with the rules, please take it up here: viewtopic.php?f=39&t=40568

I'm not sure it'd make roads any more visible,given game trails and such in the game look exactly the same as dirt trails people do make (or used to... not sure if anyone does these days or not). The one way I can think of to make them "more visible" is to make the trail markers appear on the minimap, but then some people might complain it complicates that too much.

As far as why few use them... complexity of building, or rather then time and energy involved in planning and constructing as some areas do require smart pathing. I don't think most players are willing to go far with their roads. World 10 we had a couple of people from one realm (Hedgehugs, I think it was?) build some world spanning roads to connect major areas with their market.

[Dayd]

Maybe require a road to connect 2 points if you want to teleport there? Of course I think we need to still be able to teleport back to your hearth fire which could negate everything I just said.