Roads and Such

[Delamore]

(emphasis added) Loftar, at least, has considered tile decay, so there's always the chance he'll figure out a way to make it work eventually. While somewhat tangential, it'd be interesting to have natural path creation as well, though it'd make it easier to place stone roads should my idea be implemented.

The problem is that any type of decay system would basically require adding an extra byte of storage, and in a world as large as Loftar has planned this is a HUGE amount of extra data to process.
It would be much more interesting if roads had different types as someone said, so roads could be improved to newer types.

[Junkfist2]

briiiiiiiiick.

[PhaedrothSP]

So would it go like..

Cleared path(Just dirt) > Cobblestones(our basic stone laying like we have now) > ..Pavement?

[Erik_the_Blue]

As I said, *eventually*, even if that means years from now when hardware becomes cheaper and the matter becomes trivial. Better to have thought about it than not.

Again, what's the point to having more than two kinds of road if they don't do anything different from our current roads? There either needs to be a new function added, or the speed "bar" needs finer gradations.

[KoE]

Well, with the implementation of new vehicles, we may have stuff that moves constantly at sprint speeds, perhaps even something that's faster. (Not being particularly historically minded, I can't say what that might be in either case.) Restricting such a thing to slower movement on 'cobblestone' (the current type) roads seems reasonable, and requiring a more expensive type of road to get the full potential seems reasonable to me.

EDIT:

Meant to say that'd keep from needing any more speed gradations to on-foot movement while adding some value.

[Erik_the_Blue]

If it moves at sprint speed or faster, it shouldn't have the same stamina drain as normal sprinting otherwise it wouldn't be very useful (without tea, at least). I suppose this is where animal driven vehicles come into play. Thank you for posting an idea that isn't purely cosmetic.

[Yolan]

Hmm. Actually, I don't think it is necessary to give stone road tiles a value to measure as they slowly decay. Each square is hit by the randomising kajigger every week or two IRL? Just make it so that when it hits, it has a random % chance of turning the square back to mud, or not. Whatever % you choose, that will determine how quickly roads degrade. No extra information needs to be stored.

[theTrav]

I'm a fan of making roads more difficult, and of making tera forming in general more difficult.
Clay should have to come from CLAY PITS ONLY, although it should still be possible to dig up grass to make dirt and grass should re-grow over dirt fairly rapidly (depending on soil composition and local climate, which loftar is OBVIOUSLY going to have to implement).

[Erik_the_Blue]

Yolan's idea seems nice. Make it so that certain primary levels of road have a low chance to decay while a number of intermediate levels have a high chance to decay. The higher the primary level, the more intermediate levels to be overcome. Thus a certain amount of continual work would be necessary to overcome the decay of the intermediary levels and arrive at a primary level. Someone casually building a road would probably never get to the second primary level, while a sizeable work force could get sections of road to a higher primary level before the road decays away. This wouldn't stop individuals from making small sections of high level road, but the low chance of decay would keep them from making any significant roadway. Reaching a new primary level would confer an additional speed bonus, so this could be combined with the animal-drawn carts idea from KoE.

[Jackard]

Instead of providing a greater speed boost, a higher-level road could be resistant to yolan's irritating but possibly needed weekly/monthly decay-cleaner.