Roads and Such

[Yolan]

I thought I would bring this up now, as it looks like the map reset is just around the corner.

I remember that the devs wrote at some point, about their vision of the game being the struggle of people to push back against an enroaching, surrounding darkness of untamed wild, slowly turning it to their own use, etc.

Now, it seems like the current world, now that people have quite thoroughly transformed it, resembles something more like a province of classical Rome than the dark nether regions of pine filled wilderness that people are struggling to make safe and homely.

I would like to see a couple of changes made in preparation for the next world, to lessen the suburban kind of feeling that seems to have fallen upon the land.

1) Roads: Right now, I think it is _far_ too easy (and I do not mean to belittle the very hard work put in by a bunch of people), to make massive tracts of good, stone road, covering the land. I say this while acknowledging that for the people who actually made those roads, it was hard. But I mean, relatively, consider the effort that you put in making a single wooden hut. Good quality (i.e. romanesque) stone road of the classical period was a laborious affair. It involved a lot more than simple putting down some stone ontop of some grass. Like modern roads, layers of good quality fill were required, and all sorts of various good tools, and a whole lot of back breaking labor.

Suggestion: Make stone roads much harder to make. Really, I think we should be seeing stone streets, maybe stone highways between _major_ cities, and everywhere else should be mud roads. People might hate this, as it may clamp down on trade. But then, I think trade will be given a massive shot in the arm in the next map with the development of area related resources (I suspect). Also, we might well have water borne trade on the way.

2) Buildings: I know some are planned, but I am really hoping that we see stuff that is a little more Norse-like, or at least, a little more dark ages, than classical, or renaissance. So, thatched rooftops cottages, for example. Simple structures.

[Jackard]

Hmm, this might be a wait and see thing. Some players might be spread so far apart that stone roads everywhere are impractical.

It'd be nice to see grass slowly grow over dirt, though.

[Erik_the_Blue]

A simple way of addressing this would be to allow stone to only be placed on mud, thus requiring stone road to be placed over mud road. Requiring surveying and more sophisticated construction would be neat, though, perhaps delaying the time it takes the road to decay should that ever be implemented.

[Jackard]

A simple way of addressing this would be to allow stone to only be placed on mud, thus requiring stone road to be placed over mud road.

simple is good and this sounds good too

[Yolan]

@ Erik

I like this idea. If it was combined with the slow development of pot-holes (stone turning to mud), it might suffice. People would have to maintain roads, or they would fall into ruin. Part of me suspects, though, that we would still see massive stone roads crossing the land every which way. That might not be a bad thing for another perspective, and I don't know how J&L feel about it. But for me, I think a stone road should be evidence of really developed cities, and not something a person would make running down to their farm/settlement just so that they could trade a bit faster.

[sabinati]

a couple things -
it does require you to have a specialized tool - the pickaxe. sure you can do it with a stone axe but it will take much much more time to chip the stone. you also need to cart the stone to the location.

i really, really like the "stone can only be placed on dirt" idea. i've actually already been doing this because it's a great way to get clay without having to plant grass later.

and i love the decay idea. items decay, so why shouldn't stone tiles decay into dirt tiles after a few decay hits?

[Peter]

The problem with decay is that currently tiles are just tiles, and the engine has no way of storing how much "damage" a tile has taken.
It would be possible to add this capacity, but I don't know how long it would take to do so, and it would very likely double or quadruple the amount of space needed to save the map.

[Erik_the_Blue]

Leaving aside road decay, what other ways are there to differentiate types of road? Having finer gradations on the speed system doesn't seem very useful, but roads can't really do anything else. If there's only two kinds of road, the advanced kind will be built frequently in uncivilized areas since road building is a rather mindless task compatible with passive multitasking (i.e. reading a website). If there were several levels of road, it'd take a long time for the advanced levels to show up unless groups of people go out of there way to build them, but there's no sense in having those levels if they don't do anything different.

Well, to begin with, the natural conditions that make stuff left outside wither are somewhat random to begin with, so I thought it reasonable. But mostly, it originated as a separate idea, namely one for tile decay. Tiles cannot reasonable have timers on them (since there are too many of them), so something like that was necessary. To make it decay objects was an after-thought, though it is currently the only thing it actually does.

I was thinking to exploit the function for such things as converting a tile to a "path" tile with a certain chance whenever a player walks on it, to have the decay cycle change it back to grass tiles after a while. Another idea was to have player-dug dirt decay back as well. I'm not quite sure about any one of those ideas, but those were my original intentions, at least.

(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.

[Darth_GW7]

Make a difference between lumpy cobblestone roads and smooth, paved roads.

[Erik_the_Blue]

What effect would the difference cause, though?