And its industry is set to expand…

These old bridges and roads won’t be able to cope…

So a huge motorway bypass is being built…

With sturdy iron bridges…

And a huge roundabout

Whilst trying to build roads, I accidentally stumbled upon a hard-to-find mode for building curved roads. Whenever you start building a road where the purple start-node snaps into place, I found that depending on the position of the mouse-cursor relative to the position of the snapped start-node when the start of a drag takes place, the road will either be a straight road from A to B (with perhaps a very short curved part at the start), or a very curved road. I can’t figure out what the rule is for building curved roads – I keep experimenting by moving the mouse-cursor around once the node is snapped into place, and then making several attempts to drag the road until I see the right type of curve. I can’t figure out a pattern to this apart from starting the drag in the centre of the purple node is more likely to produce a straight segment. Is there a more precise explanation for this obscure road-curvature-mode that I’ve stumbled across? Is it just either straight or curved roads, or can I also control the degree of curvature? And so far, I’ve not observed similar behaviour when building a railway.

One way to improve on this and at the same time make the game richer, is to implement surveying. Hardly any real world construction job happens without surveying the site first.

To survey your road or railroad track you could put down centerline markers. You could set the profile rules (minimum curve radius, transfer curves, maximum grade and total width) in the tool, and have the system automatically place right and left markers every 50 meters. Then you could fine adjust your right of way, modify grades and curves before checking cost and committing to  excavation. On this raw road or railbed you then place your road surface or rails.

This would in many cases give us a more realistic looking railroad without the little unevennesses the current system causes, but those who prefer the current system can still use it. It will also make it possible to plan construction without committing lots of money before you know where your entire line is going to be. You can also plan ahead, designing a line and reserving land before you are ready to build it.

I rarely see a feature like this in any city builder or similar game while it’s one of the most obvious additions to such a game. It is way more convenient to plan tracks for multiple routes, goods and otherwise, and only afterwards give the go-ahead to actually build them.

This prevents a lot of faulty construction as most people (at least yours truly) plan one line at a time, or maybe two, and will only see an inconsistency when starting construction of another one. In this way you can already plan a lot of tracks and only actually build the ones when you see they indeed look construction-worthy.

It doesn’t even have to be very complicated, even simple lines in an overlay will do, as long as you can keep track of where you want to build some lines and can see an overview of how it (crudely) will look.

Will this be possible in the game?