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Small ships and range

Started by zook2, December 09, 2017, 04:31:52 AM

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zook2

It's 1842 and I'm experimenting with goods transport by sea. I needed a small freight ship (a Humber keel) for a route several hundred km from my single shipyard. Because the ship has only a range of 50km, I need to find a way to get it there. I don't have much experience with the range feature, but I think waypoints do not count as stops with regard to vehicle range, so I'd have to build ports every 50km?

Alternatively I could build a new shipyard next to that route. Which costs 8,000 and is therefore not an option. I probably understand why such boats have limited range in real life and daily use, but in real life there's a way to get them from the shipyard to the customer.

jamespetts

Thank you for your feedback. The range limit on smaller ships such as the Humber keel is necessary to prevent these being used for trans-oceanic work. In reality, these ships were used for river and inshore work only, and were not capable of trans-oceanic work. Until recently, they were limited to waterways only, but I replaced that restriction with a range restriction to simulate that these would be used for short distance sea transport, so that people no longer needed to use large ships such as brigs as island ferries and the like.

As to the shipyard, the plan is to add a feature whereby it will be necessary for vehicles regularly to visit depots, so proximity to a shipyard will be necessary for short distance ships in any event. The cost will need to be balanced to simulate the sort of shipyard  where ships were maintained, rather than the sort where they were built.
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DrSuperGood

I would suggest removing range tests for actually getting to a destination. They should only be checked when advancing stops on a line and throw the error if the next 2 stops are too far apart.

The logic behind this is that the ship can be thought of as implicitly stopping for supplies along the way. This would be for player convenience as they then do not have to worry about making a temporary route just to get a ship between places due to range restrictions.

A better implementation might even force the ship to implicitly stop at docks along the way and throw an error if there is no path made out of hops of the required distance. However this might be harder to implement.

Another solution would be to allow teleporting of depot content. Where you can move something from one depot to another, possibly at some fee or cost of time. This avoids the complexities of physical navigation entirely and can be used to solve problems such as convoys stuck inside lakes.

In both cases what should happen is that in a well built up map with no huge open oceans a ship from one side of it could be reassigned to a line on the other and it will automatically make its way there without the player needing to care about the range or route it takes.

Jando

Quote from: jamespetts on December 10, 2017, 01:08:26 AM
... Until recently, they were limited to waterways only, but I replaced that restriction with a range restriction to simulate that these would be used for short distance sea transport, so that people no longer needed to use large ships such as brigs as island ferries and the like. ...

That is an excellent change! Many thanks, James.