When drawing canals, they seem too eager to join adjacent waterways:
- even if this means changing levels
- even if the water they stick to is "the sea"
- when there is a clear path between start and end points and a river directly adjacent.
1. is just counter-intuitive. I don't know if barges have a penalty for transiting through locks (if not they should...), but clearly building a nice level canal is better than going up and down all the time.
2. is equally illogical, since if I'm building a canal for non-seagoing vessels, they can't possibly use the route it is trying to auto-build by trying to route via the ocean. Canal-building routes shouldn't 'be attracted to' ocean tiles at all...
3. is annoying, since if I wanted to build branches off an existing canal I'd click in a very different manner than if I wanted a second canal parallel to the first. With access rights granted to other players, I know I can run boats over other players canals, but I pay tolls for that privilege (and may not want to, may prefer to control my own infrastructure).
Agreed. I end up using CTRL-click to lay most of my canals for this reason. They want to use existing waterways far too readily, even if it's quite far away from the direction I want the canal to go (or, as you say, the ocean-which is no good for horse-drawn barges).
I should note that this was originally posted on the Experimental forum, but I have moved it here, as this part of Simutrans is not specific to Experimental.
I pretty much exclusively use Ctrl when building all kinds of over any considerable distance. But I don't see any problem with canals sticking to water, though.