Cost of replacing ways

[The Hood]

Following from discussion here: http://forum.simutrans.com/index.php?topic=5087.new#new I'm a bit confused - I thought when upgrading ways you paid only for the cost of the new way rather than the cost of deleting the old way and then the cost of building the new way from scratch.  Is this intended?  As gryphonite says, it seems a little perverse that you should have to pay for deleting a river just to connect a canal into it, but I guess this applies to lots of other situations too...

[The Hood]

Any comment from those in the know?  I would really like this to be changed because at present you either very low costs for removing large rivers (which should be discouraged heavily!) or very high costs for connecting canals and rivers (which shouldn't be discouraged!).

[VS]

No, this is not a comment from "these in the know"

I'm with you... this ambiguity is rather unfortunate. But! Rivers are also a special case so I can imagine it's a bit complicated. If I'm not wrong, Prissi likes neither hardcoded special cases nor features with small overall effect.

Perhaps a way to fix this could be giving public player ownership to rivers? But then normal players wouldn't be able to work with them at all...

[Dwachs]

If a way is upgraded, the cost is the maximum of the cost to built the canal and of the cost to delete the river.

Dont know how/what to change.

[The Hood]

Two possible solutions:
1) make the upgrade cost simply the cost of the new way and ignore delete costs in upgrading
However, this could create a perverse situation where if you want to delete a large river, "upgrade" it to a canal, and then delete the canal, which would be much cheaper.  So, an alternative which would solve this:

2) when connecting a way into an existing way (creating a t-junction), keep the original waytype on the t-junction (so no upgrade on that tile, but just replace the graphics from two-way to three-way).  

Not sure how practical either of these are though.

EDIT:

I have found a much simpler workaround in the current system:
3) set the speed of the canal just below that of the rivers, and the river does not upgrade to a canal, and no cost is incurred for connecting the canal to the river.

[AP]

3) set the speed of the canal just below that of the rivers, and the river does not upgrade to a canal, and no cost is incurred for connecting the canal to the river.

Sneaky. I like it!