Overland deliveries

[Slamz]

One thing that makes, say, the Lesser Antilles awesome and Cuba and most coastal areas awful is the fact that you can't just deliver goods over land as would have actually been done in real life. I'm no 18th century manufacturer, but I suspect nobody is going to take a ship of iron from Bataban to Havana (~650 km) when they could just use a land route (~50 km).

 

Proposal:

Any two ports that share the same chunk of land can deliver to each other within roughly 250 km.

 

 

This raises the value of a lot of coastal areas and especially big islands and peninsulas like Cuba, Hispaniola and Florida.

 

The counter-argument is "this takes even more traders out of the world!"

 

To which I say "No it doesn't because as it stands, people simply avoid doing this kind of thing entirely." I will never ship iron from Bataban to Havana. I will just make my econ center be somewhere else, thus lowering the value of that part of the map.

 

This isn't about increasing or decreasing shipping traffic -- it's about making some terrible parts of the map actually be seen as being as valuable as they really would be.

 

[Galileus]

The counter-argument is "this takes even more traders out of the world!"

 

To which I say "No it doesn't because as it stands, people simply avoid doing this kind of thing entirely." I will never ship iron from Bataban to Havana. I will just make my econ center be somewhere else, thus lowering the value of that part of the map.

 

Your counter-counter argument is faulty.

 

It's true, this would not remove traders in Bataban / Havana area because - as you note - they don't exist in the first place.

What you fail to mention is that it will also remove traders from the other econ center you created and in turn lower it's value.

 

What you are left with is insane increase in value of convex city formations, thus extreme decrease in value of concave city formations (because why bother with transport?).

And - as you pointed out - is does remove the need to ferry resources at all, which is already a problem.

 

I agree with your counter-argument

[Cragger]

Overland was costly, even when there was roads. Florida only had an old mission road up in the pan handle between San Marcos and San Augustine. 

 

Now. River transport definitely, especially downstream.

[Slamz]

And - as you pointed out - is does remove the need to ferry resources at all, which is already a problem.

 

I'm saying it would make that problem no worse.

 

As it stands today, there is no reason to do long distance over-sea hauling in this game. Over-sea hauling should always be done either to the nearest free port, where you will deliver it to your shipyard in some other free port, OR you just deliver it to the capital via teleport. As such, all cargo traffic should be short haul runs.

 

This seems to unnecessarily devalue some areas, though.

 

Although I suppose it's possible this is historically accurate: maybe sea shipping really WAS the best way to move things around Cuba in this time frame. It does make lots of parts of this map unnecessarily dull, though.

 

 

Eastern Hispaniola (real world Dominican Republic) is another good example. What a boring expanse of land that is. Ports are spaced far apart and there is really no reason to go there or want to control that area. If they could move things around by land, though, maybe some practical shipbuilding and economy could occur there.

[Galileus]

Making hauling cargo optional only makes other parts of the map boring AND it removes people hauling cargo.

 

I like the idea, I don't like the consequences, sorry.