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Comment by littlecranky67 | Hacker News Reader

I would love a building game where you can't build roads. All of those building games so far allowed that, but I think it would be more fun to just allow for constructing building, and roads/pathway would form depending on their connectivity inside the production chain. I.e. you wouldn't connect your farm to a butcher, but pathways would form and eventually turn into street based on the amount people from dependent shops walking to it (also depending on terrain and usage of i.e. horse carriages).

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Foundation does this. No road building at all. Paths are created organically by activity. In addition, the player never builds houses either. The townspeople pick where they want their house to go.

There is road building in Banished, but the townspeople will only use them if it’s an optimal path. They’re not the least bit shy about ignoring the roads if they can get to their destination via a shortcut. Since the roads do give a substantial movement bonus, the most effective roads are the ones which trace out the organic movement of the citizens.

I like both systems, but prefer the one in Banished. It’s rewarding to build a heavily used road system based on observing patterns.

> Foundation does this. No road building at all. Paths are created organically by activity.

You can put the roads where you want them by placing taboo zoning where you don't want them. Foundation's villagers have an unnaturally strong preference for staying on existing roads, so this is necessary if you want to straighten a road that was kinked due to an obstacle that no longer exists.

> In addition, the player never builds houses either. The townspeople pick where they want their house to go.

This is even less accurate; the townspeople can only build houses in areas that have been actively zoned for housing.

And their "desirability" requirements also mean that they won't build houses unless you've specifically built a lot of decorations nearby, so even if you zone everywhere houses will only appear in places where you make an effort to get them to appear.

Yes, you can micromanage roads if you like using the forbidden zone tool. You can also shape the roads by plopping a building into the middle of a path and forcing the citizens to route around it. But, by and large, the roads are generated mostly from activity. It's been one of the selling points of Foundation from the beginning.

And you are correct about houses. But it's still a difference from the usual medieval city builders in which house placement is something players do directly. Part of Foundation's goal of making their villages more organic and less grid. That was the point I was trying to make without getting into the weeds of how the housing mechanic worked in detail.

On a side note, I wish Foundation had the option for direct placement of houses. There were bugs in past versions which prevented house construction without enormous amounts of decorations. The current version is much better, but can still be mysterious as to why houses aren't being built in a desirable area with what seems to be plenty of room and the townspeople are wanting more houses. The reasons for the non-construction are not often clear. One thing I hope the game improves over time.

This is exactly what Foundation [1] (which was also shown in a screenshot in the article) does.

[1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/690830/Foundation/

Looks like it's windows only..

As are most games. According to ProtonDB [1] it should run more or less perfectly on Linux with Proton.

[1] https://www.protondb.com/app/690830

Proton [0] looks like a really nice exanple of Open Source collaboration.

[0] https://www.protondb.com/

Civilization 6 does this a bit, where roads are constructed by running trade routes, not built manually.

But you choose the trade routes individually. Its not natural, that's the player's choice in where the roads go (except for Rome: all roads lead to Rome lol (special power where every city auto-builds a road to Rome in the early ages))

It's not completely manual. If you have cities A, B, and C and you have an existing route from city B to C, and you add one from A to C, it will automatically choose the optimal route by utilizing existing roads and connect the new city from there.

That's not what the original commenter is talking about.

The "decision" to build a road from A to C was not really a top-down decision from the medieval periods. Rome built roads in a top-down manner that sometimes benefited the Empire as a whole... but Feudal Lords built roads in a smaller and more selfish scale.

The growth of roads at that time was more akin to animal paths (animals deciding to travel the same path as other animals: because the well-trodden areas are flatter and easier to walk). Its an organic growth, rather than a top-down planned growth.

I seem to recall playing a few games where roads grew naturally like this, but I've forgotten their names by now. Feudal lords built Roads more akin to Death Stranding (where the player builds a road to try to connect to the online community. Once the road exists, you gain the benefits of the entire community's efforts)

So people are talking about that kind of "locally selfish but community building" behavior. And also in a management simulator and... not whatever Death Stranding is (First person Post-apocalyptic UPS simulator?)

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Different mechanics for different eras of history. Again: Civ6 probably is akin to some Emperor declaring a road should be built between two major cities. But Medieval / Feudal society didn't have top-down edicts from an emperor (at best: maybe from the Pope but... the Pope didn't have that much power). Having a simulator for the medieval time-period could be an interesting gameplay mechanic.

Ostriv! It is developed by one guy and incredibly addictive. Set in the 18th century.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/773790/Ostriv/

You would need to model the “roads” becoming an impassable hazard (thick muddy mess) to wheeled vehicles and horses during heavy rain.

Even ancient people threw gravel down (or logs) to help address this problem. But that’s a heck of a lot of work.

The logical implementation seems fairly easy to imagine to me.

You do ant-like pheromone tracking for movement by all peasants of the world. (Each cell keeps a tracker, which gets incremented by passing peasants and decays over time).

Upon sufficient pheromone build up, your walking tile upgrades. Perhaps in the form of grass -> well-trodden -> dirt road -> gravel road -> stone road. Simple model of decay would be to simply downgrade back down the list. More complex might be that stone/gravel degrade into some special state to maintain permanence (dirt roads goes back to grass, but stone roads turn to grassy stone or whatever).

Your peasant/wagon/etc pathfind accordingly, getting speedboosts (or losses) by road type — and in your example, by road type + local weather (modeled separately)

You could also have different pheremone types producing different artifacts. Human pheremone only produces dirt roads at max, but wagon and tamed horse pheremone jump from grass->road with sufficient buildup. Wild animals only build up to well-trodden paths.

Before we leave has this:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1073910/Before_We_Leave/

Frostpunk kinda does this - you build roads later on but in the beginning people leave deep tracks in the snow as they go out to collect supplies. It looks really cool. The whole game has an awesome aesthetic.

The settlers.did this AFAIK

Specifically Settlers 3 & 4. In 1, 2, 6 and I believe 7, paths are build manually; 5 doesn't have roads.

I recall in settlers 2 you put down the initial walkway, but it widening into a 2-way path and eventually a carriageway that donkeys would traverse was down to how much traffic it saw.

Back in the 90's, just to set the record straight. It was probably the first game that did it.

That could be a fun visual feature, to watch as paths and roads appear procedurally based on the layout of the town, but I don't think it's particular realistic, and might miss out on some strategic richness. Designing road networks is actually a complex and nuanced thing in and of itself, and it's certainly not as simple as "pave over the paths that people walk on the most." I think I would prefer road design to be a crucial part of the strategy in designing an efficient town.

I believe this is coming in Manor Lords.

Wow, that game looks impressive especially for a solo developer.

I found road building fun in KaM

That's how roads are formed in ostriv, an alpha title.

Rise Of Nations did it like this.

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