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here is a real web's jewel i discovered two days ago, it cover western europe with detailled maps and information about railroad network, definitely the most detailed i ever seen online, a must have for any scenario maker.

Trainspotting Bükkes

cheers,

Jan

Thanks for the link, it certainly has some good detail! I'll compare some of what we've done to these maps but the problem with these maps is they are too detailed. If you look at France for example, we could not add all those rail lines, it would be too much on the map, and there is no indication which ones are "more important". This was a problem for me throughout the road/rail placement stage. Also, we usually need to use only sources that do the whole world so that we get a consistent level of detail everywhere. However we could start collecting some of these links on the Wiki, a set of sources of where to find certain pieces of data. I've been collecting a lot of links for resource balancing so I'll probably post some of those soon.

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Chris Latour
BattleGoat Studios
chris@battlegoat.com

it may clearly a good idea to centralize all those helpful urls somewhere, you are definitelly right.

about the importrance of a railroad versus another, you can choose to only retain those with a certain amount of power output for exemple.

about road and railroad network, i was a bit surprised to find, in game, european cities without any road or rail between them, that's basically why i searched after detailed maps

cheers,

Jan

There were three factors that contributed to this; one was map scale, at a larger km/hex we try and include less stuff. Second would be that a road creates more supply than a rail and the bonus does not add up, so if a road and rail pass in the same place we only put the road. Third was lack of good sources, that is something we're doing better with this time but is always a challenge.

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Chris Latour
BattleGoat Studios
chris@battlegoat.com

Chris,

Can you please explain the rationale for placing road and rail? I couldn't explain this to someone else if they asked me. They obviously don't represent all roads and rails, nor even major highways and hubs. Given that every hex has something akin to an infrastructure rating, I don't even think roads and rails are needed -- but there they are. How do you go about selectinng which hexes get what?

Regards,
Feltan

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ETA Five Minutes ......

maybe to materialise the infrastructure on the map to let the player to be able to do military actions (blowing bridges, destroying railroads...) on it?

cheers,

Jan

While the standard for roads in SR2010 may have been poor (mostly for similar issues to rails) we are trying hard to make clearer standards for SR2020. Biggest problem is that there is no one source that has good data for the whole world and no two sources agree on which roads are "important" and sometimes don't even agree on if a road exists in a certain area. When I get around to posting all the links on the wiki I'll include the ones I used for roads and notes on how each one was used. For the US, I used mostly Google Maps and included the Interstates and a large portion of the numbered highways. Google Maps however couldn't be my only source since it does not have any of the roads in Asia other than India. Even the Encarta Atlas (a very useful tool for us) at one zoom level shows about half of the interstates. Scroll in one click and suddenly you have interstates, numberd highways and small roads all showing with no visual differences.

The purpose for roads is two-fold; travel access and supply. While there is an overall country infrastructure rating, there is no default supply provided by a hex. Without roads units would run out of gas passing through the Navada desert, the supply would not extend more than 1-2 hexes from the major cities. And the travel speed off road is different than on road, particularly in certain terrain types.

_________________
Chris Latour
BattleGoat Studios
chris@battlegoat.com