How to effectively build Railroads?

[Grandmaster of Pwn]

Hi guys, just got the tech and the military engineer. Do i have to manually move the guy and click "build railroad" on every tile? can't i just tell him somehow "automatically build railorad to x-location". it seems pretty tedious (i'm sure im missing something). thanks for any advice!

[BLÀde]

have to do it manually.

[Grandmaster of Pwn]

ok, thanks for the response. just wanted to make sure im not doing something noobish.

[tempest.of.emptiness]

Originally posted by Grandmaster of Pwn:

Do i have to manually move the guy and click "build railroad" on every tile?

Yes

Originally posted by Grandmaster of Pwn:

can't i just tell him somehow "automatically build railorad to x-location".

No. Building railroads uses coal, and so contributes to global warming. Automating the process might put you at risk of increasing your emissions more than you want, and also could cause you to run out of a potentially important strategic resource (coal or iron, but by the time you have railroads mostly coal).

Originally posted by Grandmaster of Pwn:

it seems pretty tedious (i'm sure im missing something).

It is, but for your effort you gain precise control over where railroads are built, and over how many tiles you build, and thereby over how much coal and iron you spend building them.

Personally, I find that I don't need to build to many tiles of railroad; just enough to connect my cities, typically. As a result, the tedious process of building them is over fairly quickly and then does not need to be repeated for the rest of the game (unless new cities are captured, of course).

[Grandmaster of Pwn]

thanks tempest for the detailed response. you make a good point

[Art]

Building railroads is way too tedious and so far not that useful for the effort. I understand potential resource issue, but must be better solutions with a bit of creativity (e.g. short distance point-to-point, or allocate x # resources).

[Sgt.Whiskers]

I feel like there should be a great engineer that turns and entire path (not one tile all of the path) in to a railroad with like 2 maybe 3 charges

[ScottishLad]

It's easy to build them if you just follow the road network.

Get a couple, the more the merrier. Maybe 5 military engineers and just send them a long a road in a convoy building railroads. Every turn you can get 5 railroads down one after another. After 4 turns thats a 20 tiles long line of railroads.

[dcain3456]

I only build railroads to frontier cities where I don't want to waste a trader.

[Xenpo]

Wish they would add an option to build from city to city automation at the least.

[gdshore]

Actually, railroads are very useful, particularilly if you have fractious neighbours. allows rapid movement of troops.

[=Snappy=]

Originally posted by Grandmaster of Pwn:

it seems pretty tedious (i'm sure im missing something)

No, you're not missing anything. It's the people who made this game ... they miss a LOT of things.