I think games like OpenTTD, and most simcity type game are builder-focus, hence its natural for them to have default road building tools, and they usually generate more realistic, sometimes very beautiful city landscape (I would say Capitalism cities are sometimes very unnatural looking) . However I agree since Capitalism series are more business-focus, it's not a good idea to increase the burden for players.David wrote:
In our testing, we realized that it could be too tedious requiring the player to manually build the roads while the player is already occupied all sorts of business decisions running a company.
As for the city sim expansion pack, depending on the player's preference, the player may or may not find it tedious for laying roads manually.
In view of this, we are inclined to provide two options for the player for the city sim mode where the player will be assigned with the task of developing a city from scratch. (In other words the land where the player will build the city on, will be devoid of anything at the beginning)
1) a single button for automatically building roads throughout the entire city. In this case, the player will simply not have to worry about the roads and can focus on more important aspects of the game.
2) the city starts without any roads and the player will be provided with a basic set of tools for laying roads.
IMO, I think the solution might be in the middle. have a default automatic road generating mechanism, but also provide a tool for players to destroy, reconnect some road tiles when automatic procedures fail to generate good road network, or simply need more land for buildings. Although I wonder how difficult would it be to program a procedure that automatically generate new road segments when a building is placed on an empty land that can connect existing road network. I would assume it may need certain rules to prevent odd looking blocks or double-wide-road, etc, especially when destroying roads.