Cities tend to have a vast network of roads as well as many dwellings to house as many people as possible. When you want to construct a station in the city center you are forced to cut yourself a way through these streets and dwellings. Whether the city owns all roads or transportation companies own roads you will always come to the point where you manually demolish roads and dwellings (see TTD and Locomotion). Isn't there a different approach?
Maybe there is. Imagine you want to build a 4-track station of 7 squares length in Gotham City. In TTD you see a 4*7 rectangle when you plan to drop a station somewhere and a red error box when the intended area is occupied. But why not have a different pop-up box? Check the image below.
Looks good. You could go a step further and make a preview mode that shows exactly which buildings will die. I think we have to place some restriction on destroying roads, if buses have been using them regularly, then you shouldn't be able to go over them. Like in loco.
I agree with the limitation on frequently used or important roads. The warning on what is threatened to be demolished would result in something like in the image below:
But in the end, it's unrealistic "digging through" a city to build a station in the center. Even stations that now lie in the center of cities, often were at the outskirts when they were first built. Or at least I believe so
Only a minimum of construction should ever be removed when you build a new (train) station.
Yes, you are right about the construction of railroad stations. They were usually build in the city center and the cities grew around it. If we can make such city growth possible in TE this issue wouldn't really exist. But it would still be more user-friendly to demolish limited amounts of road/buildings while planning a new station.
I disagree that the issue wouldn't exist. Assume your playing a map by yourself, your hardly going to put a train station in every town before they grow! So your still going have to build effective stations in big cities.
If the destination system allows it, then you could just use buses to make sure people get to the station, but you'd still get less demand and for A LOT more startup cost.
In simutrans(where every passenger have a destination) you usaly puts train stations next to a city. Preferable next to many cities if possible, and then use buss service(es) to get people to/from the station.
So it should work to have a system where you can't just demolish the center of a city and place the station there. Actually in TTD you often placed the station outside of a town, and "cheated" in a buss station or lorry bay in the center of the city that belonged to the same station.
My OpenTTD contributions (AIs, Game Scripts, patches, OpenTTD Auto Updater, and some sprites) Junctioneer (a traffic intersection simulator)
Let's go a bit OT with our thoughts. If we want players to construct stations on the edge of a city there's no real need for my proposed feature. It's more a convenience then for demolishing the buildings/roads in the way from within the Station Construction menu (it safes you clicking the bulldozer!). What we need to determine then is how many buildings/roads a company can demolish in the city center. Do we need a specific topic for that or shall I rename this one?
Not all stations are on ground level. We can build under the cities like in Loco, as well as put small stations on bridges and little "hills" in the town center.
There are actually more stations than you might think that are up on high levels and are more than small stations. As a guide, platform height in Cardiff Central (7 platforms) is about 4m above the surroundings. Queen Street, which has heavy local traffic, has its platforms about 6m above ground. Of course, you have to get to the really small stations at heights in excess of about 15m. At that point, you have to establish how passengers get to the platforms.
Perhaps stations will be more and more expensive the more far from ground level they get, to acout for escalators, and elvators for people to get to the platforms.
My OpenTTD contributions (AIs, Game Scripts, patches, OpenTTD Auto Updater, and some sprites) Junctioneer (a traffic intersection simulator)
