[Suggestion] Roads, Please

Sid Meyers Railroad games had a way to 'lay track' where you wanted it, as long as you had the cash to pay for each part.  How difficult can it be to give the player a road building mode, where the player's civ can lay out the road / bridges, and then begin constructing them.  Also, I remember in EWOM, some roads would already be on the map before play started.  Might this be used, as well?

A few existing roads at the start certainly make sense.   I also agree with the idea for the roads to have a cost - that should keep the total number within reason.

Engineers building roads a la MoM? I would love that.

Just wanted to bump this, as I think roads need to be addressed for the mid and late game rather badly.  I would prefer to see a road builder unit, piece of equipment, talent, etc that let you build tile by tile anywhere you wanted.  I like the caravan system as is to represent "trade roads", but I really want to be able to build a highway for my infantry cause Umber is getting it in ~20 turns...

I often find myself wishing I had a road, especially to outposts, but then I think that would make the game kinda easy if I could build roads to any outpost.

We do have road builders... they're called caravans.

Trojasmic, the problem with caravans is they only build roads on their first trip- to one city.    We need real engineers as Wintersong mentions "a la MOM" that build roads where you want them to.  That system in MOM worked well.

Building custom roads would be very nice.  No idea how hard this would be to add, seems like a no brainer if it were easy.

Adding more options with roads would be good.

I'd like to be able to build roads to outposts as well as to any natural defence barriers..

Also, making them a little more visible would be helpful.

I don't want to mess around with the possible micromanagement headaches adding roads might have, but even some easy wins like auto-creating them from outposts to the nearest city and/or between cities seems good. The one downside is that enemies should also be able to take advantage of that, too.

In my view building roads in MOM did not add micromanagement headaches.   Here are some key points of that system:

1. Engineers were a different unit that many (but not all) factions had the option to build.

2. An engineer unit could build a road on only one square at at time.   

3. Terrain other than clear (woods, hills, mountains) took longer on which to build a road.

4. Multiple engineers on a square allowed the road to be build faster.

5. Engineers could be attacked and killed by other factions if you did not protect them.

To me this added depth to the game.

There was a bug, not sure if it's there in 0.77, but a customized pioneer unit from a previous game, trained in a new game, can't build cities or outposts, but can build roads.

So, a regular Pioneer can't build roads but a custom-made one can?

As opposed to the micro management headaches we have now with the caravan system, that you can't even control.

Yes, something like MOM please, or at least auto-build from outpost to nearest city and then we can put outposts where we want roads.

The way it worked was like this.  Edit the default Pioneer.  Save the results.  That new Pioneer would act like a regular Pioneer for that game.  However when you start a new game and still have the Unit Design for the edited Pioneer.  Building that Pioneer would result in a Pioneer who wouldn't have the normal functions, however it would have Build Road.

I don't see a problem with a unit that can build roads, but I don't have a problem with the current system either, except that you can't currently build roads to outposts.

I haven't play FE beta yet. But we do need a worker/engineer to build roads/bridges from city to city. It could be how civ 5 works, each road you build it adds to the maint cost but increases gildar for each city you connect. Maybe 2-3 different road upgrades in civilization tech tree. Or maybe we need an airship that can fly!

yes, let us put roads where we want them.

Yeah, being able to build roads would be very helpful. Why no improvement system like Civilization 4? That really worked perfectly, imo.

Yeah, and that unit causes big headaches for AI, because they build them and send them out and they just bumble around, unable to build or do anything.

@ James009D:  do you like the outpost and resource clusters they have going on, replaces the similar "improvement" city building mechanic from Civ well imo.  Less micro management for each city, more focus on territory expansion and setting up buffer ""war zones" where you can duke it out and not endanger your actual cities.