[915 Auto paths Improvement Needed]

I agree. Best road travelling AI is required.

I would LOVE it if we could control WHERE roads were built. And control IF you want a road. Auto roads leads to too much randomness for the bonus it provides.

On the other hand GFireflyE, having roads automatically created between towns and outposts (with the proper tech), is an amazing time saver.

There is a champion you can hire who builds roads   strangely he is still lvl 3 after sooooo many turns....

My road system looks good though!

With the advent of "enemies can't use my roads" recent changes, it matters less, but the auto-roads are still pretty inefficient in their route as well as messy.

My preference would be to at LEAST indicate where I prefer the trade route to go, if not simply build directly.

I am putting my money here, auto-roading is just annoyingly putting the roads where I dont want them , like telling my enemies that I build an outpost on the other side of theyre borders since my engineers just smash-hammered a road through theyre capitol

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Well there is a way to sorta manually make roads. Create a outpost by spell, it places the road, then you scrap it after. So why there is no game mechanic to do this directly is puzzling.

I dont want roads all around, honestly, even in games where it only have benefit to build roads on every single tile (older games) I do not do this due to the incredible poor visuals this gives to a game.

I would also wish I could choose some outposts not to build roads out to, when getting the appropriate research, sometimes I skip the roads to outposts research due to the visual mess entirely.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Roads should cost a maintenance aswell....else they should fall into disarray.

This way, while you CAN build roads where ever you want, you won't WANT to build roads everywhere, cause it'll cost too much.

Why do you feel the need to prohibit players of building roads by price?

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

I didn't say "building roads by price". I said "maintaining roads by price". There is a difference....and I shall explain in more detail now.

I find two sides of a spectrum occuring here. On the one hand, roads are built and used completely out of our control. Now as I understand it, you cannot use roads that are in enemy territory and vice versa. Really? It's just a strip of land. Very unrealistic, imo. You build a road...you should be prepared to defend it imo. Then, on the other hand, you have the ability to control where you build roads. This equates to ROAD SPAM....like in CIV. Kinda takes the point away in having roads in the first place. ie: If every plot is special, it's just another way of saying none are.

So, I figure that buying and selling dirt would get pretty tedious, however, maintaining that dirt would be a very automatic piece of the game, though you would be aware of it as a separate row in your city taxes screen if you wanted to moderate some control over it. I won't suggest Sim City Style maintenance cost....just 'if you build it, it will cost you' flat rate style. Now the choice becomes the players.

Spam roads? It's going to cost you. Maybe not much.....and maybe you feel you can afford it in the end, but it WILL cost you. Instantly roads become a military tatic....hey that's cool...cause that's what they meant for (see ROMANS)....that and economic trade. (so as an aside, maybe if caravans are reintergrated, make them only able to travel between cities are that connected with roadways.).

Anyways, that's the mechanism I see that'll make building roads a strategic choice with economic and military consequences. The more you invest, the better your military flexibility will be, but at a cost to your economic growth. Warm up to the idea....I think you'll like it.

This explain it better?

Sorry, when I typed that I was a little bit tired, so it did not come out in perfect english (And I am a little bit tired now :P)
I did understand that you wanted to put up an upkeep on roads, and that you wanted to do it as to limit road spam.

I still hope it does not come up at high costs, I really didn't like this certain "feature" off Civ 5.
On the other hand, I played a game called "Alpha Centauri", and roads where free on upkeep, (even railroads), the disadvantage by spamming them all over your empire was that the enemy had the same use of them as you had, so if your whole land was a road-mess, the enemy units would just blitz all over you land picking off the weakly defended cities first, or just smashing all your farms (resources) to bits.

I do think that right now roads would be a real big pain to defend, and units move far too much on the overland map with some proper misusage of movement speed spells, like the AI does on higher challenge levels . So I think personally its a very good choice to limit road usage in my own borders to myself, (Don't talk realistic, or ill actually have to use my time researching silly subject ;)) as to give me atleast 1 turn warning that they are going to attack my big town with 5 tile wide borders.

I also think that if you made a rumoured upgrade system to outposts, to have "military bases" or what you want to call them, in which you can place on your roads, and make a defendable position, (like an outside the city fort), you would have done much for the players to be able to defend theyre roads (and resources) and would be one step closer to removing the limiting of roads to the player in which zone of control the roads are in.

In the end, I just want to see the new economics system before knowing whether roads would be affordable, right now I feel my economy have no space leftover for anything except more military units or special buildings, so I might be surprised.

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Hmm...I have no experiance with Civ 5. Read the reviews...was going to buy it...only to find out that it needed steam to run. Pass.

Anyways, spamming roads, even though your enemies can use them as much as you, just feels....wrong. It look and feels completely unreaslistic and should be avoided imo. It was the worst aspect out of all the other Civ games to date.

As to maintenance costs, it would be very easy to nudge up an aspect of the game to compensate you for a reasonable number of roads. As you empire expands, the money collected for roads would aswell, allowing for the construction of more to maintain that balance. Of course, you get to decide if you want more or less roads than the proscribed balance....resulting in less or more income....but with the trade off of be able to expand quickly in the direction you built the roads.

I think it would be easy to implement.....and easy to set up. I haven't seen a worker unit yet.....as far as I see it, resources instantly build if you click on them. Something similar can be done with roads.

Though to that note, I think resources should queue, just like building units etc....and they should take time to complete. Slows the game down a little....but I think with the closer cities showing up in the next beta, that'll be offset with the increased expansion of your empire.