I would love some mechanism for roads to decay over time. Roads and not just cities should be part of the ebb and flow of empires. Road decay could be triggered by:

• under utilization
• empty end points (road to nowhere)
• lack of funding/resources (if it plays a role in road construction)
• loss of territory control
• ...

Better roads I agree - more roads, no in fact I think more roads should give diminishing returns. I do not want optimal gameplay to mean having the map spammed with roads ala late game Civilization.

I like organic roads but I am really fine with being able to paint them down, I just hope the cost is high enough that roads are only put down where they make sense. I think top quality roads you would only have between the major cities, with dirt roads and trails off to the smaller settlements.

In Civ in the late game having the world be an asphalt jungle kinda made sense because by then you are in a modern setting. For the fantasy setting, I think few roads is good, and really good quality roads should be quite rare.

Perhaps when you click to build road (built BY city-A TO city-B ) the game automatically presents a blueprint of "the most efficient pathway." Then, you can click and drag at the road at any point to give it significant Meandering or such (like I want it through the Valley guarded by my forts rather than the Hostile open plains)

Many moons ago I posted a topic inside Elemental Ideas advising the magic marker method:

https://forums.elementalgame.com/367745

This method allows some players to place down roads quickly and other players to place down more complex roads while providing an easy to use method.

I'm not sure what exactly can possibly be "more interesting" here. I don't think it will be any more interesting if a player will need to make more than one click to make a road. More so, given that players will always want to connect their cities with roads, i think it should take zero extra clicks to make a road. So a road should spawn automatically if two nearby cities have either a low-lvl trade building like a trade post (that building should give some other benefit too, road is just a bonus) or any low-lvl military building. These buildings signify that these cities have either trade or military needs that require a road.

agree

interesting idea too

lol why on earth ppl wouldnt want to make a click?

this is a strategic game, ppl wants control and strategy

things automated are not good for strategic games

ofc we want things to be easy to controlo, with a nice interface and a fun gameplay, but also we want to decide and we want strategy to matter

bad idea

After reading all the suggestions and complaints here, I got a new idea, which allows as much control as you need, with minimal management.

3. Organic tactical roads - A roadbuilding AI tries to connect everything you build together, using the current shortest route (which is influenced by existing roads).  It should not build roads near hostile units, so they automatically avoid dangerous areas.  If you want a road to the mountain pass, build a fort or something there.  If you want a road around a dangerous area, build inns to guide it around.  It always builds roads from the closest point to a closest point, so no criss-crossing, and also it stops trying to build in the dangerous area if you built the inns around it.

I remember someone saying something about not wanting a road directly from his border fort to his capital.  I think building a fort to defend the road is a better option.

Since the roads are built automatically, I recommend them being free to build and maintain, so that you do not have to pay for roads that you do not like.  I know this is unrealistic, but I think it makes them more satisfying.

Whatever you choose if the builder of the road is an enemy state, we as the opposition should have the ability to disrupt the construction.

The most important part of the road debate for me is really aesthetics. Master of Magic and the Civ series did a great job of uglying up a map with roads as the game progressed. Whatever the final solution, please at least make the roads unobtrusive, blending into the map as much as possible. 

To make the roads less obtrusive, make them a trade-off.  In Civ type games, you make a road, and you're done. A one-time expense gives you a permanent bonus. Make the roads cost something, and you won't have them in every single square.  Cities have upkeep; roads also should.

Example?  A city generates 100 Road Maintenance Units. There's a road 20 tiles long; this road demands 20 units of maintenance (does this not scale well? I'm going off the cuff here. Maybe (floor_n/2) to get cost per tile?). Whatever. Once your city is spending all its RMUs, you have to find another way to maintain these roads.  Units could do it, I suppose, but the general consensus seems that units for roads are lame. That leaves us with a maintenance cost.  Tie this in to the recurring appreciation for organically grown roads, and you need to develop a scaling maintenance cost. A trail is free; why not? I walk on it because I don't get my pants torn by thorns, and by walking on it I reinforce the trail. But a nice, big road is expensive.

Here's the obvious difficulty I see with this; if you do this, you need to allow roads to decay, and if you're going to allow a resource like a road to decay, you need the player to be able to decide which road dies first. This might not be inelegant; I wouldn't be annoyed by a system integrated into the city screen where I could prioritize roads, or select one road from a governor at the world screen and kill it.

Edited: spling erors

Why bother about roads. The map represent the whole world. A square is equal to tousands of square kilometers. So the roads are simply too small to be seen. So I would say that there should be no reads in the game, you assume that there are roads there.

If you want an even easier system than organic road, you can say that a certain radius of hexes around a city have roads. The road range could be influenced by the size of the city. But if you get too far away from civilizations, you do not get access to roads.

Personally, I like games where all the roads are setup like in romance of the 3 kingdoms. I agree that maintenance on road is bad. You want to remove as much maintenance as possible like in "CivRev". Yes, Civ IV is not a good reference for turn based strategy games. It's not because it is the only TBS that it is the best.

I don't want any small things that I HAVE to do to stay competetive like continually telling workers to mine in StarCraft.

Continually telling workers to build roads is just as boring.

I don't know how the improvements will work but if you build mines over goldmines then people should go out and build it so as to prevent the lame C&C 3 mechanic of things just appearing out of the ground.

So make it like in Majesty. You select the building (road or improvement in this case), plop it down and out from the castle comes the peasants to build.

To reinforce the importance of highlvl cities:

• When two cities reach a higher lvl the road between them is automatically upgraded

One thing that may have been forgotten here, is, what purpose do roads serve?    I'm not sure if free movement a la MoM is good since then, roads are quite powerful. It brings down the time to get units to the front but might make defending too easy....

larienna

Who the hell says that Civ IV is the best TBS??        Granted, Civ II The Test of Time is the only Civ game I've played but after 30min I've had enough.

I say Age of Wonders and Master of Magic is the best of the TBS genre.

I liked one of the early suggestion of allowing any military unit the ability to make roads. I would like to add to that suggestion of worker/contruction units the ability to make those roads much better (y'know - like brick/marble roads, properly formed and smooth...as opposed to dirt tracks or shale)

This. But only if the road was already built previously, by the player.

Actually I got a better idea.

Cities build their own roads to each other. Forget telling them to build roads to City x,y or z. Cities only build roads to cities of your own nation.They grow slowly but surely overtime and the same applys to upgrades of the roads.

You can research better roads (civ tech)that increase trade bonuses, Speed of your units, (maybe a small bonus to money gathered by cities) and increases maintenance costs of the roads.

Now when you set up trade pacts with other nations, caravans will head to their closest road to the neighbor and they will create a road to connect with that neighbors network of roads.

If you setup a perminate alliance with your neighbor, all cities will create bigger networks/more roads to each other.

All above is automatic. Now if you need to speed up road construction just place a worker near the route and it will be built faster. You can group workers and even solders too to get a bigger bonus. Maybe there is an extra cost for doing this. Workers can build you roads of your desire if you need to. IE a highway that leads to your board to mass troops into war zones. But your enemy can also use it against you too!

NO WORKERS!

I think the mainproblem for X-Roads like in CIV is the military advantage you gain, if the enemy can use roads like you do, there is no need to X-Road everywhere.

Also there should be a possiblity to build a fort or an outpost that protects the road and territory around the road, so the enemy needs to attack the fort or take a long trip arround the fort...

Diffrent roads and fortification should use the same upkeep system, so u can choose between building a stone road without fort or just a dirt track but protected by a fort.

Big City connected with each other should also need better roads for trading more goods. This would lead to build first fast roads between big city because of the needed of income.

Maby u could display something like a rush hour on a dirt track if they need a better road connection ^^

I wish people would stop posting reiterations and opinions. We need SKYNET just to organize these replies and the devs don't have that kind of budget.

Are any devs even reading this post anymore?

How about a little bit if communication? Idea-->feedback-->Dev response-->repeat

Agreed, some dev feedback on which way they are leaning would be nice. This has been suggested a lot, and is still the most sensible to me: Automatic dirt trails that eventually become dirt roads. If you want anything fancier; (stone?) just click on a city, and there would be a little road icon with a little flag, pressing this lets you place a target origin and destination for your new shiney stone road. Then some little dudes with a wagon of rock, pick axes and shovels come walking out of the city and get to work.

Thank goodness, someone knows what they are talking about.. 

Alright, here what I think it needs to be like: 

• You open up the road building window
• based on your technological level, you see what kind of roads you can lay down: dirt, stone, brick, etc.
• Each type uses different resources and bestows different benefits, mostly just relating to speed bonuses, but also some trade
• You hand draw the road on the map, like taking a pencil to a piece of paper.
• The road is laid down. Immediately, but only as a dirt road. If you asked for a stone road it will one day develop into that but only after it has been amply traveled on.

Trade, you need to list trade for this argument.

Upkeep on roads is good.  The why is simple, you're not just using your road network to jack off, it's a valuable, revenue generating asset.  The commerce system simply needs to be set up to take advantage of the assets.  The merchants in your empire, by traveling faster, would complete transactions in a more timely fashion.  This would reduce their overhead and increase the amount of trading they do, which in turn increases your revenue from taxes.

Upkeep means you have to choose whether to put a useless road up in regards to commerce.  Without it, there's really no reason not to build highways out to everything you want to protect.  You can try to say that building those roads is part of strategy, but there's no strategy in something you always do because it helps.  You get strategy by having choices, and you make roads a choice by making them realistic.  The dirt path will have to do where you can't afford to be replacing paving stones.

Here is my thought for something different though I originally jumped on the 'organic' road idea.

I'd like to have a 'transportation officer'. This would be someone I promote (train) to build/maintain the road network. The better the training, the quicker things get done and for fewer $$. Here is what they would do and the commands I could issue them.

*They would 'hold the funds' I allocate them for the building/maintaining of our transportation network. The more funds I give them, the more roads they could build (within limits) and/or the better quality they could be. If my funds drop too low I might not be able to maintain a higher quality road. I could raise/lower their spending limit when it suits me.  

*They would 'hire a crew' to build the roads depending on the money I give them. I could determine how much control I want over the placement of the roads by basic instructions. I could say "build a road to city x" and let it get done how they see fit. They would build the road in the quickest/least expensive manner. I could tell them to build a road from point A through point B, C, etc. to guide the road where I wanted. This would be more time consuming and costlier, but might be worth it later in the game. I might tell them to build it as quickly or as inexpensively as possible. Maybe I would order my officer to drop funding for a road leading to my enemy. Maybe my officer would take it upon themself to allocate more funds to the best trade routes in order to improve profits. 

The basic point behind this would be a setup that would have options for different playstyles. You could give all control to your officer or you could manange more details in the road building process. Think of it as (3) varied settings; fully automated, automated with settings or manual/micro-managing.

If the enemy can use your roads (which is to be expected) then roads everywhere like in civ give you a huge disadvantage: the enemy can strike everywhere and avoid your army! This can be used as an automatic penalty for people who use an (over)extensive road network.

From here it is only a small step to organic roads (with maybe an occasional hand-made road here and there for tactical purposes, like a mountain road(/tunnel?) to get your troops near the capital just a little faster).

Roads shouldn't give a direct terrain bonus to trade but rather an abstract bonus, so whoever is going to road spam is just making it easier for the AI to quickly slip armies to any city of yours they want. The Civ IV mechanic of road spam only works because it has the advantage of allowing the defender total movement while the attacker does not benefit. If in Civ IV the attacker could use roads then there would be no road spam as they don't contribute to increasing a single squares commerce and thus it would be stupid to build roads everywhere. When roads are used properly cities are choke points, the outer cities protect the inner ones by demanding the attacker move through them. If they don't take the outer city the defender has brought time and can prepare to defend the next city down the line. As soon as you road spam you lose this advantage as a defender, the attacker can move wherever they want as quick as is possible in the game. As a defender that sucks.

So who would actually choose to road spam given these conditions?

Maintenance, what happens if you don't pay it? Will a whole road just revert back to a dirt path, will slowly over time individual squares randomly revert back to a dirt path? What an annoyance! Not fun, now roads in Elemental are like a Tamagochi mini-game.... I want to spend my time researching spells, making, moving and fighting armies, not babysitting roads.

The KISS principle. Keep It Simple Susie.