Hello everybody,

Because of one thing that is still annoying me quite a lot in the current version of Civ4 I'd like to post a proposal for a change in one of the future releases or maybe a user-mod.
It's about this ugly looking railroad and road system that spread over the whole map in later games. I hated this from the beginning on but it seems to me that nobody really cares about.
So to avoid this spread of rails and roads over the whole map I'd introduce an infrastructure upkeep system. That means that each road or rail tile needs an upkeep in each round. That would limit the rail and road system depending on your economy and brings an interesting new feature to the game.
Additionally to the upkeep I'd introduce an initial cost factor for each rail or road that is build.
What do you think of this proposal and is there anybody who could prepare a mod like this???

Thanks a lot in advance.

That really is a good idea! I agree that maps full with roads are ugly, especially with farms everywhere. Maybe the upkeep should be 0.10 for railroads (10 movement points) and 0.03 for roads (x3 movement points). It will be very expensive for a very large empire. Maybe the upkeep for companies should be lower if connected with a road. Just an idea;)

Wrong forum ! This must go to the parent directory.

I agree that roads should somehow have an upkeep. The problem however, is not to implement an upkeep system, the problem is to make the AI take this into account so it will retrict himeself to essential roads.

Of course. That's the main problem. That's more less why I'm not able to do it by myself. I still don't understand why the game developers didn't already change this annoying and completely unrealistic road system. It's annoying from Civ1 on. So I just started a post to find somebody who is able to do such a mod or maybe game developers start thinking.
As far as I know the AI has some priorities to build roads and railroads. At this decision points it should be possible to introduce a new parameter that reflects the upkeep value. Primary the AI should just stop building roads and rails after building a trade network and connecting all ressources. Further roads have only strategic value in some cases if going to war. But also in this case it is more realistic not to have roads everywhere because also in reality roads and bridges were always important strategic places in war.
I think of different paramters that could influence the upkeep (terrain, government type,...). Also a non linear calculation would be appreciated to have a realistic model for each size of the empire. It should really be expensive to keep up a vast infrastructure while the essentials shouldn't be a too big factor. So I think of a calculation model that is quite linear up to a certain number of roads and rails depending on the number of the cities in the empire. Exeeding this point the costs should increase much faster.
Nevertheless, I have no idea how to implement this so I hope to find an experienced modder liking my ideas.

I think restricting the AI to trade network only is too restricting. It should also build roads between cities to improve militairy mobilisation.

The aI could use the following priorities:
- first, connect resources with cites
- second, create trade network
- third, create direct paths with nearby cities

this should allow the AI to construct a road network that is both effective for resource, trade and militairy purposes

Sorry. My statement was not complete. Of course should the AI also build roads between the cities. I absolutely agree with your proposal.