Who pays maintenance for roads?

feldmarshall · Aug 11, 2015

You pay maintenance for your road and railroads. What determines who owns the road? In most cases, it's obvious, but how about these corner cases?
- You build roads in other civ/CS's territory (e.g. for the "connecting capitals" quest)
- You build roads in no man's land (e.g. to connect your non contiguous cities)
- You build the road and someone took it (e.g. by taking your city, building a citadel, etc)
- You build road in no man's land and somebody took it because their city expands.

Sclb · Aug 11, 2015

You own it when it's currently inside your cultural boundary. It is also useful to remove the road inside your boundary after you finish the quest for connecting capital to CS.

feldmarshall · Aug 11, 2015

Sclb said:
You own it when it's currently inside your cultural boundary. It is also useful to remove the road inside your boundary after you finish the quest for connecting capital to CS.

Who pays the maintenance for those roads that you build outside your boundary? How about those in no man's land? Nobody?

Sclb · Aug 11, 2015

The ones in no man's land if they're built by you, you still pay maintenance.
There are also tricks for saving on maintenance when you construct roads. You can set your workers to stop when there is 1 turn remaining to finish, then order a couple of your workers finish the road in a single turn to save on some early gold.

Dushku · Aug 11, 2015

False. You pay for all roads YOU built that aren't inside somebody else's territory:

https://youtu.be/HhT7I5XM1qY

Edit to add that you also pay for roads inside your borders you didn't build. Had a game recently where my borders grew to encompass somebody else's City Connection.

claudiupb · Aug 11, 2015

feldmarshall said:
You pay maintenance for your road and railroads. What determines who owns the road? In most cases, it's obvious, but how about these corner cases?
- You build roads in other civ/CS's territory (e.g. for the "connecting capitals" quest)
- You build roads in no man's land (e.g. to connect your non contiguous cities)
- You build the road and someone took it (e.g. by taking your city, building a citadel, etc)
- You build road in no man's land and somebody took it because their city expands.

You pay for ALL the roads that are within your cultural borders, regardless of who originally built/owned them. You also pay for all the roads that are in "no man's land" that are constructed by you. This applies to all civs, so to answer all your questions in order:
1) The other Civ/CS pays for it.
2) You pay for it.
3) They pay for it.
4) They pay for it.

Now you need to be careful, because you also pay for pillaged roads, so if you conquer some city and don't want a couple of road tiles, pillaging them before conquering the city does not work. You need to bring a worker to remove the roads.

A nice trick is to use someone else's roads for your city connections, for this to work you need to have open borders with that civ/friend status with that CS. Of course if a road is in no man's land you only need to connect to it (sometimes AI's will construct long roads to fulfill CS quests, so you can just attach yourself to that road and use it for your city connection).

HughFran · Aug 11, 2015

Sclb said:
The ones in no man's land if they're built by you, you still pay maintenance.
There are also tricks for saving on maintenance when you construct roads. You can set your workers to stop when there is 1 turn remaining to finish, then order a couple of your workers finish the road in a single turn to save on some early gold.

Sounds like a lot of hassle for a few coins!! :lol:

claudiupb · Aug 11, 2015

^^

It's really not, by doing this you can "pre-build" a complete road if your workers don't have any other tasks to perform, and once your cities grow to a size supporting the road cost you can finish it in a small number of turns, and get some coins.

In the beginning every coin matters, since you have so many things to build but so little time to achieve it. You will want your citizens to work a mix of food and hammer tiles, so gold tiles come 3rd when assigning them. This means that you need to get gold by different means, since you want it to rush buy things. Rush buying an archer or two, or a library or sometimes even stone works, can give you an advantage and will result in faster times to NC, faster times for education, etc.

z284pwr · Aug 11, 2015

If you play as the Inca there is a simple solution to this....road all the things, especially hills and just not worry about it :smug:

Ayubalugu · Dec 20, 2015

Is there a way to identify which particular road tiles in neutral territory that I am the "owner" (the one who pays the maintenance)?

(other than taking a worker there, removing the road and checking if the road maintenance I am paying changes or not).

I have got a PBEM multiplayer game where we have a ton of roads in neutral territory and I need to find which ones I own and remove them.

Browd · Dec 20, 2015

If you built the road, it's yours. When in doubt, if your worker can remove the road (i.e., the remove option is a "usable" option for your worker), it's yours. There is no way (that I know of) to tell at a glance whether a road segment is yours.

orasis · Dec 24, 2015

You only pay for roads in your territory or in 'nowhere' by your workers.

A cheap, very cheap exploit is to get open borders with a neighbor (early) and just put roads everywhere in your neighbor/enemies territory. It can financially disable him/her.

WackenOpenAir · Dec 24, 2015

orasis said:
You only pay for roads in your territory or in 'nowhere' by your workers.

A cheap, very cheap exploit is to get open borders with a neighbor (early) and just put roads everywhere in your neighbor/enemies territory. It can financially disable him/her.

You call that cheap ? wasting your workers on building roads in someone elses land ? :eek:

And then you lose out on the coins that you would have gotten from that civ in trade for your excess resources. :crazyeye:

Ayubalugu · Dec 24, 2015

Browd said:
If you built the road, it's yours. When in doubt, if your worker can remove the road (i.e., the remove option is a "usable" option for your worker), it's yours. There is no way (that I know of) to tell at a glance whether a road segment is yours.

Thanks, I guess I will have to continue moving my worker all around the map and try removing the roads.

If anyone is curious, why I would need this is:
We are playing an unusual setup in a PBEM game on GMR, all the players are playing as Germany to take advantage of the Barbarian recruitment UA, none of us have any cities (starting Settlers are deleted by the players at the first turn), and there are no City States, so all of the map is neutral territory, we all have a Worker and if you lose your Worker then you are eliminated.

We had been growing our armies by attacking Barbarian camps and recruiting them. I decided to use a strategy of building roads (that Worker should make himself useful, right?

) so that my units can move around faster and converge at where ever I needed them. The game took much longer than I expected, over 1.5 years now (or I survived much longer than I initially thought, several players are already eliminated, I encountered only a couple of them), so I lost track of the roads I built (apparently some other players also thought of the same strategy as there are roads built by others all around the map). Now that I ran out of Barbarian camps to provide me gold, the road maintenance will soon deplete all my gold reserves and I am afraid it will cause my units to disband. This will ensure my defeat when I encounter one of the players that are stronger than me.

BlackWizard · Dec 25, 2015

Ayubalugu said:
Thanks, I guess I will have to continue moving my worker all around the map and try removing the roads.

If anyone is curious, why I would need this is:
We are playing an unusual setup in a PBEM game on GMR, all the players are playing as Germany to take advantage of the Barbarian recruitment UA, none of us have any cities (starting Settlers are deleted by the players at the first turn), and there are no City States, so all of the map is neutral territory, we all have a Worker and if you lose your Worker then you are eliminated.

We had been growing our armies by attacking Barbarian camps and recruiting them. I decided to use a strategy of building roads (that Worker should make himself useful, right? ) so that my units can move around faster and converge at where ever I needed them. The game took much longer than I expected, over 1.5 years now (or I survived much longer than I initially thought, several players are already eliminated, I encountered only a couple of them), so I lost track of the roads I built (apparently some other players also thought of the same strategy as there are roads built by others all around the map). Now that I ran out of Barbarian camps to provide me gold, the road maintenance will soon deplete all my gold reserves and I am afraid it will cause my units to disband. This will ensure my defeat when I encounter one of the players that are stronger than me.

Who pays maintenance for roads?

feldmarshall

Dictator

Sclb

Emperor

feldmarshall

Dictator

Sclb

Emperor

Dushku

Prince

claudiupb

King

HughFran

Prince

claudiupb

King

z284pwr

Prince

Ayubalugu

Chieftain

Browd

Dilettante

orasis

Prince

WackenOpenAir

Deity

Ayubalugu

Chieftain

BlackWizard

King

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