Trade route connection

Is it really worth building a road to Cuzco? In the following screenshots, Cuzco doesn't have a trade route yet and is far away from my cities that are the closest. Will building the extra road be worth it for the trade route?

Building a new railroad would yield 7x1.25=8.75 gpt for 22 gpt extra maintenance. Machu Picchu and Wagon Trains may make it barely profitable at this point. I would probably build it, if I needed the railroad production bonus.

Looks like about 11 hexes so you'll need Cusco to be over 11 population for it to turn a profit on road connection if I read the forums correctly....

Callonia said:

Looks like about 11 hexes so you'll need Cusco to be over 11 population for it to turn a profit on road connection if I read the forums correctly....

Click to expand...

With some other later game stuff than just the Wheel you can be less than 11 pop - even at 11 pop with nothing else you'd be making a slight amount of money - so at 7 pop it'd probably be just losing money, but you get the bonus of defending it + 20% production bonus. Production bonus might be able to be easily purchased with a harbour though.

Keep in mind the Iroquois UA: "Units move through Forest and Jungle in friendly territory as if they were Roads. These tiles can be used to establish connected City Connections upon researching The Wheel." When you use a combination of road segments and non-road forest and jungle tiles in friendly territory to form a city connection, the friendly-territory forest and jungle tiles do not have road maintenance cost (obviously).

From the first screenshot, I can see 3 jungle tiles in Cuzco's territory that can form part of the city connection, and some city ruins with a free road segment, so you should only need 2 road segments to connect Cuzco with those city ruins. From the second and third screenies, it appears you need 3 more road segments to get to the friendly-territory bananas tile near Assur, which tile is connected to Assur by 2 friendly-territory forest tiles.

So, unless I'm miscounting tiles, you only need 5 road segments to form a city connection between Cuzco and Assur. Since Cuzco has 7 pop, that city connection will be immediately profitable.