Economics of Roads

E

epsilon97

Chieftain
Joined
Dec 5, 2001
Messages
41
Hello there,

I have a really elementary question concerning the economics of building roads. What is the strategy behind building roads? How much does each tile of road cost? When should you build connections between your cities and city states?

Thanks for your help!
 
Roads cost 1 gold per tile per turn. Generally, you just want to make connections that go as directly as possible from your capitol to the city in question, without making all kind of interlocking roads. (For example, when playing as Netherlands and you have Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht, make a road between Amsterdam and Rotterdam and one between Amsterdam and Utrecht, but not one between Rotterdam and Utrecht)
Don't build roads immediately. A good rule of thumb is to build them when the number of citizen in the to-be-connected city is equal to or higher then the amount of road tiles you'll need to add to get to it.
 
Falconiano said:
I let workers path them else if I make them manually, my units will go offroad if commanded to go from place to place as they seem to use the same AI as the worker's road AI. Meh.
Click to expand...

Units under the AI control (go to, build to) if they have a choice between ending their movement on a open tile or rough tile and it will still take the same number of turns to get to the destination will always end their turn on the rough tile. This is actually one actual intelligent things about the AI. For combat units it means they will always end their turn on the most defensive position and for workers it means they build roads across rough terrain which is good for you because you units will be able to cross that terrain quickly in the future.e.g. it will block your enemies but not your movement.

As with all automated systems though it is not perfect and is why i mostly manual my worker but this is one of the few cases where i will sometimes set them on limited auto(build to).
 
Loucypher said:
Roads cost 1 gold per tile per turn. Generally, you just want to make connections that go as directly as possible from your capitol to the city in question, without making all kind of interlocking roads. (For example, when playing as Netherlands and you have Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Utrecht, make a road between Amsterdam and Rotterdam and one between Amsterdam and Utrecht, but not one between Rotterdam and Utrecht)
Click to expand...

If you have a road from Amsterdam to Rotterdam already , you can build a road between Utrecht and either Amsterdam , Rotterdam or the nearest road tile that is already connected to the capital (whichever is nearest ).
this is good economy of roads , one issue though can occur if you just have one road out of your capital if a barbie or enemy pilages it your entire network falls apart .
 
They can get expensive. As most have pointed out, you want to find the shortest distances between your cities and put roads there *only*, no crossroads and ring roads, just straight up shortest path between cities. Also, hold off on roadbuilding until your cities start hitting 4 and 5 population, otherwise you'll probably start losing GPT paying for the roads. Automating your workers is a terrible idea, and building roads is the absolute last thing you'd want them to do on automated as they will cost you a fortune with all kinds of pointless roads you don't need.
 
Not mentioned, but implied, is the fact that in addition to the ease of movement, trade routes are established, which, when the cities are large enough, more than cover the cost of the road.

And if you're running the liberty route of social policies, one of them grants +1 :c5happy: for each city connected to the capital, and roads are one of the very few ways to do that.
 
bobbo008 said:
Not mentioned, but implied, is the fact that in addition to the ease of movement, trade routes are established, which, when the cities are large enough, more than cover the cost of the road.

And if you're running the liberty route of social policies, one of them grants +1 :c5happy: for each city connected to the capital, and roads are one of the very few ways to do that.
Click to expand...
And Messenger of the Gods for +2:c5science: per trade route
 
Roads are fairly important for a number of reasons, but they're also quite expensive. Like many others have suggested, I'd hold off on building roads until you can afford to do so. Early road-building can quickly sink your economy if you're not ready to build them yet. I think it's 1GPT for every tile of road you have down, meaning the less road tiles you have to build, the less money you will have to spend on them. In addition to maintenance costs, you must be aware that they can be plundered by roaming barbarians or other hostile units.

Other than that, I like to have my roads up and running as soon as it's reasonable to do so. The money you gain back through trade routes between your cities and easier passing through your land is absolutely worth getting to whenever you can.
 
Browd! Thank you so much for posting that link! And thank you OP for bringing this up. The 1.1 multiplier disparity was driving me nuts. I never would've guessed that the difference came from a 0.15 per capital citizen calculation. That is one minor OCD annoyance off my mind.

As Ximixanga and others have said, it's best to build at the right time so you're not costing yourself money. BUT, if you feel war is coming, don't let that stop you from building a road to a new city. I lost one early because I was waiting for it to reach the proper profit point. (Pardon all the alliteration in this post!)
 
Roads can definitely be worth building for defence despite the cost. I always like to ring a city with roads (especially if they have rivers) if its the focal point of attacks.
 
I play my games assuming that I do not pay for roads that are in in someone else's territory. I am not sure if this assumption is correct. I shall try to do some kind of verification next time I play.

For me, this mechanic has two implications:
1) If a city state asks for a road, I first move my worker to the city state and start building the road from there. I won't have to pay for the first parts of the road, and when the task is complete the worker kan remove the road starting from my own territory.
2) When trying to conquer enemy cities, I bring along some workers to improve siege infrastructure. If I am correct, these roads have the added bonus of costing the enemy maintenance.
 
Roads in someone else's territory (CS or another civ) are paid for by them.

A particularly fun (and abusive) thing to do is to get Open Borders from a neighbor and build roads from your borders to their key cities, and then beyond their cities to the next civ you want to attack. Your neighbor pays for those road segments, chewing up its gpt, and you're able to zip your army through their territory (still with OB) to attack that next civ. And when you're done with that next civ, you can turn on your neighbor, knock him out and have a complete road network connecting all of them. At that point, you're paying gpt maintenance (since the roads are now in your territory), but you can remove any unnecessary road segments, and city connection income should more than compensate.
 
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