Question about Roads

[SealJuice]

Finally got Civ V because Steam had a sale for 17.99

I'm loving it.

Do roads affect terrain improvements? It seems like they aren't needed, but then the dialogue mentions them getting added to the resource network when I get railroads.

Nothing in the help system about this.

Thanks.

 

[tvirus infected]

I dont believe they have any effect on terrain improvements at all. But I will say one thing, just in case you were in the dark like I was... Roads have an upkeep... I was totally unaware of this because I dont remember roads sucking gold from ya before and would have roads all over my lands in past games prior to Civ 5

 

[SealJuice]

Yes, I did know about the upkeep. Someone posted a tip on here to check the distance to a city before running a road to it. If the distance is too far, the upkeep could cost more than the trade bonus.

 

[Raethwyn]

Roads have two purposes in CiV. They connect your Cities to your Capital to create trade routes and they reduce the movement cost for units moving over them. Railroads do everything roads do but they add a Production Bonus to non-capital cities and reduce the movement cost further. Each tile of Road costs 1g per turn (gpt) while Railroads cost 2gpt.

Regarding Trade Routes:
Each non-capital city connected to the capital counts as 1 trade route. The formula for trade routes is (Capital Pop * 0.15 + CityA Pop * 1.1 + CityB Pop * 1.1 ...etc) - Number of Trade Routes. Arabia is different in that they don't subtract the Number of Trade Routes at the end of the equation. A general rule of thumb is to match the pop of a non-capital city to the number of road tiles. This rule works best when your capital is at least size 7.

 

[Karpyan]

Apparently basic rule is to have more pop in your connecting city than hexes distance between to turn a profit. So if you connect a 5 pop city, there needs to be no more than 4 hexes of road, otherwise its loss-making [apologies Raethwyn just answered that...]

Another tip [exploit] - if you build a road to a city-state, you can remove it after with no loss of influence.

I've found removing roads in puppet cities useful as well. E.g. take an AI capital city and remove all connecting roads to AI cities you're not intending to target, will yield 1gpt per road per hex that you remove which you're not intending to use (and potentially aid defence, depending on terrain).

 

[joncnunn]

Delaying roads until reaching population targets is really only important in the early game; especally when you only have 2 or 3 cities total and even your capital is still really small.

After you have 4 cities and those roads are paying for itself, it's probably not going to break the bank to start laying down the road to your new 5th city the moment it's built as your economy will be big enough to absorp a -4 a turn hit until the city grows.