road building for conquest

[swimslave]

Has anyone put together a tutorial on how to properly use roads as part of a conquest battle plan? I'm thinking that praetorians and ballistas can be a particularly powerful combo if roads are used correctly.

 

[Maxym]

Not that I know of, but this strikes me as a wrong way to use legions. They need to be fighting not road building, that's a job for captured workers. I will use them to build roads and forts when not at war, but when going for domination as you seem to suggest there should not be a single turn when you are not at war or marching to next target once you start conquering.

Also it's hard to compete with standard CB rush , but might be fun and workable with Rome.

 

[Ninakoru]

I use roads quite actively when i go conquest, preparing roads to enemy cities even before the DoW is placed. Conquering is done much quiker with a good road planning.

 

[blackcatatonic]

It's a nifty trick, one I've been making more and more use of. I agree that since workers can stack with military units, if anything it's a waste setting your Legions to build roads instead of just having a worker do it.

 

[Polisurgist]

And prior to your declaration, you can start building a road right up to the border. If you keep the city you capture, half your trade route is there already, too. If the AI were as smart as a human, it might take this as a hint, though fortunately it doesn't.

 

[swimslave]

There are a few other advantages with siege weapons. If you plot your roads in the right spot, you can move your siege unit in range and fire without first having to take a volley.

 

[azzaman333]

If you have a worker and a Legion on the same tile, can they both build the road, and as a result build it in half the time?

 

[Tabarnak]

Road spamming can be effective when you have a very large army that need to go through ennemy land(litterally circle the city with a road so you can put 7-8 units around that city in 1 turn). When it's done bring your workers with units and repair ennemy tiles when you heal from them so you can pillage/heal again if needed.

But it's probably more useful in mp game when :

-You will surely play at quick speed
-Ensure to move and shoot on the same turn before they do
-AI brain is inexistent compared to fierce humans...you need a solid plan(so roads can help)

 

[Browd]

If you have a worker and a Legion on the same tile, can they both build the road, and as a result build it in half the time?

Tried this once. Sadly, no.

Also doesn't work to have the worker working to improve the tile (e.g., build a farm or mine) while the Legion tries to build a road on the same tile.

 

[whyidie]

I've done it in dire circumstances, nothing I use as a regular tactic though.

Problem is I rarely build a lot of workers and I have a lot of other improvements I'd rather have them focused on. Plus the time it takes to build roads is usually a deterrent. But there have been those games where I don't have the advantage and I need every edge I can get.

 

[Catan_Settler]

I guess it can help speed things up a little, but if you are going for a full domination game, there is no way you'll be able to sustain roads to all corners of all the continents on the map and have any gold left over for the war effort. My preference is to not build roads outside my core 3/4 native cities, in an effort to keep my GPT up. I've found that during a war, having gold around to buy and upgrade troops, or even rush build the occasional happiness building, is far more valuable than arguably faster troop movement.

I'd wager that building roads up to all your oponents is actually going to slow your campaign down compared to just getting the invasion started way earlier. It takes a lot more turns to build a long road, than to simply walk slow troops over a mountain range, so you're trading what, like dozens of turns of road building, for a 1 or 2 turn reduction in the actual length of the military campaign? I donno, I don't think it's a fair tradeoff. Nevermind the fact it costs you massive GPT to pay the maintenance for hundreds of road tiles all over the place. In fact, I go so far as to have my workers go and *remove roads* from around all the puppet cities while I'm also converting their farms to trading posts.

I suppose on small map sizes, you can probably get away with building roads everywhere but.. I really couldn't imagine.. even on a standard sized pangaea map... paying the maintenace for roads across the whole thing. Nevermind large, huge, etc. Well that's my theory and I'm stickin to it!

 

[Justice1337]

Opportunity cost is the biggest problem. If I don't need a worker, I'll build something else, which is probably better at winning the war than a Worker. If you can't build anything better, you've got a serious problem. And by the time you have enough spare worker turns and maintenance gold to spend like that, you'll have Artillery anyway, and so you just slow-push out of range. By comparison, these nifty tactics don't matter.

 

[mintcandy]

I have a variation of road building for conquest: if I'm massing my forces in an allied City State's territory to invade another civilization, I will have my workers build roads in said territory to facilitate movement.

Best of all, I don't have to pay to maintain these roads. Faboo!

 

[GhostSalsa]

Opportunity cost is the biggest problem. If I don't need a worker, I'll build something else, which is probably better at winning the war than a Worker. If you can't build anything better, you've got a serious problem. And by the time you have enough spare worker turns and maintenance gold to spend like that, you'll have Artillery anyway, and so you just slow-push out of range. By comparison, these nifty tactics don't matter.

If you are conquering a city on the same continent, you are probably going to have to biuld a road to it eventually. The opportunity cost is greater if you wait until artillery conquest has already started and you are about to learn railroad. Generally my settled-cities can be left with just one or two workers for the early industrial stretch of the game, everything else is already way done.

On my fastest clocked win (275 turns on emperor, nothing special but) I had built roads ten tiles long through jungle and CS's to conquer neighbors, putting internal improvements on hold. I wouldn't have won the game until the 300s without those roads.

EDIT: this also points out how hard the game makes it to capitalize on sailing techs, that building an implausibly long road through a land bottleneck is more efficient than teching for astronomy to launch a sea invasion.

 

[SYKOJAK]

Roads pay for themselves once they are linked to a friendly city, ie. Trade routes. It is beautiful thing to watch
a reaction force move from one side of your empire to the other to meet an invasion force.

 

[Antiphon]

Sometimes I build a road just to get my troops quicker to enemy and back again (healing!) I once played a Bollywood game, where I conquered Askia with War Elephants, so I had a good second city. Wouldn't have been possible without roads, the double healing rate is well worth it. And just imagine what roads are worth with faith healing....

 

[Ninakoru]

I guess it can help speed things up a little, but if you are going for a full domination game, there is no way you'll be able to sustain roads to all corners of all the continents on the map and have any gold left over for the war effort. My preference is to not build roads outside my core 3/4 native cities, in an effort to keep my GPT up. I've found that during a war, having gold around to buy and upgrade troops, or even rush build the occasional happiness building, is far more valuable than arguably faster troop movement.

Well, once you get the city conquered and connected you make up for the road cost. I always have all my cities connected. With liberty you get also a happiness bonus per city connected. On a full domination game you will be poping military units from your main cities more often than not, so bringing them to the front line ASAP becomes priority.

I'd wager that building roads up to all your oponents is actually going to slow your campaign down compared to just getting the invasion started way earlier. It takes a lot more turns to build a long road, than to simply walk slow troops over a mountain range, so you're trading what, like dozens of turns of road building, for a 1 or 2 turn reduction in the actual length of the military campaign?

Well, the idea is to work on roads as soon as you know the destination it will be a target, so you can plan ahead. The idea is not to slow down your attack while building the road to the target, you can be building that road while you start your attack, it can be done on parallel. And no, you can save many turns, not only for the troop positioning, but the troop logistics (replacement, healing and such).

 

[Unresolved]

If the city is close by, then I'll sometimes make a road if my workers have nothing better to do. But if it's more than 7 tiles away, I don't bother, even after I take the city. I'm usually too lazy to do it and losing several units means that I'm not playing effectively, so I don't generally need much backup.

 

[General Tso]

I always try to build a road to the border when I attack a neighboring Civ. It serves two purposes. It speed up troops movement and it allows me to connect the newly conquered cities to my network more quickly.

 

[Walter R]

Go by sea, build a harbour. Yes I know, rubbish strategy on pangea! I usually play water maps.
However I once played as Alex on pangea, and the majority of the continent was forest. I had two neighbours as I recall and the rest were clustered down at the other end. Anyway I had two workers build a 20+ tile long road whilst I was 'expanding'. I know, mad really, but it did the job: By the time I had one end of the continent to myself I was able to march over to the other fairly quickly and get cracking. Still as I recall I was only playing at Chieftain or similar, and you do seem to get rich fairly quickly if you are agressive at that level, without getting unhappy.