Road Building in Civ 6

[Woobyluv]

While I like the idea that the Trader is used to make roads between cities, I find that the coverage of roads in my territory to be terrible. I'm really not liking that I can't easily build roads within my territory. Military Engineers only have 2 charges and road building consumes 1 charge? Asinine! I really don't like Builders or Military Engineers having such limited charges. I can understand not wanting to have the bloat of extra units on the map but, there has to be a better way to handle this.

 

[Dida]

Using military engineer for roads is atrocious. If you need to build a stretch of road over 10 tiles, you must manually select to build 5 engineers, move them into place and manually order them to build road 10 times. This is ridiculous! Military engineer works okay for things like fort. I imagine people don't spam forts much.

I think Firaxis should have gone a step further and completely virtualize builders and MEs. At this point they work just like the Public Work concept from Call to Power, except you have to manually build and move them. This is really not fun anymore.

 

[Ozisl]

It is also lacking because sometimes you don't want the road to go to a city, which makes the entire system useless.

 

[KmDubya]

I really like the new road system. Roads get built between trading partners to help trade which is like real life. If you want a road to nowhere you'll need to invest in order to build it. It's easy enough to send a trader towards a neighbor's city to build an invasion route if you need one.

cIV had the atrocious road and rail spam on every single tile, ciV was better in that you had to pay for roads but was still a pain to build out. Now with civ 6 roads are more organic and logical.

Having builders and military engineers have limited charges forces you to make choices, previously you just had idle workers who you set to do things just to keep them busy. Combined with government cards that can improve builders you have multiple layers of strategy. Its a much better system.

 

[Dida]

I do like how roads are built organically thru trade routes. I just don't want to deal with builders and MEs. They are more of a hassle now. So annoying to having to keep building/moving/ordering military engineers to build roads.

 

[KmDubya]

I do like how roads are built organically thru trade routes. I just don't want to deal with builders and MEs. They are more of a hassle now. So annoying to having to keep building/moving/ordering military engineers to build roads.

Where are you needing to build all these roads to that don't go towards a city?

In three games so far (King, Emperorx2) I've never built a road with an engineer, couple of forts for a boost and a few airstrips to help biplanes but that's it.

 

[redwings1340]

I've personally enjoyed the road system. I just generally use my first trader to connect a nice network of roads in my empire, it takes a little while, but I mean, it took your workers a little while to create roads in V too. Then after I have a good set of roads I can go external a few times.

Traders are great units anyway, and you get the option to build one at an early civic, so its not that big of a hassle to build one relatively early and connect up the place you want connected the most.

 

[Kingreaper]

I like the road system, but I feel like a mil engineer charge should be good for more than one tile. It takes two tiles to bridge a river, three to get over a hill, a charge should be enough for that.

 

[Nathair]

a mil engineer charge should be good for more than one tile. It takes two tiles to bridge a river, three to get over a hill, a charge should be enough for that.

At least.

 

[Ozisl]

Where are you needing to build all these roads to that don't go towards a city?

Around terrain obstacles to minimize 1upt, leading around to an enemy's position...

Like I said, I like the "organic" system, but that shouldn't be (effectively) the only system.

 

[Magil]

Given that military engineers require an armory, are fairly expensive production-wise, and have a high maintenance cost (4g per turn!), I feel they shouldn't use charges to build roads. With 2 charges, you feel like Firaxis went out of their way to make them as terrible as possible, only really worth building for the Eurekas right now.

 

[redwings1340]

Given that military engineers require an armory, are fairly expensive production-wise, and have a high maintenance cost (4g per turn!), I feel they shouldn't use charges to build roads. With 2 charges, you feel like Firaxis went out of their way to make them as terrible as possible, only really worth building for the Eurekas right now.

I've found they can be somewhat useful placing down airstrips and nuclear silos late game.

But yeah, their road and fort building ability seems moderately useless.

 

[kampori]

I've only ever used MEs to build silos on the edge of my borders. With only 2 charges they aren't worth doing anything else.

 

[dturtle1]

The only thing i dont like about the trader roads is their routing logic, it can be bloody terrible sometimes. In my Rome game i have a section of my empire with 4 !! roads running parallel with each other. They need to bias towards existing routes rather than absolute minimum distance. Of course if the route doesn't run through the city you dont get the trading post, so it is infuriating when you plop a city as Rome and the road goes next to the city, not through it, or rather than go through cities in a line it will just bypass them and make its own road. Unless you plop your cities in perfectly square grids it can be a nightmare to get it to work properly.

Although as Rome it is Bloody annoying it also affects other CIvs as well with foreign trade. You know sometimes when you trying to trade with a city that is <than 15 tiles from your nearest trade post but it is not available !??. Likely because the routing logic doesn't go through your Trade Post city, thus being out of range. The Trade Post system is great but the road routing logic just shoots itself in a foot time and time again.

You wanna see Road spaghetti,.....Play as Rome on a map with growing room.... Forward settle like a madman and then back-settle ...... and behold. the ugliest road system you have ever seen.
I was kinda OCD in regards to roads in Civ5, Making sure only 3 roads entered or exited a city at anyone time(with gap either side).....minimising t-intersections and when you can hide them in tile improvements where possible etc, even when it costs an extra tiles to make sure it looked nice.... I miss this.....Civ6 roads are the devil

 

[Deggial]

I also like the road system itself, including the road net crossing your realm.

Mil. engineers, though, are tedious and too limited. I would like, if...
a) their "road charge" would be at least 5 tiles and
b) their use would be something like: "Build a road from where you stand now to THIS (click on a map tile in a 5 tile radius highlighted in green) place!"

Furthermore, I would like to see a change in how traders select their target.
The list as it is now is fine (providing that Firaxis adds a sorting functionality).
Additionally, I want to be able to select my trading target city directly on the map. Sometimes, I simply don't care about the trading yields; sometimes, I simply want to get this road built!

This functionality is already present when relocating traders and great persons. Why not expand it to trade-route-targeting? (Oh, and spy placement, when we are at it ...)

 

[TomBeard]

How bout a tweak ME uses 1/3 charge for a road. Still get a fort or 2. Or up to 6 road tiles.

 

[Deggial]

How bout a tweak ME uses 1/3 charge for a road. Still get a fort or 2. Or up to 6 road tiles.

In principle: A possible solution!
The problem here is to keep track of it. You want to display whole numbers as charges. So maybe increase the engineer's charges to 6 and let the fort cost 3 of them?
The downside of this approach is, that it doesn't fit to the established ruleset. You want consistency in a game. (Consistency is important.)

As proposed above: Consume one charge per road building order, but let this charge built roads up to(!) 5 tiles. If less than 5 tiles are choosen, the unused tiles are wasted.

 

[bladex]

just use a trader each time don't even bother with them useless engineers

 

[skyclad]

Yeah only use engineers for eurekas.
Early roads are horsehocky Anyway so not worth building. Late game when you get good roads i have traders going back and forth all over my continent so dont need more roads at that point.
I think a "build in a line up to 5 tiles per charge" would be a lot better.

 

[stealth_nsk]

The idea is - you build roads with Traders, Military Engineers are really for... military purpose - to build roads in areas you can't send your traders to due to war.
It's actually fun, I like the new system a lot.