(9-59b) Rome But It's All Roads

[azum4roll]

Motivation
Rome's City State UA bonuses are very map dependent and causes lots of issues around either a crazy snowballing Rome or a Rome that gets almost no bonus from them. Fornix then doubles down on this to just either make the snowball even stronger or you get little from it. I don't think these problems are easy to address so I think taking Rome in a bit different direction is a better solution.

This proposal focuses more on road building (or city connections) and have no explicit benefits from waging wars (though more roads definitely help).

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Current Rome (changed components only)
UA - The Glory of Rome
+30% Combat Strength against City-States. Conquered City-States provide Yields, Happiness and Unit Gifts as if they were Allies. +15% Production towards Buildings present in Capital.

UNW - Fornix
Roman Unique Heroic Epic
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Cost: 60
Destroyed on Conquest
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Culture: +2
Tourism: +2
Great Work of Writing slots: 1
Local Effects:
• +10% Military Supply from Population
• +1 +1 to Aqueduct
• On Completion: +10 Turns of "We Love the King Day"
• On Completion: 1 Great Writer appears in or near City
• Free Morale Promotion for all existing and future eligible Units trained in this City
Empire-Wide Effects:
• +1 +1 to Aqueduct in all Cities
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Required Buildings: Barracks
Prerequisite Technologies: Iron Working
Max 1 per Player
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List of possible boosts to this Building:
• Ceremony: +1 Happiness
• Eliminating a Player: May build 1 more of this Building

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Proposal
UA - All Roads Lead to Rome
+25% Production towards Buildings present in Capital. +2 Gold, +1 Culture, and +1 Tourism in Capital for every City Connected to and within 8 tiles of an owned City by land, scaling with Era.

Details:

• Land city connection includes river connection, and ignores borders.
• This includes both owned cities and foreign cities. It's easy to connect to City-States, but you may have to conquer foreign cities or capitalize on their rivers/lakes and existing roads.
• One Roman city on an island doesn't give any yields, but two on the same island connected by roads will count as +2.
• The distance cap is here to keep the yield numbers in check. Otherwise you'll connect to entire empires instead of just one layer of foreign cities as intended.
• All yields go to Rome. This fits a lot with Tradition, while satellites can alleviate the usual lack of production with the building production bonus and production from Fornix (see below).
• Building roads everywhere has a hidden effect of amplifying religious pressure to/from your cities. If you happen to found, spreading should be less of an issue.

UNW - Fornix
Roman Unique Heroic Epic
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Cost: 60
Destroyed on Conquest
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Culture: +2
Tourism: +2
Great Work of Writing slots: 1
Local Effects:
• +10% Military Supply from Population
• On Completion: +10 Turns of "We Love the King Day"
• On Completion: 1 Great Writer appears in or near City
• Free Triumph Promotion for all existing and future eligible Units trained in this City
Empire-Wide Effects:
• +1 to City Connection tiles in all Cities
• +1 +1 to Aqueduct in all Cities
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Required Buildings: Barracks
Prerequisite Technologies: Iron Working
Max 1 per Player
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List of possible boosts to this Building:
• Ceremony: +1 Happiness

Details:

• +1 Production on City Connection tiles parallels Tabya on placing small yields on a vast amount of owned tiles that are usually worked.
  • This also encourages building shortcut roads between cities, as the shortest path between any pair of owned cities counts as City Connection.
• Just spam roads with your Legions while you're not at war.

Triumph Promotion:

currently unused icon: PROMOTION_ATLAS_VP_04 index 20

• +15% (up from +10% of Morale)
• Gain 50% of the Combat Strength of defeated Enemy Units as Great General Points
  This in turn helps Rome gain more Great Generals which synergizes with the 2 UUs

Villa, Legion, and Ballista are unchanged. This does not conflict with the Ballista change proposal.

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Implementation
UA yields are given through a new table Trait_YieldChangeFromLandConnectedCities (TraitType, YieldType, Yield).
Yields are updated every turn, and IsPlotConnectedToPlot() can be used to check whether each city on the map is connected to any owned city, after checking if the city is within 8 tiles with plotDistance() (much faster check than connection).
UB yields on city connection require a new table Building_CityConnectionYieldChanges (BuildingType, YieldType, Yield).
There's already the CvPlot::IsCityConnection() function to check whether a tile is a city connection tile.

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References
Counterproposal to:

[DLL] Thread '(9-NS) Belated 4UC Reproposal III: Rome'

Jan 4, 2026

Spoiler Full Roman 4UC kit :

Proposal:

• Increase Roman Building production bonus from 15% to 25%
• Change the additional Fornix build trigger from "eliminating a player" to "winning a war".
• Great Writer only appears on the first Fornix constructed (the free, unconditional one)
• Fornix Do not give the Morale promotion. Instead they give the Triumph promotion
  • Triumph - Given to all military units trained in this city. +15% CS; 50% of the killed unit's CS is given as GGeneral points.

Justification:
UA change:

• The roman construction bonus is...

• pineappledan
• Replies: 23
• Forum: Failed Proposals

• 

Thread '(9-59) All Roads Lead to Rome'

Jan 4, 2026

Motivation
Rome's City State UA bonuses are very map dependent and causes lots of issues around either a crazy snowballing Rome or a Rome that gets almost no bonus from them. Fornix then doubles down on this to just either make the snowball even stronger or you get little from it. I don't think these problems are easy to address so I think taking Rome in a bit different direction is a better solution.

So we instead revive the old Colosseum (because it's so iconic!) and move the UA towards a focus on city connections which synergizes with Legions road building ability. Also bump the...

• redrum68
• Replies: 53
• Forum: Failed Proposals

• 

Thread '(9-59a) All Roads Lead To The Glory of Rome'

Jan 5, 2026

Motivation:
Pdan and Redrum have made proposals to change Rome, and I like parts of both.
So, I have synthesized a combination proposal.

To explain my thinking:

• The UA: I don't rate the CS conquest part. I'm not convinced such a heavy bonus to CS conquest should even exist, because of its implications for other players that have bonuses to diplo. The old annex abilities were removed, and this is like a lite version of that.
  Finally, the variance on neighboring city-states is quite high in many mapscripts (more reliable on pangaea or oval, whilst others put them in remote...

• hokath
• Replies: 25
• Forum: Failed Proposals

• 

Related to:

Thread '(9-59c) Roman Replaces Trebuchet Instead Of Catapult'

Jan 6, 2026

Motivation
Rome's UUs currently come around the same time giving them a huge but very short power spike which is also iron dependent. If we move Ballista to replace Trebuchet instead that expands their window of opportunity and also gives more time to get iron for Legions that can upgrade to Longswords.

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Proposal Summary

• Move Ballista to replace Trebuchet rather than Catapult (spaces out Rome's UU a bit more and gives the a bigger window of opportunity for early aggression)
  • CS increased from 8 to 12 (+4 more than Trebuchet)
  • RCS increased from 14 to...

• redrum68
• Replies: 15
• Forum: Failed Proposals

• 

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Updates
1. Added a distance cap from the nearest owned city to UA.
2. Reworded the UA a bit to be more precise. Simplified the implementation.

 

[hokath]

I got a little confused by the wording of "every City Connected to an owned City by land"
But you clarified it counts all cities, so I understand now. Since all connections are to your owned Cities, maybe a better wording is "every City Connected to you over land"

 

[Alpakinator]

Having a single Fornix is a dealbreaker, eliminates strategies of maximising their amount, which together with Villa-maxxing is the most fun part of Rome to me.
Though boosting the city connection tiles is the most interesting idea so far. You can max it out by building snaky roads around hills so that more tiles get the boost.

 

[gay_Aleks]

This sounds like a pretty good idea, but how would you offset the cost of road maintenance? Is it going to be assumed Rome will have to pick Authority+Imperialism (which to be fair IS fitting, but still) to get the most of the UA?

 

[Alpakinator]

By making more villages on the snaky roads. 1 road costs 1 and 1 > 1. Authority is usually the strongest choice for Rome, this proposal mildly encourages that further.

 

[stormfallen]

Does changing the Fornix promotion mean you can take Orders to get both Triumph and Morale?

 

[Alpakinator]

Does changing the Fornix promotion mean you can take Orders to get both Triumph and Morale?

Yes

 

[redrum68]

+2 Gold, +1 Culture, and +1 Tourism in Capital for every City Connected to an owned City by land, scaling with Era.

Will this end up encouraging city spam? If you combine this with say Progress +3 science on connection that is quite a good amount of yields for early 1 pop cities. Also connecting to another major civ will give a LOT of yields as they most likely have all their other cities connected to each other.

+1 to City Connection tiles in all Cities

Any reason to have this on the UNW instead of the UA? Just wondering if one is a better place than the other since I had it on the UA instead.

 

[redrum68]

By making more villages on the snaky roads. 1 road costs 1 and 1 > 1. Authority is usually the strongest choice for Rome, this proposal mildly encourages that further.

True but you have to work all the tiles and you gotta build all the roads. Plus you generally want at least many roads to be the most direct path for unit movement. So there is a balance here.

 

[FPXI]

This is my favorite implementation thus far. Still not really what I'd like, but it's a big improvement. Support.

 

[Stalker0]

I don’t think this UA necessarily needs era scaling as it will balloon out later in the game. Especially on a Pangea map would be trivial to see +60-100 culture per turn in Rome at the ancient values. With scaling that could easily be +500-600 cpt in the later game.

It’s an interesting idea I’ll give it that. I do think the boost to “city connection tiles” is confusing and clunky…no one knows what that is, there’s nothing in the UI to tell you a tile is one of those. I would just pick a different mechanic. The UA already does everything you need to make roads and connections super important, you don’t need more

 

[Chinag]

I quite like this proposal. Rebuildable Fornix appears to be quite hard to implement... Also it lowkey encourages spreading the UNW around even though a Rome-focused Rome is probably a better fantasy.

I do agree on buffing roads that are part of city connections being a bit jank with unclear definition and visual cue aside from yields. Maybe faster road + 50% faster build time + Immediate bridges would be more comprehensible... but still pretty meh.

Looks like roads are hard to change after all! How about we buff the other thing Legions can build: Forts!

 

[azum4roll]

there’s nothing in the UI to tell you a tile is one of those

Have you tried hovering over a road? There's also a highlight on strategic view.

I've added a distance cap of 8 from the nearest owned city to the UA. Connected cities also have to be nearby to give yields, so numbers don't go uncontrolled.

 

[redrum68]

Have you tried hovering over a road? There's also a highlight on strategic view.

I've added a distance cap of 8 from the nearest owned city to the UA. Connected cities also have to be nearby to give yields, so numbers don't go uncontrolled.

OMG. I learned something new today! The highlight on strategic view is awesome. Any chance something like that option could be added to the normal view?

 

[Stalker0]

Have you tried hovering over a road? There's also a highlight on strategic view.

I've added a distance cap of 8 from the nearest owned city to the UA. Connected cities also have to be nearby to give yields, so numbers don't go uncontrolled.

So now people have to count their city tiles to opponent cities to see if they get the bonus? That seems janky tbh.

 

[Recursive]

Would need some coordination with @KungCheops to make sure the Roman AI understands the city connection tiles bonus.

 

[azum4roll]

To be fair, even as a human it's hard to optimize this. Given 4 cities in a rectangle (roughly), is it better to make long roads on the sides but only 1 diagonal, or short roads on the sides but 2 diagonals?

I intend for players to not think that much about this and just build straight roads between all pairs of cities.

 

[azum4roll]

Update 2: Reworded the UA a bit to be more precise. Simplified the implementation.

 

[FPXI]

Really don't like the 8 tiles thing. As much as I really like the foreign cities angle, I don't think it's worth this extra layer of gamey logic.

 

[redrum68]

Really don't like the 8 tiles thing. As much as I really like the foreign cities angle, I don't think it's worth this extra layer of gamey logic.

I think you need some limit otherwise you connect to 1 major civ city and if they have 10 cities connected together you instantly get 10x your UA bonus. Could maybe do something like you have to share a border? But that would be much more limiting than cities within 8 tiles.