City Connection Problem, any Solutions, and how bad is it?

[SirNovelty]

So, I picked up Old World this past week, and have been absolutely addicted so far, sticking on The Good Difficulty at the moment, although if this current game goes well I'm probably gonna bump it up a bit. Onto my problem, in this game I'm playing as Egypt, I decided to settle this....as I actually look at it, completely indefensible city, but I'm trying to city spam early and do a Religion-based science push.

Guess you can't see it in the screenshot, but Babylon's got a city right on this border here. Regardless the city's settled now and I went Landowners to take advantage of a crop resource and keep my families balanced, but mountain pass that provides my only access to the city is two desert tiles, which I can't build roads on. My bad, I knew the rules, I just wasn't paying enough attention to the terrain. Persia's also to the north of this city so no connecting the long way around without an invasion, and it'll be ages before I can take the other long way around through the South. Can you imagine any way to fix this situation, and if not how bad do you think it'll be to leave the city unconnected for most of the game? I've never actually dealt with the penalty very long before, so I wanna know if it's going to become untenable, especially since my economy's already in a temporary gutter. I'll undo if necessary, but I'd also like to play out the error if that's at all reasonable. Thanks for any help!

 

[PiR]

Where does the river go? Sometimes you just have to connect 2 rivers, and bam! cities are connected.
Maybe a little exploration?
Otherwise I wouldn't worry too much about not being connected. The issue would be more how to defend it if attacked from there I guess.

 

[SirNovelty]

Where does the river go? Sometimes you just have to connect 2 rivers, and bam! cities are connected.
Maybe a little exploration?
Otherwise I wouldn't worry too much about not being connected. The issue would be more how to defend it if attacked from there I guess.

Well the mountain range doesn't open up again in the North until a narrow mountain pass between me and Persia at the moment, I don't really know enough about their lands yet to plan anything, and my econ's in no position do a war yet regardless. To the south it flows into Babylonian lands and seems to run off into a lake. There is a way around the mountain on the southern coast, and I plan to settle a few of the tribal outposts in that region eventually. I know that Greece and Carthage are to my north and west respectively on my main side of the range. Realistically I'm going to try and wait for (maybe provoke, I haven't played with espionage much yet beyond science stealing) Babylon and Persia to soften each other up. Maybe it's just a small sample size of my games, but it seems that both of them tend to either snowball hard or completely stall out trying.

But yeah, if you say the Connection's not a big deal then I think I'm just gonna keep the plan going. Constitution and Hamlets should fix most of my gold problems, unfortunately Apadana's not in this game, I'm paying 85 maintenance on Waset alone, and it's only going to get worse when it inevitably hits legendary culture.

 

[InsidiousMage]

A city being connected to the capital increases the amount of gold you get from hamlets and giving -1 discontent per turn, which can add up. You can build roads in the territory of other nations if you have peace with them, which also increases your per turn gold if you have those roads connected to your cities since they are then part of your trade network. If Persia is on good terms with you that's an easy path to pursue. If the river in W(?)amu runs far enough north simply connecting a road from the capital to the river will connect Wamu to the capital.

 

[SirNovelty]

A city being connected to the capital increases the amount of gold you get from hamlets and giving -1 discontent per turn, which can add up. You can build roads in the territory of other nations if you have peace with them, which also increases your per turn gold if you have those roads connected to your cities since they are then part of your trade network. If Persia is on good terms with you that's an easy path to pursue. If the river in W(?)amu runs far enough north simply connecting a road from the capital to the river will connect Wamu to the capital.

Ah, peace there's an interesting idea. Not with Persia, a few turns later and they hate my guts, but I can wrap around to the South and through Babylon, I wanted a defensive road network down there because there two routes through the mountain anyway.

 

[PiR]

This page seems quite outdated! https://www.oldworldwiki.org/index.php/Roads

But yeah, I think you just loose discontent and money, nothing you can't work with/find a solution for.