I agree with the OP that the charges make no sense. Since the dawn of Civ6 and my 1200 hours I can count the road hexes I built on one hand. I always see places where I want one but it feels like by the time I build it it wouldn’t matter.
In one of my GS games I had some fun building a rail network but I have no idea what benefit it brought me aside from era points for connecting two cities.
Are the trader bonuses posted anywhere? Would ever make sense? Seems like it would be more fun if builders could also put down roads without a charge and ME’s were available for a reasonable cost without a district. Then you could do some serious map manipulation with networks.
I am usually an antagonist when it comes to “realism” but overall it seems a little weird that it can be the information era and for some reason or another two of my continental cities 8 hexes away have no direct road between them and to build said road it would cost 2 builders and 15 turns using a policy card slot.
This was basically my point.
I find no use for roads and especially railroads.
I know that roads can help to speed up a Domination Victory by a few turns.
However, this means you have to get some Engineers out in front of your Army which I find very difficult.
The detour and time it takes to build Engineers seems difficult for me.
I could of built other things that seem more valuable to me.
This isn't to say others haven't found a good use for Engineers or have fun using them.
I just can't seem to make them work in my game.
Sort of like Military Tactics and Pikeman.
I find that I completely ignore both and have no use in my game for them.
If I build Pikes or Engineers I only find that it has made my game longer or slower.
this did always bother me too but I have found that in GS i spam miliitary engineers and connect every inch of my empire in railroad so its more or less fixed now. In my last game I played an inca domination and I have an army of workers and military engineers paving the way to my conquest and opening tunnels all around the world, it finally felt like my modern war machine was actually very efficient rather than in vanilla or R&F my troops would've been bogged down by the terrain for years despite being industrial+ troops
Impressive but sounds tedious.
I have a difficult enough time moving my Army let alone an Army of Builders and Engineers.
That sounds like a ton of clicking!