Yeah, pretty sure Civ4 didn't let you use roads or rails in enemy territory. Apart from units with the top tier promotion "commando" which was insanely powerful.
I think having roads be 1/2 movement base, 1/3 with "Roman" roads and then 1/5 with cars; while railroads start as a 1/10th and maybe go up to 1/15th with electricity (or later as maglev) is about right for balancing speed with reaction time. As with Civ4 foreign roads/rails shouldn't give you a speed boost. But it would be fair if they still reduced movement cost to 1 in rough terrain (can't remember if Civ4 did that).
For the others who haven't played Civ3, for the record, it did not let you use roads/rails in enemy territory either. But as soon as it became your territory...
I would like to see some evolution of rails as you mention - it's always seemed a bit odd that 1840s level steam rail and modern rail are essentially the same... although to be fair from a freight standpoint, trains don't really travel much faster now than they did 50 or even 80 years ago, just more efficiently in terms of fuel and labor. But 1840 to 1950 was a world of difference in tractive power and speed.
They often do! Perhaps taxpayers and shareholders are most cost conscious than before, but I can think of many recent museums or cultural spaces, or even airports, designed with beauty in mind in the last few decades. They appear rare because of multiple cognitive biases happening at the same time.
Firstly there's a survival bias: old ugly buildings haven't survived until now, so we only get too see the old buildings that people deliberately kept around, and forget that they're not representative of all old buildings. Secondly those old buildings are not all equally old, but we're subconsciously compressing them all into the same time period, which exacerbates that (false) impression that highly decorated grandiose buildings were the norm. Lastly there's the fact that when such buildings are new, or on going, we have their cost in mind - both financial and from expropriating the land and from demolishing what was there before - and these sully our ability to appreciate their beauty.
There is some survival bias: The grand union terminal I travel through replaced over 2000, presumably mostly much uglier, buildings when it was built.
I'd be curious what some of the modern examples of buildings built with beauty in mind are, that aren't renovations of older buildings. I'm sure there are some, but... the only one that comes to mind right away for me, that I know is fairly modern, is the building for the Craftsmen's Guild of Mississippi, northeast of Jackson, which opened in 2007. Especially from the back and on the inside, it's an impressive building, but it's also intentionally designed of artists and craftsmen and to show off their work, so it makes sense that it would have some care put into appearance. I would probably spend all my money there if I owned a house within convenient driving distance. I'm sure there are more
I think there was more of a focus on beauty in the early 1900s though - the
City Beautiful movement, which built upon the
Beaux-Arts movement. The level of detail and decoration seen then just is not seen in hardly any post-war buildings, unless they are reconstructions of or expansions to pre-war buildings. After Art Deco, the Great Depression hit, then the war, and IMO the focus on beautiful public spaces or buildings never really came back. True, there are some historic districts that have kept their character and require similar character for new buildings, but the focus on beautiful buildings and belief that creating a beautiful public environment would enrich the quality of life for everyone seems to be a distinctly pre-war practice, IMO.
This could be something that Civ VII tries to model a bit more when it comes to cultural victories. IMO, Civ has historically been pretty wonder-focused in that realm (Civ3's 100K victory somewhat excepted), but one could make a decent argument that cities like Paris and Prague benefit greatly from a cultural standpoint from all their beautiful-but-not-world-wonder buildings. A policy card that makes buildings 25% expensive but adds +2 tourism per newly-constructed non-military building? Or whatever the equivalent in VII would be.
