removing your own roads

[Civ4newbie]

How do you remove or get rid of your own civalization's roads and what is the first unit you need in order to remove a road? I Haven't played civ4 in a while and I am playing Futuremod. I was able to remove a road somehow when playing a different mod or regular bts game but I forgot how. In my saved future mod custom game that I am currently playing I have a horse spear man unit which I thought that any ground military unit could pillage or get rid of a road but supposedly these types of units can only get rid of improvements like a farm, town or mine.

 

[awesome]

pretty sure i've done it with warriors before

 

[yturk39]

I've wondered the same thing, but I've never tried using basic warriors to remove roads.

As far as I can tell, once a road is built within your cultural borders, it's there forever unless an enemy unit destroys it or some random event washes it away. Frontier roads (outside cultural borders) you can wipe out with any kind of unit.

 

[Terrance888]

I think you can raze your own improvements. Including roads. However, you have to raze the stuff ontop of the road first.

 

[xenex]

Indeed im pretty sure you can pillage your own roads, I dont it before by accident with other improvement so im pretty sure you can also do it to roads, I dont think you get any money for pillaging your own stuff like you do for pillaging enemy improvements though.

 

[Civ4newbie]

Tried using a ruffian that looks like a stone age warrior which is the first war ground unit in the mod and tried using a warrior but neither of them worked. I also tried putting a farm, cottage or town and fort improvements on the road I wanted to remove and then tried removing it with my horse spear man but only the improvement would be removed. There seems to be no information on how to remove roads in the encyclopedia, all look again though. There seems to be no way to remove your own roads unless they are outside cultural boarders like yturk39 said. I'll try using a ruffian and warrior, make improvements, then remove them. If that fails I will put a worker on it by cheating and see what that does. In the mod I can only use work gangs right now since I probably don't have the technology that unlocks the workers yet.

 

[xenex]

Well the it might be the mod preventing you from doing so.

Just to be sure check if your ruffian/warrior and see if you can remove enemy roads.
It might make sense in the mod that fighting units cant remove roads, because it takes a quite a bit then a few units to effectivly destroy a road, at least until you get to siege weapons.

 

[Clam Spammer]

AFAIK there isn't a way to destroy your own roads. You can't pillage roads inside your borders, only those in unclaimed and enemy land.

 

[Civ4newbie]

As far as I can tell, once a road is built within your cultural borders, it's there forever unless an enemy unit destroys it or some random event washes it away. Frontier roads (outside cultural borders) you can wipe out with any kind of unit.

Your probably right. All give it a rest for now until I can make a siege unit and then see if that works but I doubt it. If that doesn't work then I will put it to rest for good.

So far the only way to move the roads within my boarders is to cheat. If I cheat or open world builder and save my game with the roads that I want to remove then will I get a score and get ranked at the end of the game? I've gone into cheat mode already but I don't think I saved after I cheated. I could be wrong though since when I load my save game, then go into worldbuilder it doesn't give me that little message that says I won't be scored or ranked at the end of the game.

 

[Sian]

the million dollar question ...

Why do you want to remove your own roads?

 

[xenex]

I was wondering that too, but figured in the mod hes playing roads probably have a maintanance or something like that. either that or he wants his road to go in a certain way instead of all over the place.Not that it really matters why he wants to remove them.

 

[Dhoomstriker]

AFAIK there isn't a way to destroy your own roads. You can't pillage roads inside your borders, only those in unclaimed and enemy land.

Correct! However, you can allow Barbarian units to come into your territory and they may randomly Pillage your Roads for you.

You can also get into a war against an AI that likes Pillaging, such as one of the Khans with their Keshiks, and they'll more than happily do the job for you.

If you are really insane, you can even allow the nearest City to be captured and then can pillage the relevant Roads yourself, before recapturing the City.

the million dollar question ...

Why do you want to remove your own roads?

I can't answer why he wants to get rid of the Roads, but for me, it is to DOUBLE the chances of Forest regrowth on a particular square. Having a Road on a square that is eligible for Forest regrowth will halve the chance of a Forest growing there--take away the Road and that's the same as doubling your chances.

As to WHY it won't work is likely an unintended bug from a lazy bit of coding... Roads and Railroads are not classified as improvements--they are instead classified as "routes" and are found on the same World Builder tab as "terrain features" (like Flood Plains) and terrain types. This distinction is easier to understand if you use the World Builder and try to build an improvement... on the Improvements tab, you will see items like Mine, Pasture, Quarry, etc, but you will not see Road or Railroad. You'll have to go to a different tab, one that contains Rivers and Flood Plains, in order to add or remove a Road/Railroad using the World Builder.

I claim that this behaviour a bug because other units, when they Pillage, are able to also pillage Roads and Railroads. Likely, a decision was made at some point to allow a player to Pillage their own lands... and when that decision was made, the programmer assigned to the task simply allowed for improvements to be pillaged, not even doing the proper research into other pillaging code to see that there are more items than the strict definition of improvements (namely, Roads and Railroads) which should be eligible for Pillaging.

 

[yturk39]

It very well could be a bug.

My guess as to why it was made impossible to pillage your own roads had to do with adding another subtle element of strategy / planning: the game designer really wanted players to think about where (and equally important, WHEN) roads should be built within your own borders. It's not always to the player's advantage to have a nice, speedy efficient system of roads your rivals can zip throughout your territory on, taking in all there is to see in just a few turns. Spies with their Commando promotion can use your roads as efficiently as you can.

Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, maybe I'm not. Maybe it is a bug.

 

[xenex]

I think your giving them too much credit, their developer after all, not players.It seems unreasonable to think that its a feature to make you think take into account the commando promotion , that only the spy can get at a point where it would really matter, it takes other units too long to be able to get it.It being a feature would be more credible if roads had maintanance cost or something else like that that makes you think before you do.


I was shocked when i accidently destroyed my own improvement, the thought came into my mind of "WHY?" , what possible reason could there be for wanting to pillage your own resource.Its almost obvious to me that at one point they actually thought about this and decided to do it (for whatever reason I cant even imagine) and simply forgot to do the same thing to roads/rr
Even when commando actually comes into play it isn't big enough of a issues to make you want to change your network.The most you would probably do if you were afraid of commando would be to put scout units outside your borders or make sure all your workers have a defender stuck on them or increase your city garrison.

 

[s.bernbaum]

I was shocked when i accidently destroyed my own improvement, the thought came into my mind of "WHY?" , what possible reason could there be for wanting to pillage your own resource.Its almost obvious to me that at one point they actually thought about this and decided to do it (for whatever reason I cant even imagine) and simply forgot to do the same thing to roads/rr

I have, albeit rarely, pillaged resources in my border lands on purpose. When my borders popped to include tiles in the BFC of a neighbor, I don't plan to war with him and I expect the tile to eventually pop back to him, I clear off the improvement, especially if it is a town, before it reverts to his control.

 

[xenex]

Thats actually a good reason, I believe you dont get gold for pillaging your own improvements, but it would be nice although you would do it very rarely to be able to get gold from your improvements, then if you needed gold really fast you could destroy a town and get your gold, it would almost never be worth it, but still.


At least now I see a possible reason for this, still wish that it would ask you if your sure.

 

[Sian]

I can't answer why he wants to get rid of the Roads, but for me, it is to DOUBLE the chances of Forest regrowth on a particular square. Having a Road on a square that is eligible for Forest regrowth will halve the chance of a Forest growing there--take away the Road and that's the same as doubling your chances.

the double of a stupidly small number, is still stupidly small

 

[Dhoomstriker]

still wish that it would ask you if your sure.

Absolultely! Along with Alt + clicking on a Leader's name to declare war...
To go through diplomacy menus for declaring war is a 4-step process... one slip with the keyboard (easy enough to do if you Alt + Tab or use the nearby Shift key a lot for hotkeys or even Ctrl + click on a Leader's name to save time when you want to trade) and BAM, you're at war with your long-time buddy!

The same with Resource pillaging... it's a rare enough thing that you'd want to do for it to warrant a confirmation dialogue.

The same can be said for deleting a stack of units... if I recall correctly, clicking on the Delete Unit icon for a single unit will give you a prompt, but clicking on that icon when you have 2 or more units selected will immediately delete them... I'm not about to "test" this functionality in my current game to back up my claim, but it's what I recall.


And then there's the MISUSE of confirmation dialogues... move onto a non-enemy unit in neutral lands and BAM, you're asked if you want to declare war. Ummm, couldn't you have at least asked us to have held down the Alt key when moving the unit if we wanted to declare war in this manner?

Sure, it's great that if you don't have Open Borders with an AI and you attempt to move into their territory (say, to capture a Worker) that you get the immediate option to declare war on them. But what's the tactical advantage of striking a unit in neutral lands, a location where you are just as likely to want to send your units to scout as an AI would? Not much tactical advantage at all, but a definite huge disadvantage if you accidentally agree to declare war... and war on whom if there are two different AIs' units on the square? The "confirmation dialogue" (which isn't really confirming something that I indicated wanted done in the first place) doesn't even specify against whom you are going to declare war (at least, that's what I recall--again, I'm not about to blow up my current game just to confirm my memory on this point).

the double of a stupidly small number, is still stupidly small

Perhaps, but when you start building those Forest Preserves and that value grows to a somewhat reasonable, albeit still small, number, you will wish that you could easily double that number's value!

 

[Tristan_C]

You cannot remove roads within your borders, and you will not receive gold when pillaging your own improvements.

Forest regrowth is "stupidly small" on quick and considerable on marathon.

 

[Civ4newbie]

During some time into the game when Most of the roads looked the way I wanted it to, I forgot that you had to connect roads to your resources as well as the cities in order to share resources from one city to another. Since I made that mistake I wanted to redo my roads the way I wanted it to look and not look messy like xenex was saying. Maintenance costs for to many roads or lots of messy roads or wanting to get rid of maintenance costs is a good reason to get rid of your own roads other then just wanting to get rid of them just because they look messy. It's not really a crazy idea to remove your own roads because they look messy as long as you clear the roads you want removed after you have made new connections but of course you can't remove your own roads. Maybe removing your own roads could be a feature implemented into new versions of mods. Am I wrong, What do you guys think?