Road building is so broken!

[rschissler]

I have several cities on a continent, one city a good distance from the others. For whatever reason, traders will not go there from other cities, and will not leave from it, saying "No trade routes exist..."

Why is that? How else to I get a road to and from this city?

I know, use a Military Engineer! It's ridiculous that a ME can only build a road on a max of two tiles! I understand the two building charges for airstrips and silos, but for roads it makes no sense.

 

[Tech Osen]

Traders can only move 15 tiles on land. Put a city in the middle. Or, if possible, connect with harbors. Traders have 30 range over sea.

 

[Siptah]

Traders can go only a limited distance from the farthest out trade post. Found a city between the not-accessible one and your others, or build a trade post in a city state that's on the way.

I think maximum distance increases with tech, but I'm not sure of that. Maybe someone can verify this.

 

[kryat]

The suggestions here are pretty much spot on. You need to establish trading posts ~15 tiles by completing trade routes in successive cities. Each trading post established resets the range. In example, finishing a trade route in a city 12 tiles away will allow you to reach any city 15 tiles away from that new post, to a maximum of 27 tiles away from your source city. (Note: I believe that this refers to the effictive range, so having to go around mountains or water decreases the range.) This is true over land, but water has a longer range. I think it’s 30 tiles. Also note, Gathering Storm will have different rules on distance and yields based on canals, bridges, tunnels, and harbors.

 

[iammaxhailme]

I think trading is fine, but I agree that military engineers have way too few road build charges. I basically never use MEs, they're useless as-is except sometimes for air strips

 

[Duuk]

I really think that road building needs a re-work. Especially later in the game roads should organically appear (as they would) connecting districts and improvements and most tiles to each other.

 

[SammyKhalifa]

I think trading is fine, but I agree that military engineers have way too few road build charges. I basically never use MEs, they're useless as-is except sometimes for air strips

MEs should get endless road building.

 

[Dragabond]

Man, and here I am thinking that it's super awesome there's no potholes or alternate side parking.

I've never had a problem with the roads in VI; if there are a few tiles that could use a road that haven't gotten one from traders around the mid-late game, I'll pop out a few engineers to go handle that. I've slapped traders into routes that weren't terribly profitable or productive, just to get the roads that they'd bring (and maybe a trade post). I dunno, I just can't agree that the road building is broken or even needs a change.

I guess we'll see how railroads work in GS.

 

[Laurana Kanan]

I actually don't mind the way the road mechanic works now with two caveats: 1. I would love to be able to adjust trade route pathing similar to the way Google Maps allows route pathing for directions. Right now, you can get some funky trade routes that probably don't follow the paths you'd like. And, 2. I agree MEs should definitely have more charges. That was actually one of the first things I modded in Civ VI.

I just remember the nightmare of Civ III roads, where it was beneficial to road/railroad every tile and then you ended up with not only ICS, but a ridiculous sprawl of unsightly roadways.

 

[UWHabs]

I actually don't mind the way the road mechanic works now with two caveats: 1. I would love to be able to adjust trade route pathing similar to the way Google Maps allows route pathing for directions. Right now, you can get some funky trade routes that probably don't follow the paths you'd like. And, 2. I agree MEs should definitely have more charges. That was actually one of the first things I modded in Civ VI.

I just remember the nightmare of Civ III roads, where it was beneficial to road/railroad every tile and then you ended up with not only ICS, but a ridiculous sprawl of unsightly roadways.

Yeah, I'm excited to see how they'll handle railroads in the expansion. The current road system works fairly well, in that I often find myself dedicating basically one trader to "road-building" either within my empire, or to my nearest and (least-)dearest neighbour. I basically treat him like a military engineer with many charges.

Would love to see the Military Engineer's "charges" change, so that one "charge" was "build road to..." another city, and then he would simply move like a trader to the next city. That would be a fair use of one charge, and a function that I would actually use quite a bit.

 

[bbbt]

I really think that road building needs a re-work. Especially later in the game roads should organically appear (as they would) connecting districts and improvements and most tiles to each other.

I think as roads advance, anything with an improvement/district should become a 'side road' essentially like a road two eras behind or so. But maybe GS will have something, especially with advent of railroads.

 

[CPWimmer]

MEs should get endless road building.

I don't think it should be endless, but i do think they should triple the # of charges ME's get, and increase the cost of all of their actions by 2 or 3 times except leave road building at 1 charge.

 

[Disgustipated]

I still think it's a little too hard to get roads up and running on some maps.

I wouldn't mind seeing trade routes be half as effective, but you get double the amount of trade routes. Of course they would have to balance the bonus effects you get for alliances. And this would screw up bonuses you get from campus districts, IZ's etc. I just think it should be easier to get a road network set up. I sometimes get into the late game with barely any roads connecting my cities. It's strange.

 

[UWHabs]

I don't think it should be endless, but i do think they should triple the # of charges ME's get, and increase the cost of all of their actions by 2 or 3 times except leave road building at 1 charge.

Even if they got all the same bonuses that builders got from policy cards (maybe Victor could give them an extra charge instead of Liang?), that would give them 4 most of the time when you want to use them, and that starts to make me consider whether they would be worth it.

 

[chazzycat]

I like the road system with traders. My problem with roads is that they don't DO anything for a long time, when your terrain is flat. What's the point of a road when it doesn't make your units move any faster? If there is a forest it's going to be chopped soon anyway. So early roads are basically only helpful for hilly terrain.

 

[Tech Osen]

Yeah, I'm excited to see how they'll handle railroads in the expansion. The current road system works fairly well, in that I often find myself dedicating basically one trader to "road-building" either within my empire, or to my nearest and (least-)dearest neighbour. I basically treat him like a military engineer with many charges.

What I would really like is being able to simply cancel a trader once the road is made. I'm not even sure why these must have a set duration. Just make them repeat their route until cancelled.

 

[UWHabs]

What I would really like is being able to simply cancel a trader once the road is made. I'm not even sure why these must have a set duration. Just make them repeat their route until cancelled.

You'd probably have to change the city-state quest to be "complete a trade route to the city-state" otherwise it would be too easy to just set that route for one turn.

 

[kaspergm]

I really think that road building needs a re-work. Especially later in the game roads should organically appear (as they would) connecting districts and improvements and most tiles to each other.

The road-building system of Civ6 is an absolute mess. On paper it sounds cool with the traders, but in reality, it's not only really annoying to not be able to place roads at will, it will also make completely non-sensical road paths. I thought Civ5 was a great step away from the road spaghetti of previous iterations, but Civ6 totally destroys this with an automated algorithm that will just connect point A to B without any consideration of what makes sense.

One of the things I hate most is when you have cities placed like this:

A                             B
                C

And then if you want to make a trade route from A to B, it will connect cities like this:

A----------------------------B
                 C

Which doesn't make any sense from a realism perspective, because you'd pretty much always connect through C on your way from A to B, or at least make a connection from the road to C, but not in this game, if you want to connect C to A or B, you may well end up with a new road that runs parallel to the old road for most of its length.

 

[RealAntithesis]

We should be able to adjust the route that caravans take to build roads similar to how Google maps allows the user to adjust routes. Just click and move any point of a proposed route to create a new anchor point, and the path finding algorithm then finds the most optimal route between the anchors (two of which will be the start and destination cities).

Military engineers as a separate unit should be scrapped. The builder should gain additional abilities later on due to a tech or civic to build roads from a start to an end location. And also to build forts. And national / nature parks (because a separate unit just for this doesn't really make sense).

 

[acluewithout]

Yeah, I'm excited to see how they'll handle railroads in the expansion. The current road system works fairly well, in that I often find myself dedicating basically one trader to "road-building" either within my empire, or to my nearest and (least-)dearest neighbour. I basically treat him like a military engineer with many charges.

Would love to see the Military Engineer's "charges" change, so that one "charge" was "build road to..." another city, and then he would simply move like a trader to the next city. That would be a fair use of one charge, and a function that I would actually use quite a bit.

Yes please.

I want more control over roads, and the ability to decide where railways go, but manually building them is rubbish.

Actually. I’d like to just gold buy roads / railways between cities like you do in Civ Revolution.