Roads add movement bonus and NOTHING else ?

[Hamil]

Hi everyone

I have found this statement in the pre-release information of civfanatics

"Roads and Rail-Roads will only provide a movement bonus to your units and nothing else. This has been done so the player does not have Roads and Rail-Roads on every tile later on (unlike in Civilization III)."

But there is no link to the site given the info. So my question is, is this true ?
If so, where does the info come from?

Greetings

 

[Rayanth]

Sorta makes sense to me. the extra gold a road offers in civ3 never really set well with me. The presence of a road does not generate more money. Linking it to a source of money (ie, another city willing to Trade) does. But linkign two cities under your control won't have an effect on the overall gold available to you at the end of your turn -- money moving from one city to the other is still the same amount of money in the end.

And I never did like invading enemy territory, finding a road on every square they owned, and not being able to use those roads to my own advantage...

I can see Railroads not being useable by enemies, as they require trains which can prevent you from accessing them -- but regular roads are just modified terrain to make movement easier...trees cut down, dirt packed down, even paved... those types of modifications are not civ-specific...

In other words, If i travel over to england, I can use their sidewalks to the same effect as my own here in the U.S. They give me the same ease of movement versus, say, walking through thick, tall grass, or brush.

Also, as you mentioned, having roads only give movement bonus will reduce the number of roads on the map... this has the added effect of freeing up your workers for other, more important tasks. Perhaps this will lead to less workers being needed per city, thus freeing up resources to have a larger military without support costs...and no support costs means you don't need the money the roads would have given you in Civ3 anyway =)

 

[Naveed]

But in all the screenshots that are released we see there are roads everywhere?

 

[remconius]

Many roads can still help, eventough I think there are costs related to them. If you have one road, the enemy can pillage strategic squares and sever multiple trade routes, bringing your economy to a halt.

 

[Rayanth]

The game world is always evolving around you. As things change, new paths become shorter than existing paths, so new roads are built to cover them.

-- New resource discovered, need a road to bring it to Trade system
-- New town created, need roads to connect it to all nearby cities
-- cultural borders shrank, losing control of existing road, need new road to make up for it

In the real world there's even more reasons for new roads, where there are roads already:

-- Getting from point A to point B is nice. but if, somewhere in between, you have to go back to point A? you have to continue traveling to point B before you can turn around -- unless someone builds a branch off of the path that lets you go somewhere to turn around. (This obviously doesn't apply to Civ, as we're all efficient enough to not "forget" something... right?)

On the other paw, perhaps it does apply... let's say you've sent a worker from one side of a city to help a worker on the other...
-the second worker finishes the job before the first worker gets there, for whatever reason
-the first worker now has a new task, which is not connected to his present location by a road. He now must either return to his original position, continue to his original destination (presuming it is connected to the new destination) or take additional non-road movement points to get to the new task.
(I've actually had this type of thing happen in Civ3...)


Perhaps i'm reading into things too much... but you get the point. New roads are always useful for some reason, but covering *every* square with a road is unnecessary, and no screenshot of Civ4 has shown every square covered with a road like the AI loves to do in 3.

 

[Hamil]

But there is no link to the site given the info. So my question is, is this true ?


Greetings

sorry i have to quote myself. But my main question is, where the author of the pre release info did have its info from. Cause everyone is discussing the lack of other benefits of roads other then movement, but i cant find the info on another place then here.

So where is the source of this info ?

 

[Hamil]

ok i have found the answer myself, finally ^^

Jesse Smith says in an interview with ign, that roads no longer will give commerce and only give movement bonus.

Now its just the question if this statement is still right. Cause i read some articles and they say the direct opposite of jesses statement. Hm who knows ...

P.S. here is the link to this video. At timecode 1:20 he starts talking about roads: ign interview with jesse smith

 

[Ozymandous]

ok i have found the answer myself, finally ^^

Jesse Smith says in an interview with ign, that roads no longer will give commerce and only give movement bonus.

Now its just the question if this statement is still right. Cause i read some articles and they say the direct opposite of jesses statement. Hm who knows ...

P.S. here is the link to this video. At timecode 1:20 he starts talking about roads: ign interview with jesse smith

Where are these statements that say roads give anything but movemenr bonuses? I have yet to see anything that says they do more than that.

 

[Mason11987]

That's his point, Jesse Smith says they don't give anything but movement bonus.

 

[Hamil]

The problem was i have read in two different magazines, that roads give production and/or commerce bonus also. So i was asking myself, whats correct.

As it seems pre release info is correct, dumb magazines are wrong. at least i hope so.

 

[Undertaker798]

Evening

I think the roads should be the same as on Civ 3 and you can change it to the Civ 4 rule in the options menu or sumin, or you can share the roads with your allies.

This is probably been already said, but hey! I cant be bothered to read em all!

 

[vorius]

I would really welcome the change if roads only provided a movement bonus and trade route. In fact I would like roads to cost maintenance so that it discourages the road-on-ever-square-syndrome even further. This way you have to choose wisely where to build roads

 

[Pembroke]

In fact I would like roads to cost maintenance so that it discourages the road-on-ever-square-syndrome even further.

Couldn't agree more.

No gold bonus is a step in the right direction but it's not enough. If roads give you a benefit (movement bonus) but cost nothing then why shouldn't I fill my territory with roads on every tile?

Taking away the gold bonus only *slows* the road building. The only cost in building roads is that your workers aren't building something else. However, that only means that whenever there's nothing else for the workers to do they will be building roads. It's better than having them sit idle.

The only way to cut down roads is to have them cost something. A maintenance cost would be ideal IMO but if that sounds too drastic there are other options to implement the cost. For example a road could "fade" given time. Say, a road in good condition gives you triple movement but every turn there is a 5% chance of a given tile "downgrading". This could be a process taking several steps:

Good road (3x move + trade connection)
Bad road (2x move + trade connection)
Path (no move bonus but you get a trade connection)
No road

This way you'd have to divert some of your workers into repairing roads which is effectively a maintenance cost since they are away from other jobs. However, maybe people who dislike a direct gold penalty might accept this kind of maintenance more readily. It might even be simpler for the AI: essentially it'd just build and repair roads with the automatic balancing factor of running out of available workers.

 

[warpstorm]

I agree with Pembroke. If roads only give a movement bonus and no negative (besides the worker time to build them), I will likely road every tile in my empire eventually.

 

[Undertaker798]

I agree with pembroke too, especially about the wearing the road down.

 

[apatheist]

That's not the only way. It's certainly a way, and a direct one, but it isn't the only way. You point out the opportunity cost of diverting the worker from other tasks being a minor constraint, but that's not the only opportunity cost. The gold to support the units is another opportunity cost. Using those workers as city population is a third. We don't know how much workers cost to support. We do know that growth may be harder to achieve, so it's possible that having a Worker just mindlessly building roads is worth less than having that same population in a city researching Replaceable Parts or something. Another way is to have multiple types of roads as I've suggested before. A road that takes 1 turn to build might be clearly superior to having that population point working in a city, but maybe you don't get a very good road in 1 turn. For example:

1) Dirt road: reduces the movement cost of that terrain by 2/3. Takes 2 turns to build.
2) Paved road: reduces the movement cost of that terrain to 1/3. Takes 6 turns to build. Requires Stone and Construction.
3) Superhighway: reduces movement cost of that terrain to 1/12. Takes 30 turns to build. Requires Stone, Oil, and Automobile. Perhaps it's worth inventing the synthetic resource Concrete for this...

You might end up with dirt roads everywhere, but that is both realistic and advantageous. Paved roads are placed more selectively, and superhighways even more so.

Oh, look... 1000 posts. I don't know how to feel about that...

 

[Hamil]

Ofcourse you can place roads on every tile, but you no longer HAVE to. And THAT is in my opinion great. I will love to see a clearly set network of roads / railroads.

 

[Monker]

Say, a road in good condition gives you triple movement but every turn there is a 5% chance of a given tile "downgrading". This could be a process taking several steps:

Good road (3x move + trade connection)
Bad road (2x move + trade connection)
Path (no move bonus but you get a trade connection)
No road

This way you'd have to divert some of your workers into repairing roads which is effectively a maintenance cost since they are away from other jobs. However, maybe people who dislike a direct gold penalty might accept this kind of maintenance more readily. It might even be simpler for the AI: essentially it'd just build and repair roads with the automatic balancing factor of running out of available workers.

They've already gotten rid of pollution to try to speed the game up. This would just slow things down again.

 

[mitsho]

My solution to the problem would be:
Roads give movement bonus/trade connections, no maintenance
Railroads give infinite movement, but cost maintenance (and medium to high),

and now give the modern roads a nice graphic that blends in with the surrounding, e.g. that is not seen well. Now you have a country with high-speed connections (railroads) that are 'unique' while the whole rest of the land is still connected, but with normal country roads...

mitsho

 

[Punkymonkey]

30 turns for a superhighway on one square? seems excessive... I really don't see what the problem is. I think the figured out a way to stop the AI from just building roads everywhere. It's not worth it to spend the resources to do that. It shouldn't be worth it to the player as well in terms of cost-benefit but then again throughout history there have been eccentric rulers