Roads not worth building?

[Chibiabos]

Roads NEVER pay for themselves with the paltry 1G per town (except the capital which gets none), even with the bonus I can't remember at the moment that doubles it to 2G. They aren't needed to connect resources nor distribute them throughout your empire.

I'm starting to wonder if its even worth building roads at all? Railroads maybe for the production bonus, given how rare hammers are, and maybe with the policy that grants 1 happy/city, but until then ... what really is the worth? A lousy gold per town, at the expense of 5+ gold to maintain the roads?

IMO, someone should mod it so roads grant +1G TO AND FOR each town connected to a road trade network. That is, if you only have your capital plus one city, you'd get 2G in each ... but with a marketplace, bank and stock market in each, even just that can pay for itself. A third city connected would grant 3G in each and so on. Maybe that's too much of a buff, but considering the happy penalty, maybe someone should mod it? The Harbor should do the same, but only to other coastal towns with harbors. That way, realistically, its still a good idea to connect cities on each continent by road.

 

[MaXimillionZero]

From where have you gotten this misconception that a trade route only generates 1 GPT?

 

[aimlessgun]

If you look under your economic overview you can see revenue from trade routes.

I assure you that it is much higher than 1g.

 

[Zechnophobe]

So, unless there were other factors, it appears that a trade route in a city produces 1.25 gold per turn per population. So a size 8 city production 12 gold per turn.

This was true in the last game I played, but may scale with era, map size, or something.

(Technically it was .01 +1.25, since I would get 12.01 gold instead of just 12).

 

[Syiss_]

Someone did the math and determined that your trade route income is based solely on the size of the city you are connecting to the capital. The size of the capital itself does not matter. This person determined that you get 1.25 * the size of the city. So for a size 4 city, you get 1.25 * 4 = 5 gold. Arabia gets a flat bonus of +1 gold per trade route.

I cannot attest to the accuracy of these numbers, this is what I read, and I have not bothered to verify the math.

 

[Tennyson]

Also, roads are a critical military advantage. I usually build cities next to rivers, and I often build a single road on the other side just to get a free river crossing.

On the other hand, for cities that are unimportant, I don't build roads to them until the road will pay for itself.

 

[nodule]

Trade routes generate a good chunk of my profit (not just income) in the late game. They are quite lucrative when cities are a decent size

 

[Seven05]

It's also important to keep in mind that unlike Civ 4 it's ok to have cities with a lot of overlap as you'll rarely get a city large enough to use every tile in the 3 tile radius. I tend to have cities no more then 3-4 tiles apart, some only 2 tiles apart. This result in very favorable road maintenance to trade income ratios.

And, of course, don't forget that you're not likely to have a single city connected to the capital by a single road so a raod that is 6 tiles long to one city and then 3 more roads from that city to other cities at about 3-4 tiles length does not mean those outer cities are using 10 tiles worth of roads each. It also means that long 6 tile road is not being solely supported by a single city's trade route.

This is very different than the 'screw roads use harbors' idea where each of them have a constant, and equal, 3g maintenance per turn for the harbor. Likewise you can connect nearby cities to a city with a harbor to establish the trade route without needing a road all the way back to the capital.

If you think of it as connecting each new city to the closest connected city you can keep road maintenance under control easily.

 

[Kid R]

IMO the military benefit of roads is somewhat reduced because (a) all units have more movement now than in previous Civs and can usually get in position quite quickly, and (b) front lines tend to be slower moving because of the tactical 1UPT combat, and units requiring several hits to kill, means units have longer to move up anyway.

Otherwise as people have said, keep the roads short and they pay off nicely if you have the worker turns to actually build them.

 

[Chibiabos]

It was somewhere in the game that it said 1 GPT, and I was only noticing about a 1 GPT when I finished the last road tile to connect a city. Maybe that was because it was a new city that hadn't grown yet, with this new info.

Still, even with this corrected info for my use, I tend to play on large maps, and am suffering the same issue I have seen a lot of others post that building new cities is very difficult to manage, unhappiness gets out of hand quickly, so I tend to very carefully place my cities near resources ... which means my cities tend to be far apart. I started tweaking my roads, trying to minimize the number of actual road improvements while still connecting all of my cities. Japan pissed me off by building a lot of cities right around a farther off city I had built to collect a number of resources within 3 tiles ... so I wound up warring Japan and Puppeting a lot of their cities, leaving me with a huge number of cities (this was before I realized its best to only even puppet good cities and raze the worthless ones). This left me with two groups of cities on opposite ends of a continent, and the minimum road length between the nearest cities from each of them was on the order of 12 tiles. That's a lot of road maintenance, doubly so when it came time to up them to railroads.

Do the railroad bonuses work if you just connect inland cities to the nearest harbor which then connects to the capital?

Also, I keep getting mysterious 'trade route disrupted' messages even though there's no interruption in the roads between the city it claims and my capital. :/ Anyone know what could cause that?

 

[King Jason]

Well one thing I haven't tested yet myself is if you can have a city with a harbor connected to a bunch of cities via roads... and all those cities be "connected" to the capital due to the port city.

However, I assume this is possible because I had a territory clear across the map that I roaded all cities, then hooked that road up to a nearby allied city-state. Doing so established a trade route to my capital.

So, whether or not the port-city mechanic will work, I believe that establishing a route to a nearby city-state will establish a trade network from all connected cities to your capital. Yet another thing that makes City-states more powerful... as you can essentially use them as hubs to establish "colonies" across the globe.

Oh, the CS must be allied with you, naturally.

 

[sbq]

Well one thing I haven't tested yet myself is if you can have a city with a harbor connected to a bunch of cities via roads... and all those cities be "connected" to the capital due to the port city.

Yes, the harbor acts as a road (for connection to the capital purpose) and all of the other cities connected to the harbor city show as having a trade route to the capital. You can verify this by playing a continent map and having cities on both continents, with a harbor bridging the two continents for trade route purposes.

 

[Acidrain]

In my late game, i got around 20+ gold per trade route. They're awesome!

 

[jauggy]

They are not worth building. Once you conquer your AI neighbours - you will be using their roads to get your troops to the front line. Also you can kill your workers earlier to save more money.

 

[Nefelia]

Roads are very much worth building, especially on the larger maps. Throughout the classical and early medieval period my trade route income tends to be twice the value of the maintenance. By the Renaissance the trade route income is more than three times the value of the maintenance.

With the great monetary returns on top of the military necessity, building roads is a no brainer. The challenge is to build an efficient network that keeps the maintenance costs at a minimum while still providing quick military access to all vulnerable parts of a large empire.

 

[skywalker]

Roads are absolutely necessary. Even with two moves, if you are actually expanding it will just take far too long for your units to redeploy to a new front (or even just get to the current one!) without a road network. Trade routes are just gravy to support the cost. For that matter, I've never seen my road maintenance costs be larger than my trade income; as far as I'm concerned, the upkeep is just what keeps me from roading every single tile.

Also, honestly, road maintenance just isn't that expensive in the grand scheme of things. It's not worth optimizing; just connect everything, and then build roads along the paths your units might want to take.

 

[Daniel D]

Trade Route Formula Explained