Roads. Worth building?

[AlanH11]

I've now played a few games of Civ5 BNW and come to the conclusion that building roads (and rail) doesn't make financial sense as the costs outweigh the benefits.
Having said that I admit that there are still aspects of the late game I am not aware of. Maybe under certain circumstances they become viable.
Any comments?

 

[psparky]

Roads usually break even when the connected city has a population roughly equal to the number of road segments needed to connect it. The income comes from the city connection.

Roads also provide other benefits in terms of moving your units around, increasing caravan range and the connections give happiness with the meritocracy policy.

If most of your cities are on the coast, you might omit some or all roads, as harbors provide the connection benefits.

The extra production for railroad connections is usually well worth the added cost.

 

[Browd]

This War Academy article describes the economics of city connections (called "trade routes" in this article, and later renamed to "city connections," but still an accurate description of the mechanics and the economics): https://forums.civfanatics.com/thre...roads-railroads-harbours-work-vanilla.438745/

 

[joncnunn]

As long as the city wasn't forward settled it probably should get a road to it to provide city connection before harbors.

I usually start building my first road when the first non-capital reaches pop 4.
I frequently find that by careful routing multiple cities can share some of the same segments to reduce both maintenance and number of worker turns spent building them.

If the city was forward settled : Generally best to back fill the city between the forward settled one and your capital before building such a long road segment.

 

[AlanH11]

Thanks all. I can see I started building roads too early. In my current game I've joined pop. 10 cities and it's saved my finances.

 

[Cicerosaurus]

What is difficult to quantify though is the military factor. If you play with a minimal defence force it is necessary to have roads to move your forces to a threatened city. This saves not only on upkeep costs of units but theturns devoted to building them.

 

[joncnunn]

Thanks all. I can see I started building roads too early. In my current game I've joined pop. 10 cities and it's saved my finances.

Unless you're playing with a mod that decreases gold from city connections; that's actually extremely late to start the road network (unless your cities really are around 10 tiles apart)

The formula in base game for city connection is something like population of the non-capital + 10% population of the capital; and so the road should be started no later than when the population reaches the number of road hexes that would be required.