Roads=worthless

[KM]

One might ask the question, How to get a civ with net 500g/turn and the answer is: no roads!!!!

"
trade income is very close to 1.25 * population of the connected city. (not the capital
Population | Income | Net Income with...| Harbor/ |
| | 6 Roads | 4 Roads | 2 Roads |
3 | 3.75g | -2.25g | -.25g | 1.75g |
4 | 5.00g | -1.00g | 1.00g | 3.00g |
5 | 6.25g | 0.25g | 2.25g | 4.25g |
6 | 7.50g | 1.50g | 3.50g | 5.50g |
"
http://gaming.stackexchange.com/que...onnecting-my-cities-with-roads-early-in-civ-5

This is a quote of some math for roads. If you have a harbour or ICS layot roads will still not be worth it economicwise until you hit size 3.

I dont know if roads cost to much, they do give a productionbonus with railroads aswell (I m not sure how much they cost conpared to roads) But I think that a base rule would be to never connect a size 1 or 2 city with roads and only a size 3 if you can manage with 2 roads, a size 4 only if it doesn t take more than 3 roads etc.


This also leads to another intresting conclusion. Lets play with the thought that you have happines enough to sustain a population of 20 in 10 cities. Now you have some choises. You can have 10 siz two cities and no roads (not a single city would be worth building a road to) Each one working a tradepost for 2g + a productiontile/library etc. Goldwise that would give you 10*2=20g
Or you could have capital size 2, 2*roads 1 size 10 city 8*1 sized cities not working any tradepost. You would then get 1,25*10 = 12,5g -2g for the roads giving you a net income of 10,5g.

This is taking it to the extreme but the conclusion must be the following. An empire consisting of 10 size 2 cities is faar more flexible when it comes to production choises than an emire with 1 size 2 city, one size 10 city and 8 size 1 city. Also having the small cities working tradeposts is more efficient incomwise than having one large city connected to the capital. Therefore the conclusion must be to never build roads until the whole empire grows over size 3 and maintain equal sized cities throughout the empire if possible.

 

[kamex]

This may be true, but if you get invaded, you'll have real problems moving your military to defensive positions!

 

[KM]

Yes this is only a studdy of maximizing income. You could probably look at production this way aswell. I will look into the initial income bonus vs the bonus from having a city grow 2 population. (new city will cost 2 happines) Looking at the incoma that will show woth is most worth it incomewise, settle a new city or lett an old one grow.

Anyone got an answer to this?

1 new city = 1 pop = one possible tradepost. letting an old one grow would be (without roads 2 possible tradeposts) so 1 tradepost = 2g, how much to a new city give in base income?

Of course if your empire is abowe size 3 the math would differ since the ICS placed cites would be connected at that point giving a pop growth of 2 and income of 1.5g from trade plus the 2g from one possible additional tradepost a total of 3.5g for 2 happines.

 

[EscapedGoat]

One might ask the question, How to get a civ with net 500g/turn and the answer is: no roads!!!!

"
Population | Income | Net Income with...| Harbor/ |
| | 6 Roads | 4 Roads | 2 Roads |
3 | 3.75g | -2.25g | -.25g | 1.75g |
4 | 5.00g | -1.00g | 1.00g | 3.00g |
5 | 6.25g | 0.25g | 2.25g | 4.25g |
6 | 7.50g | 1.50g | 3.50g | 5.50g |
"
http://gaming.stackexchange.com/que...onnecting-my-cities-with-roads-early-in-civ-5

This is a quote of some math for roads. If you have a harbour or ICS layot roads will still not be worth it economicwise until you hit size 3.

I dont know if roads cost to much, they do give a productionbonus with railroads aswell (I m not sure how much they cost conpared to roads) But I think that a base rule would be to never connect a size 1 or 2 city with roads and only a size 3 if you can mnaage with 2 roads, a size 4 only if it doesn t take more than 3 roads etc.


Before I saw these numbers I would allways connect all cities. Now I won t.

The table leaves out size 2 cities, which is 2*1,25 gold = 2.50 gold income, 2 gold if you assume 2 roads/city (which is too high for ICS, see below).

Optimal ICS road layout is 1.33 roads/city, meaning that size 1 cities at 1.25 gold income are allmost break even, and size 2 cities is 1.20 gold profit. More realistically, you will manage 1.5 roads/city, in which case it's still 1 gold profit at size 2 and a small loss at size 1.

Also, meritocrazy requires road, that alone is good enough reason to road all cities ASAP when ICSing.

If you are in the vain camp of never wanting your cities to overlap (irrational if you ask me) then yes, normally you need 6 roads to connect cities and then you need at least pop 5 to break even

 

[Bibor]

This is taking it to the extreme but the conclusion must be the following.

TLDR version:
If you really want to calculate this, please make a calculation that involves something like "how much less workers and military units I need to have if my cities are connected with a road network". My rough estimate is that you need around 50% less workers and units. Multiply that number with the requirement in production and GPT ukpeep and you'll soon find your calculations completely false.

LR version:

Spoiler :

- hills, forests, swamps, river crossings slow your units down
- multiple hills, forests, swamps and river crossings are even worse
- workers not able to reach tiles to improve waste their GPT upkeep
- without roads, settlers may take as much as 10 turns to reach new city sites (and also waste GPT upkeep)
- if you border more than one AI civ, your defensive capabilities are severely limited
- unit healing in cities adjacent to the front becomes an impossible feat
- certain Social Policies depend on having connected cities

My conclusion is that your conclusion is completely missing the point. Roads are expected to be an expense (i.e. cost more money than they bring in) because one of the two core concepts of this game is to have units that move around the map.

How beneficial is it to have units move 2x to 10x as fast (in an extreme case of having 5 hills adjacent to each other)?

 

[Kyroshill]

But if I'm paying 20gpt in road maintenance and getting 135gpt from TRs on a pangaea map.... what's the problem?

 

[firecat318]

I'm not so much interested in the trade income, it's the faster movement that appeals to me.

 

[alpaca]

Quite the opposite. Trade route income is actually 1 + 1.25*pop. So even a size 1 city in an ICS grid is turning in a financial profit if you connect it with roads, or even if you have a slightly less rigid grid that takes advantage of hill sites, etc.

It's also questionable to assume the second citizen in a city will work a trade post. Mostly, you want to grow your cities to size 2, then get a Colosseum up ASAP in ICS. This way, you can found the next city because your old city is now happiness neutral. Production math is also worth mentioning:

- size 1 city, working 1 hill. This has 5 , it takes 30 turns to build a Colosseum here and an additional 16 to build a Library

- size 2 city, working 2 hills. This has 8 , it takes 19 turns to build a Colosseum here and an additional 10 to build a Library

If you have H happiness available in your expansion buffer, you can found H/(2+pop) cities. The question is: Which approach lets you expand more quickly? Then you will have H/3 cities in case 1 and H/4 cities in case 2. Each turn, case 1 cities will produce 1/30 Col while case 2 cities will produce 1/19 Col. So the mean colosseum output per turn is H/90 vs H/76, which means the size 2 cities are more efficient at generating Colosseums, even though you can found more size 1 cities at first.

In general, if cC is the cost of a colosseum and p[n] the production for n citizens, you get a contribution of H/(2+n)/(p[n]/cC) = H*cC/((2+n)*p[n]). Maximize this function for each of your cities under the constraint that the city shouldn't exceed your pop neutral level and you're good to go for maximum expansion speed. p[n] depends on the number of available hills, of course.

 

[Soronery]

You need the bonus movement from roads.

 

[DaveGold]

It's a very annoying aspect of the game that you need to micro manage your roads to the bare minimum. It wouldn't be so bad if you could order your workers to create roads with minimal commands but the automated road building goes wonky and manual instruction takes many clicks over many turns, not to mention 1upt blocking .

 

[Bibor]

It's a very annoying aspect of the game that you need to micro manage your roads to the bare minimum. It wouldn't be so bad if you could order your workers to create roads with minimal commands but the automated road building goes wonky and manual instruction takes many clicks over many turns, not to mention 1upt blocking .

Definitely less annoying then placing a road on every single tile.

 

[sleepingbear]

After a certain tech point (industrailization or modern era) or maybe with a new tech, you should be able to move anywhere within your cultural boundries as if there were roads there. With roads then representing highways/freeways, which would still be needed for trade connections.

 

[TheNoodle]

real funny f(x) coliseums and all alpaca. There is also a huge benifit in playing the Iroquois for max trade and very low maintanance cost (it s quite incredible I have seen a huge empire 30+ cities with 4 road tiles ) Normand

 

[neilkaz]

Roads+ Meritocracy = awesomeness.

 

[alpaca]

real funny f(x) coliseums and all alpaca. There is also a huge benifit in playing the Iroquois for max trade and very low maintanance cost (it s quite incredible I have seen a huge empire 30+ cities with 4 road tiles ) Normand

Funny? What's funny about it?

Agree about the iroquois, the bonus can be quite useful, especially once railroads roll around (if you're willing to ignore the movement point bonuses from Machinery and RR). See my Iroquois game somewhere in this sub-forum for some goodness. > 300 trade income with a road upkeep of 39 which are almost exclusively outside of my core territory.

 

[Tabarnak]

Roads+ Meritocracy = awesomeness.

Yes. And if you are be able to settle not to far from each other, with enough pop, you can actually make benefits from roads. I dont know the maths but i think 4 or more average pop from each cities is enough with maybe an average of 4 road tiles between each.

And it's oviously necessary for a better offence/defence.

 

[Stretchy Man]

It's all very silly if the only purpose is to stop road spamming. Just lower the ridiculous 1 gold cost per road to something tiny like 0.1. This will stop spamming without affecting game play. I loved the feeling in Civ 4 when you finally linked up that foreign civ or resource with roads after careful planning. More fun removed from the game.

 

[neilkaz]

It's all very silly if the only purpose is to stop road spamming. Just lower the ridiculous 1 gold cost per road to something tiny like 0.1. This will stop spamming without affecting game play. I loved the feeling in Civ 4 when you finally linked up that foreign civ or resource with roads after careful planning. More fun removed from the game.

I'll support the other side of the argument and state that I am fine with 1gpt for roads and that I find it fun and challanging to figure out my road layouts (often in advance) and to micro my few workers.

.. neilkaz ..

 

[alpaca]

It's all very silly if the only purpose is to stop road spamming. Just lower the ridiculous 1 gold cost per road to something tiny like 0.1. This will stop spamming without affecting game play. I loved the feeling in Civ 4 when you finally linked up that foreign civ or resource with roads after careful planning. More fun removed from the game.

I'd set it to 0.5; if it's too low you will get road spamming for strategic purposes in too many areas. I sometimes road-spam around rivers even with 1 gpt upkeep.

I agree about foreign trade routes and hooking up resources but this isn't related to road upkeep. You could require hooking up resources and civs regardless. Having to hook up resources with trade routes to the capital so they count would create some problems, though: Pillage the route and you can make your enemy get a -50% combat modifier. Of course, your enemy shouldn't even put the trade route in such a vulnerable position without a back-up route but we all know how well the AI handles such considerations.

 

[The Tollan]

The general idea of stopping roads from being placed upon every tile seems to be good. However, it seems like roads perhaps should come with somewhat greater incentives and one should not be quite as penalized for having a longer road network (because cities are further apart for example).

It would be good if some factor existed that reduced the problem with having longer road networks but did not lead to having roads on all panels/tiles. Although the costs could be lowered perhaps there could be some "rebate" style benefit. Such a benefit would heavily or entirely recoup the upkeep costs for having longer road networks without encouraging placing them on every tile.

Harbors should either provide a boost to sea panels in addition to provided trade routes or they should give sea based trade routes (which would have to be separated from land based routes).

Also, hopefully Trade Unions will become more useful if roads are improved.