Roads

[Matth3w]

How do you work your roads? Right now I only have them between cities to link trade routes because they can be expensive to upkeep. How do you have yours? In early Civ games, I used to have railroads etc plastered all over my damn map.

 

[Dunkah]

You want to use them for trade routes just like you have them. Really only one road per city and try to go through as few hexes as possible. If you are planning on qonquering a nearby civ that has a big army you may want to build a road to border so that you can move troops up faster from your other cities.

If you are conquering a civ on another continent, build a harbour in one city on the coast and connect all of the other cities to it via roads for the trade routs accross the water.

The thing you need to look out for is the enemy can cut your trade routes by destroying a road so if you see this happen you may want to build additional trade roads. Alos if your enemy has a navy they can cut your trades by blockading your cities connect through the oceans.

If you conquer a civ and annex or puppet lots of cities, reasses their road structure as sometimes they have an excess of roads. I once saved almost 30 gpt by destroying extra roads in a conquered civ.

If you put your workers on autobuild they have a tendancy to start spamming roads once they are done building in all of the extra tiles you have. So keep an eye on them.

Once you hit railroads you may want to build one path from the furthest point in your civ to the other extreme furthest point so your troops can travel faster but not have extra rr's kicking around to eat up your gold.

 

[Matth3w]

Thanks for the advice!

 

[automator]

I'm still trying to figure out how roads and trade networks do their thing.

Most recent game attempt: Everything connected to my capital. Great. Then I punched north and grabbed a handful of Russia's cities.

After the war, I connected Russia back up with the rest of my empire. All Russia's cities were interconnected, so I took one road south to my northern most city. No trade route. But a road going east to one of Russia's southernmost cities did make a trade route. None of the roads were damaged, no hostile units blocking the road ... what gives?

 

[SuperJay]

^ Maybe there's a tile with unfinished road on it somewhere in the first instance? I've accidentally pulled workers off their projects before they were done (still not sure how), and the 'in-progress' farm looked enough like a finished farm that I thought it was done for a while before realizing what had happened.

As to roads in general, I'm pretty conservative with them so far - only linking cities to my capital, for the most part, with additional roads between other cities if the existing network forces units to go too far out of their way.

I actually thought road maintenance was going to be more of a problem than it seems to be... at least so far.

 

[Ahriman]

I've accidentally pulled workers off their projects before they were done (still not sure how)

This normally happens because an enemy unit (often a barbarian) comes close by, and the AI "wakes" the worker unit so that you can move it away to avoid capture.

 

[Dunkah]

Not sure if cities that are still under revolt can connect to network, so you may need to wait for them. Also it takes a turn before the game recognizes the trade network.

 

[Udey1]

This normally happens because an enemy unit (often a barbarian) comes close by, and the AI "wakes" the worker unit so that you can move it away to avoid capture.

I'm very grateful for an improvement they made concerning that. I love the fact that units w/orders only execute them after your turn is completed. this stops the most annoying bug: I need to move my worker but he already spent his turn building a farm.

 

[Ranbir]

I had a city get the railroad bonus, even though the railway line it had a road hex between it (so the railroad was broken)


Also, you may not need to road up all your coastal cities if they connect from harbour. Go into strategy view and select trade routes you might see certain roads not highlighted meaning they are not being used to link the cities.

Of course, you may still want to use the roads for transport.

 

[DrwHem]

how do you destroy roads and improvements? all i see is the option to pillage them. that removes the bonuses but does it remove the cost? it also looks ugly, as little as that matters.

 

[Teejvan]

Use workers to remove roads. Roman Legions can also build and remove roads as well as forts.

 

[Ahriman]

I'm very grateful for an improvement they made concerning that. I love the fact that units w/orders only execute them after your turn is completed. this stops the most annoying bug: I need to move my worker but he already spent his turn building a farm.

Agreed, this is a huge improvement. There are lots of little things like this that I appreciate.

 

[Welnic]

You can pillage them, or you can have workers deconstruct the road. If you pillage then you have to pillage the improvement first, but a worker can just get rid of the road.

It looks different after pillaging because there is now a broken improvement there. If you sent a worker there the option to fix it is repair instead of farm.

 

[Meneer Popken]

I had a city get the railroad bonus, even though the railway line it had a road hex between it (so the railroad was broken)


Also, you may not need to road up all your coastal cities if they connect from harbour. Go into strategy view and select trade routes you might see certain roads not highlighted meaning they are not being used to link the cities.

Of course, you may still want to use the roads for transport.

Harbors also are used for the railroad bonus, just like for trade routes, so you don't need to actually have railroad to each city.