Xiao Xiong
Prince
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- Oct 15, 2009
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- 480
I always seem to build them too early and they crash my economy.
When should you build roads?
- Thread starter Xiao Xiong
- Start date
Portent
Chieftain
Totally agree with the last post.
I personally go for infrastructure early so I play defensively. This means that roads between cities are not just for economics, but for speed of movement for units in defence.
I personally go for infrastructure early so I play defensively. This means that roads between cities are not just for economics, but for speed of movement for units in defence.
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=438745
A pretty good guide that shows you the mechanics of roads/harbors. Basically you want to have at least 1 population for every road connected to the city+1 pop to make it profitable. When your capitol reaches size 7 then only 1 pop per hex is needed. Also agree with above it depends on map type and civ leader. Archipelago and Tiny Island maps typically don't require roads while Pangaea maps use roads more often. Hope this helps a bit
A pretty good guide that shows you the mechanics of roads/harbors. Basically you want to have at least 1 population for every road connected to the city+1 pop to make it profitable. When your capitol reaches size 7 then only 1 pop per hex is needed. Also agree with above it depends on map type and civ leader. Archipelago and Tiny Island maps typically don't require roads while Pangaea maps use roads more often. Hope this helps a bit
Bechhold
King
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- Dec 27, 2008
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- 725
QFT. Roads equal
which equals 
which pays for the soldiers who defend when one or more civs DoW you because of your growing power.
Gort
Emperor
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- Nov 7, 2010
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Bad idea. If you connect up a size 1 city you only get 1 gold per turn from the trade route, while the roads have got to be taking at least 3 gold per turn - it's not worth it.
It's usually best to wait until the city is one size bigger than the number of road tiles it takes to link it up - after all, you're going to be losing money while the road is built.
The_Quasar
King
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- Oct 1, 2010
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- 862
I don't agree with this... sometimes you have a situation where you have a spare worker, and a fairly new city that is unconnected... as long as you're ok for gold, I'd connect it up, rather than rest or delete the worker. Also, often my young cities grow very quickly, if I get things right, and connecting them up is very important to continue their growth.
I consider the situation when the city will be connected, perhaps 10 turns away... will the new city pay or almost pay for itself then? If so, then build, especially if you tend to build tall, and even more so if you have a spare worker! If you wait too long before connecting them, you're going to loose a shed load of gold!
imho, when a city has more pop than tiles between it and the next, it should ALREADY be connected by a road.
Nope, roads are used strictly to create trade routes and speed up unit movement*. Read the War Academy article linked earlier in this thread for specifics.
*Also for completing the occasional City State quest.
chazzycat
Deity
- Joined
- Oct 13, 2010
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- 3,085
roads are not needed on resources anymore. They are connected just with the improvement.
OP, there are some good reasons to delay road building. Off the top of my head:
1) improvements to resources, food and production are higher importance for limited worker pool
2) trade routes would lose money if built (i.e. if cities are far away)
3) delaying "the wheel" tech can have positive effects on the median tech value if you are going for early RAs (more advanced strat)
4) even if the route would break even when completed, there is a small cost to recoup that you spent on maintenance while the link was under construction. So technically, to break even faster, you'd want to wait until the route was slightly better than breaking even.
This last point is confusing and I admit its pretty minor. Let's use an example where we have 2 cities to connect. They are 5 tiles apart, requiring 4 roads to complete. Let's say it takes 3 turns to build a road.
So with one worker building the link, here are the costs:
1) first link completed end of turn 3, with 12 turns of total construction. So this link costs 9 gold before there is any payoff.
2) second link completed end of turn 6, costing 6 gold before the route is completed
3) third link completes end of turn 9, costing 3 gold before the route is completed
4) fourth link completes the trade route so there isn't a cost in that sense.
So the total cost of that trade route prior to getting any gold back is 18 gold.
Complete the route when trade route profit is +1, and it takes 18 turns to recoup your investment and break even. If you wait a few turns until your cities are larger, say profit = +3, you now recoup your investment in only 6 turns, minimizing the damage done to your economy by building the road network.
Of course doing the math on this every time would be ridiculous. But I do think it's a good idea to wait slightly longer until the route is beyond mere "breaking even" status, due to the sunken costs of the roads you paid while the route was under construction.
...Also you can get around this by pre-building the roads or using multiple workers. Or not caring.
The Little One
Warlord
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- Sep 18, 2011
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I THINK that a trade route's output is: (the population of the city + population of the capital) divided by 2. This might have changed in a recent update though...
Gort
Emperor
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Well, that would be waiting too long. There's a perfect turn to finish connecting them up, and that's the turn where the connection pays for itself. Work out how long it'll take to build the road, how long it will be before the city will pay for its own road connection and you know when to start connecting them.
I think we actually agree with each other
Gort
Emperor
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Nah, the exact formula for calculating trade route income is as follows:
1.1 gold per citizen in the connected city + (0.15 gold per citizen in the capital -1)
In plain English, you get 1.1 gold per population point, and an extra 1 gold per trade route for every seven citizens in your capital.
Yours would be about a million times more elegant than that though. God knows how they arrived at this.
If it were average of the two; then you'd get massive trade income from a new size 1 city the moment it's connected if your capital is large. And in addition, every time your capital grew, you'd get number of cities / 2 more gold.
Under this formula, it's weighted towards the local city and every time your capital grows, you only get number of cities / 7 more gold.
Under this formula, it's weighted towards the local city and every time your capital grows, you only get number of cities / 7 more gold.
wannabewarlord
Prince
So you deliberately chose to lose money? Being "OK for gold" is a bad yardstick. +5GPT is better than +2GPT independently on how much gold you have, wouldn't you agree?
If the city is not big enough yet to support a trade route, then you surely have other tiles to improve with your worker somewhere.
How does connecting cities help growth exactly? It's not like they get more food from it. In a stretch you could argue that the worker can move about faster and thus improve tiles faster, but at the same time you sacrificed those turns when you were building the road too early and could have moved the worker to improvable tiles instead.
In the end, building a road too early is forgivable on a lot of difficulty levels. Also if you have more gold than knowing what to do with, the hit to GPT will not kill you. I can agree on this. But bulding the roads when their time is due instead of just build them the earliest moment you get a chance is a step in improving your gameplay.
Just build some trading posts and you can build them whenever you want. Everyone should have one "pure trading post" city at least one. One thing what I do in every games I lock some luxury/gold titles. You can pile up quite amount of gold by the turn 100. This is important as AI tend to favor growth if theres extra happiness.
wannabewarlord
Prince
Pook
Bloviating
Precisely!They're called puppets.
In Civ IV, I would build lots of roads early. In Civ V, the mechanics have changed (no need to connect resources; roads now cost money to maintain), so my approach has changed with it.
Playing at Emperor, I typically don't bother with roads until I begin my wars of conquest to become the puppet master. Please note: when you conquer a city, you are now saddled with the maintenance cost of all the roads in that city's domain.
Conquered cities will often have roads connecting them, so I have a choice: I can remove the roads to save the maintenance cost, or build my own network to connect with them. Personally, I remove "roads to nowhere" and excess loops, and build my own network to link with my newly-acquired territories. The trade routes help my happiness and income, and provide a path for my troops to enable more cities to come under my benevolent leadership.
