Worker: Road-to command

[Wodan]

The worker will sometimes go to a sideways tile, building a jog in the road, which is just stupid. I think the worker is following the "fastest route" to the destination tile, but that's not the point... once the road is built, the direct line path will BE the fastest route. The worker should go straight there.

 

[Petek]

Perhaps you could post a game save file or a screenshot that illustrates your point. I've noticed that workers will construct roads that aren't the most direct path. However, it sometimes turns out that the "jog in the road" allows you to create a shorter path to another city, saving road maintenance costs.

 

[Wodan]

Well I've noticed it 3 times, the most recent is my current game, but I went back to an autosave to fix the situation. It was laid out like this:

plain city plain
--plain plain
plain hill plain
--plain worker

I told the worker to go to the plain at the #1 position (keypad) to the city, which would have taken the road over the hill. The reason I wanted that is because there was another city off to the left and later I would of course run roads down to it, so by going that way it would save overall road maintenance.

But the worker chose to go to the right of the hill, which would end up making a backwards "C" of roads. Bizarre. The only thing I can figure is the "fastest route" formula.

If a screenshot is essentail then I can recreate the situation, it'll just take a bit of work to do so, thus I'd prefer not to unless critical.

 

[Petek]

If I understand correctly, your preferred path and the one chosen by the AI both would have covered the same number of tiles (and so would have incurred the same maintenance costs). But the path you wanted the worker to create would have resulted in a shorter path to another existing city. Is that correct?

 

[Wodan]

If I understand correctly, your preferred path and the one chosen by the AI both would have covered the same number of tiles

No, my preferred path was: current tile, hill, destination tile (cost 3)
The path it took was: current tile, plain, plain, destination tile (cost 4)

 

[Wodan]

Loaded an old autosave. Here's a screenshot. I had the worker on the forest and did a road-to targeting the horses. You can see it made a backwards "C" route.

I think I know what it is. The middle hill tile was NOT in my cultural borders when I did the command (it expanded there while the roads were being built). So the worker tried to build the roads through tiles within my borders, even though it was longer.

 

[Petek]

The chosen path makes no sense, unless as you say it has to do with existing cultural borders. It would be nice if one could "build" a path through a series of build road commands, but that doesn't seem possible.

 

[DeeBo]

I just stared manually constructing my roads rather than using the "road to" command. Just put your worker where you want him, click build road, then move him when he's done with that tile. It's helpful too because even if the "road to" command picks the shortest/fastest path, you may want the road going a different direction for military purposes.

 

[Wodan]

I agree, the solution is to simply use a build road command one tile at a time.

But there's a feature that doesn't work intuitively, so saying "don't use it" isn't really an answer.

Anyway this definitely should be at the bottom of the bugfix list in terms of priority.