Honestly I think the power and expense of roads is underestimated in most games. The ability to move goods and soldiers quickly and safely over most any terrain is a massive advantage. On the other hand building a road is a massive undertaking and maintaining it requires constant effort. Typically that would mean it's the realm of the government to build and maintain because although it benifits everyone the benifit to each individual party is not enough for a singl individual to justify the expense. I believe roads should only be built at the expense of money and city production. Or soldiers could be assigned to build the roads (which works fine because they take up population that could be producing money and production).

Also to prevent the road sprawl make upkeep significant. And have several levels of road quality. So you could skimp on upkeep for a while if you need the cash but it'll come back to bite you later in damaged or washed out roads that need more money and resources to be repaired. And instead of building roads on every tile upgrading roads would be more efficient so in late game even an advanced empire would have the highest level of roads only around major trade hubs and production centers and second tier roads spidering out to other settlements but not randomly along the countryside.

There have been a lot of ideas thrown out there regarding roads but I personally would like to have some say into where roads are built.  There are many ways to get a road from one point to another and there will often be a reason to favor one route over another based on your future strategy.  Why not just let us draw our own roads and have them build up over time.  You could even send out a little worker unit that is handled completely by the AI.  It would a lot like you are handling caravans right now.  That way an enemy has the option of trying to interupt the building process if they wish.

This also allows you to build roads to other places such as a critical border or maybe a fort or some other important location.  Just put some limits so we don't end up with roads everywhere.  Maybe make them more expensive the further they are from a city.

Why not draw the roads on the map?

That's the way it was done in Call To Power. (Public works.) That's also what we did in Clash (http://clash.apolyton.net). You could just draw where you wanted your roads to go and then you set up some money to do it and it would be done in a given time. The economic model was way too complex, but you could simply have roads take X turns and gold per tile, so for instance building an 8 tile road between your cities that goes around the FoW (can't build roads into unexplored land) would cost 4 gold and take 2 turns.

There's no option in Player resolved to give the ai control of your side and then say "stop it you're doing badly" and taking over? Like in Master of Orion (1)?

Sadly, it looks like we won't be able to stockpile anything anywhere, except food. It's been decided by the Powers that Be that local (and even global) resource storage isn't fun, so instead training/production/construction is going to be a matter of using the highest percentage of your 'resource revenue per turn' because resources you don't spend are wasted... (Or used to speed up production, although I hope there's at least a limit to that).

I vote no on workers.  Building roads with workers in Civ is not that fun, it's a bit of a micro chore.  How about if roads were built slowly, by themselves, over time between towns and/or mines/resourses, but, they are only primative "paths" at first, which you can pay to improve.  And you can place "Signposts" on the map to mark where you want roads to pass through for sure.  Your workers/people would build roads to the signpost(s) first, then to the towns/resourses.

That would allow for personalized building of rode routes to move through or avoid certain areas, yet still keep the actual building of roads simple and automatic.

Age of wonders doesn't have a real resource system. Cities and map features only produce gold and/or mana (granted, stored globally, but that's kind of obvious).

This is looking great, and there are some fantastic suggestions coming out of the community. Heres my HK$0.02:

Roads: Several levels of road. Automatic roads that are triggered by some sensible criterion are too good and too simple an idea to pass up because they aren't really random; they are an organic response to the player's play-style in practice. This pays a huge dividend in terms of immersion, fun and emergent storytelling. I agree with other posters that this should supplement, not replace, the player building their own transport network.

And a brief note on how this might work in practice -

*L1 roads are simple tracks, trails or paths (costing no maintenance) that permit limited trade capacity and grant a small movement bonus. These are automatically built by your citizens once it makes sense to have a road there, i.e. once [fuzzy criterion here] is satisfied. An example criterion might be moving a caravan from A to B a certain number of times triggering a road along the shortest distance between the two.  Certain policies, buildings, research, population milestones or whatever can lower the threshold for these to be built.

*L2 roads are 'goverment infrastructure projects' that the player dictates the start, end and path of. These offer full trade capacity and a full movement bonus. These roads cost gold to build and to maintain. An L1 road can be upgraded to an L2 road at for the build cost minus a discount.

*L3 roads and above are like L2 roads but more expensive to build and maintain and can be built or upgraded once the appropriate tech is researched.

Battles: For the auto-resolve and insta-resolve options, maybe have n (say 3) choices of general to appoint: aggressive, neutral, defensive, keyed off the AI generals. If the player autoresolves, a large pop-up portrait of each 'general' appears with a description of how he/she will run the battle, and the player clicks on one of these to select.

That's a good point - the trigger doesn't have to be a unit moving though. The point I'd like to emphasise is that if an L1 road arises organically in response to the player's playstyle, the map will look more 'real' and be more satisfying than a series of roads to nowhere based on what seemed like a good strategy in turn 50 - or blanket road coverage, civ-style.

I have no doubt there's a good trigger that could be found for this. I think the characteristics of a good trigger would be that it is predictable, follows on from some action taken by the player and intuitively makes sense. I also like the idea of simple roads being triggered by a settlement reaching a certain lowish level of infrastructure (first few buildings, maybe). This would also be a visual reminder to the player to think about building a 'proper' road there.

Edit: Also could work for resources - if a resource is within n tiles of a settlement and there have been no monsters along the way for a certain number of turns, it's intuitive that enterprising subjects would get harvesting and build their own road. If the unobtanium mines of Khazad-something are within your borders but in the middle of a desert, it would take a sovereign-sponsored effort to get a regular supply flowing.

It seems like a good trigger is simply that the two places are big enough to have movement between them.

For any two settlements of a sufficient size, you will start to see travel between them. People go visit family, do business, ship goods to market, etc. Once enough people are doing that, a trail will get beaten down in the wilderness, as people will tend to use a similar route (and the path of least resistance). This all happens on its own, old trails didn't get there because someone drew it on a map and said put it there, people went that way on their own and formed it over an extended period of use.

I really like where this type of idea is going, those kind of roads would just form naturally over time and be really neat. Then the player can build better roads in areas where its of strategic or economic interest to do so.

I like how the numbers will scale per timeframe and I REALLY like how the military will directly take away from your population.  I think this will make for some really interesting decisions early on in the game.

I also agree with the various posts on "organic" roads.  Roads were first and foremost avenues of trade.  Cities could automatically pick a path to the largest city in its general area (as suggested by someone else) as the first route.  Then as the economy grows you could add to the number of roads the city would generate.  So, if you started off your third city, it would link to the biggest city (presumably the capital, if close) and that alone.  But as the city grows it would link up to other towns.  Sort of a "Hub and Spokes" method with places gradually growing in importance.  I mean look at any highway structure around a major city and you can see how they radiate away and circle around the city, focusing on connecting the city with the surrounding areas.  Obviously a city that has access to a resource (bees, wheat, field, etc.) will have a lot of commerce to and from.  Might be easy to establish a point system for "hub" cities: +1 for resource, +1 for number of surroudning cities smaller than #...something like that

The military aspect for roads should be paid for by the player [I agree with this idea].  this would be where a player wants to make it easier for troops to move across their area and into the battle.  This idea seems like a very advanced one in a post-apocolyptic world like Elemental where, presumably, people are going to be worried about eating first.  so perhaps it should be very expensive or require substantial technology...remember the USA didn't build highways until AFTER WWII and seeing how much faster German troops were able to move around Germany.