Is there a way to permanently get rid of roads? (or other improvements) ... or are they ever just "finished" and "pillaged" ?

and if so, is the option only available to the person that originally built the improvement?

Not sure if you caught the sarcasm in my post there

And no, changing the settings file doesn't have anything to do with modding, it's the global settings file where everything you set in the Options menu are saved. Their QA simply missed the fact that obvious option had not been included in the GUI, so you have to do it manually.

It is so infuriating to play this game when you have no idea about unit mantinence costs (so you can't plan how many workers you can afford etc). Roads seem to cost 1 gold at the start then less? later on? They round numbers so there might be fraction costs or something? I.e. difficult to tell if your economy can support a freaking road.

You: "So how much infrastructure can I build for 500 gold my good man?"

Minister for Transport: "Well, some. Between 1 and a million roads depending on variables."

You: "What variables?"

Minister for Transport: "Errr.. Unkown variables. Best way to find out is to build lots of roads and see if your economy dives!"

You: "Perhaps I should not have employed a talking monkey in a important ministerial position afterall...."

They certainly did go for more hidden variables... not sure what a cooperation pact entails, for instance, or a secrecy one - what does the AI expect?

There's actually a 240 page manual there, which is rather impressive. (Remember to DL it if you bought the DL edition.).

But with both elemental and civ 5 causing my PC to wheeze along like a an out of shape guy at the second half of marathon, I think I'll need a new PC soon.

There's qutie a few things bothering me - it seems like some features are omitted by design, to make expansion packs more inviting. Still, it's good, so far.

1 gold per tile huh? With no discounts for me, 12 gold with 8 tiles 5 citys and 20ish roads outside my borders. If I build a road (outside borders) it goes to 13 if I build another one, its still 13.

I r confuseld.

8 roads inside, 20ish outside is what I ment so nearly 30 roads in total costing me 12 gold per turn.

Oh and my current thoery is that roads outside borders cost about 20% that would explain the above. There are fractions involved with gold but it rounds the number most of the time (for display).

Curious. For those of you who have played at least a few games of Civ IV...is it my lack of skill(despite years of playing tons of Civ5 and similar games) or do you need to cover your territory in trade posts to have any sort of economy that isn't crushingly negative?

I noticed that when I automated my workers they built trade posts everywhere, in some cases replacing my farm lands. I have to admit I was happy with the results.

Have people done math on this over-time, considering that relationship decays and you have to keep buying? AFAIK, it decays faster on some difficulties as well. +3/+2 food is just one tile's worth, I'm really unsure of the long-term benefit of this when you have a lot of tiles that can be worked. I can see it being useful if you have lots of very small cities, but that's about it. You may easily be able to afford buying reputation when making 100 gold/turn, but the opportunity cost of that is basically a unit or building bought (or half a unit/building, if you don't have the buying reduction bonuses).

They started to discuss road-building ...

and hilarity ensued

Far as I know their profit/loss does factor in to your treasury. You get the bonus of the buildings they build, so not getting the maintenance would be pretty odd.

Kind of a sad thing tonight. I sat down to play Civ 5... and didn't want to. I've already won the game I'm in, and I won it within 100 turns. Now it's just mop up for 200 more turns but there's no way I can lose without really screwing up. I wasn't even trying to conquer people, but they kept attacking me due to my small army, and I kept tearing their large army to pieces. The AI is REALLY bad with the new combat mechanics.

The combat is really the star of the game, so that's disappointing. I find the empire building part to be weaker and less fun then in Civ 4, so at this point it's not that interesting without cranking up the difficulty to the really high levels where the AI cheats to the point that it's not fun anyway.

What difficulty do you play on? As for what your describing I do most of that and still have a huge deficit. How many games have you successfully done what you've described on what difficulty level?