One of the big problems with 'organic' roads is it really only works over really short distances - you can't make a massive kingdom-spanning 'highway' style road.. not all cities are going to be right next to each other, i'd think.

Another +1 for organic roads. We already have caravans trying to go between settlements. If there isn't a road yet, they can still try, and over time will carve a trail out. Later with the proper tech you can choose to build better roads, and pay the upkeep cost associated with those (paved roads require maintenance or they break down, a trail in the woods doesn't as long as people are using it).

This to me gives the most feel of the world being "alive". People going places and doing things will find their own way without the sovereign having to tell them to. The sovereign can *help* them by building better roads, but trade shouldn't stop just because the mining town doesn't have a fancy road to it.

So far as how it gets built, both the idea of using soldiers and the idea of simply having people come from the nearest town makes sense to me. I wouldn't have it in a town's build queue though, I'd have a global "build road" tool that lets you build roads anywhere in your or neutral territory. When you use it to draw out the road you want, people from the nearest settlement come out and get to work automatically. This would cost that settlement the popluation while they're out building roads, and they can be attacked.

Magic.

Seriously, a spell or spell-like ability that is researched like any spell, but would cost gold instead of mana or whatever to cast. Make it generate a few miles of road per turn(perhaps modified by how much gold you spend on it). Maybe a few types of roads, for instance: paved highways and underground low-ways.

This just depends on how good the AI would be in building roads. Why shouldn't it be able to build roads even over longer distances?

But then I have to spend all game micro'ng my units to run back and forth to ensure my roads grow where I want them too.

The extremes are either you make roads independant of the players control (ie they grow organically between cities to represent trade) and thus as a gameplay mechanic roads become an abstract experience, or you make roads totally under the players control. If roads have a big effect on gameplay then the player will want total control (to be able to maximise their potential through the players control), if roads don't have much effect the organic is better (as there is no user input to make the game look nice with pretty roads criss-crossing the map).

As roads will have gameplay effect then the player will want control, because when the player doesn't have control but wants it they will feel the game is silly (ie why can't my thousands of troops build a road?). I think click and drag is easiest but how to confer the cost? Something must expend energy (either a unit spending time to build, a cities production spent building or gold deducted) or the player will just throw up roads willy-nilly.

A units time, magicians magic points, civilizations money or cities production. Where will the cost come from? I say let me choose, give me options.

No to workers.  Roads should develop naturally over time.

Military units should be allowed to speed up the building of roads if needed.

It could also be sped up by spending money, or by spell (Earth magic?)

I have not read all above, so maybe this was already mentioned.

For me there are mainly two types of roads:

- standard roads

- military infrastructure

For the standard roads I would like the concept that your caravans create those roads...

So first the move through complete wilderness (with according risks), after some movements back and forth a dirt track starts to appear. Depending on the amount of trafic the road of the quality increases slowly.

Beside this there needs to be a way to establish Highways for fast military movement.

For those I would say that we could have some military builder unit, which can build such roads between cities, build bridges, built fortresses, remove forrest,

so which can do all the non magical terrain changes.

There is different kind of control : in majesty 2 you don't control directly your soldiers, but you can give them reward.

Another +1 for organic roads

But... I think you still need the ability to build roads as well. It may be you'll want a decent road infrastructure between your military centres that wouldn't necessarily appear with an organic system. Really you want the organic system to take care of the dull micromanagement road building but also have a mechanism on top of that for a fully player controlled road build.

Basically this.

But I don't believe the manual road building should be limited to military use. You may want to force a particular trade road or some such to be higher quality than would occur naturally, but it has to come at a high cost.

How about this...

• 1 road generated automatically after n turns to nearest city. So after your outpost has been sat for 20 turns it'll connect it's new mine to your starting city.

• Outpost support 1 road connection max, each city level supports more up to 4/5 roads top (I was thinking of caravans leaving from north, south, east and west gate... but I suppose you could have 4 roads leading south that branch later if you're at the top of the map)

• You can at any time make a new connection by hand, drag and drop on target city, path shown, waypoints can be adjusted.

So drag from myrror to Wall, get "12turns", make the road bend around this and past that and get 18turns, can't make it pass through another city (that's two roads).

Player designed roads take preference and the old road to be "abandoned to the wild" will be highlighted with a "confirm choice" pop-up with the option to:

1. Build road and abandon old road,
2. Build and pay upkeep for old road,
3. cancel road design.

Most of the time you only need one connection to your outposts anyway, and if you're expanding in that direction the only problem happens when an outpost should connect to another outpost X---x---x, you'd have to manually make the new outpost build to the nearest and not to the free city. You could have an option on the autoroad generator build to 'nearest, nearest free, nearest big, nearest large and free'... but that's far too complicated and more easily done by hand, or maybe a general options toggle... build to nearest or build to nearest free.

So far the organic roads are indeed nice. I do not like the idea of having carts create roads by itself though. I would at least like the option of creating roads and putting an effort into it. Roads auto-upgrading seems a bit stupid to me, it should require a concious effort and an investement rather then it just magically appearing.

Getting options for better roads by technology, by magical spells and build by soldiers - after getting the right technology maybe - all sounds good to me.

Thats paying money to get the job done. No money, no work.

They should upgrade automatically to a point, and after that it would require some kind of intervention/payment from the player. (ha-micropayments for roads! but I digress) Its perfectly reasonable to assume a single dirt track would improve do a decent compacted dirt wagonway by use alone, but anything further, such as drainage or a hard wearing surface needs to be actually planned and built.

Hmmm... What if there is a certain type of creature, "brownies" or something, that can build roads or speed production of roads or something. You persuade them to join you and then whatever city they are stationed in can use them to rush out to build the roads instead of using towns people. Or all "organic" road building is sped up near their position. Or if we go the Worker unit way they could be a faster worker.

My view is that this should be mixed. Historically road building was a mixture of state action (for example, the Roman Empire built roads like no tomorrow) a very small amount of private action and the organic development of 'tracks' between trade settlements.

So my view is that an empire should allocate some money to 'public works' and then use that to build stuff outside cities. Not just roads, but other stuff like wells, bridges, aquaducts, viaducts etc.

Perhaps just set aside some amount of gold/money per turn to this Public Works section, and that would determine the speed at which the "organic" roads get improved once they've reached their natural max.

There seems to have lots of roads ideas,

My suggestion as road as trade relationship.

I like the idea of organic road, and further link that to cities relatioship

If City A trade with City B, a road will be create upon the open trade route.

After X years, of trading, the road become bigger and can be upgraded with tech / magic

If City A cancel the trade with city B after it is been captured by a hostice faction,

the road slowly downgrade back to a simple one.

Sounds good to me..

Allow organic dirt roads between cities within a certain radius of each other.

If you want longer distanced, strategic dirt roads (or simply dirt roads of your choosing), get soilders to build it. If you want expensive paved roads, get soilders to build it.

And by "soilders" this could be mean cheap, easy to train "peasent milita" type units, or you could get your uber knights of pwnage to do it too. Up to you

my 2 cents

See this thread: https://forums.elementalgame.com/370742

I think some types of roads should be "organic" and generated by natural traffic from trade between cities.  Improved roads (even if unpaved) should require investment on the part of the Faction building them.  We don't need units in my opinionp; the investment could be abstracted.  I do think roads should take some time, however: no insta-pop roads (unless there are spells to make roads through forests, hills, etc.).

In the game 'Merchant Prince' you could build roads just by clicking a road tool on a square. It just required funding, which you could get from being appointed to the 'road builder' position in the government, or you could use your own funds. It was very simple and gave the player complete control over the exact route.

A Organic road structure is nice and makes sense, but, are people really willing to give up control of manually placing roads? I know I for one would very much like to decide where my roads are placed. I'm sure we've all seen cases where the AI will make bad decisions placing roads taking the long way around a mountain or lake where there was a obviously faster way. Also, what about making roads to improvements that lay outside of town? I would want a road running from my town to the largest farm so that not only would the food from the farm get to my cities faster but I would also be able to quickly send troops to defend the farm if need be. If the AI makes these roads on it's own what's to say it will think the farm is important enough to have it's own road?

Control should be left in the players hands where-ever possible. For those people who don't want to worry about where their roads go let them automate it so they don't have to deal with minor details of placing their roads. For those of us who want to strategically design our road structure the option to do so should be there.

Perhaps I build a fort and want all my roads to lead to it and have it with only one road leading to my main town. This small fort/town would act as my "Gateway" into my Empire through my road net-work. IF the AI is handling all this for me I wouldn't be able to do that. I'm sure we can all think of fantasy cities that have a structure like that. Maybe a city built in a mountain with only one way in and out. To do this on Elemental maybe you'd design a mountain range that surrounds a city on all but one side (custom map). Either way the need to be able to manually place our roads is apparent and it adds a lot to the fun I think.

  I think we need to have multiple options for road building.  If this game is gonna be replayable: add infintum, then we should have a checkbox or multi choice at start of a game.  It should help modders as well. 

a)  Organic roads-roads built by units that don't need to be controlled.  they have trading caravan's, guards, inns along way, meet fellow travels or pilgrims on road, occassional bandits, borderland keep, towers

  Roads that require players to manage their own road building(I think this is important to keep in for those who go for complete control of how and where roads are built as well as when)  I like the suggestion of an engineer unit being used for this purpose.  Engineering units should be able to build roads, buildings, fenced off areas for farming or defense, bridges, mines, castles, etc. 

c)  Build roads by waypoints as suggested above by mrakomo.

d)  Roads are "pre-existing" and not part of map control by players.  Each map generates a different road network upon start.  Have a history or lore attached.

e)  Roads that are not meant for humans.  "Dwarves, dark elves, goblins " might have tunnel networks.  Intelligent spider civilization might have cobwebbed "tunnels roads" in trees or rocks.  Leprauchans using the "Rainbow road".  etc.

  I like the suggestions that roads have multiple tiers or levels of building with attendant bonuses.  Game trail, dirt trail, compacted dirt gravel early road, cobblestone road, flagstone road, bricked and mortared road.  These all get you "there" faster than NO road.  It would also be nice to enchant or cast spells onto our roads like MoM's Enchant Road spell or cast a protection spell so that golems appear to dispatch bandits or other invaders into my realm.  Generally, just want to have options on casting spells on road systems.

  One last thing about roads.  They are used for transport and trade.  Rivers are also.  I would like to see barges, rafts, docks, etc along "some" river routes.  Rivers should be large commerce hubs or at least have a presence in some territories and/or geographic features.