Road frenzy

[Solomwi]

Originally posted by Arrian
Unit movement is why. Defense, including (as mentioned by Sandwich) counterattacking incoming invaders.

Exactly. It occurred to me during my first game that, as long as roads give a movement bonus (without which they'd be pretty pointless), road/railroad spam is here to stay, regardless of what Firaxis tries to do to mitigate it. Either I want that redundancy, as joncnunn said, or I want the most efficient route available from any point A to any point B in my empire. Eventually, that becomes an all-encompassing net of roads. Attacking only costing you as much movement as it would have taken to move into the square also promotes roads everywhere, as now you can get even footsloggers to safety after a battle if the enemy unit is on your roads.

Personally, I like the way they de-emphasized it for the early game, then allowed it to have some benefit later on.

[Arrian]

I never had a problem with road/railroad spam, and have been kinda amused at the lengths people wanted to go to get rid of it.

-Arrian

[Arrian]

Doh, dp.

[Dis]

It was pretty bad in civ2. Civ3 I never had a problem with it.

And in Civ4 it's not much of a problem at all. I know I don't build nearly as many roads as you guys. But as I said, I like to have multiple routes connecting my cities. And all my forests and hills have roads on them.

[Arrian]

So long as there is an advantage (any at all) to building a road on a tile, I will build it - eventually. Obviously, the opportunity cost may favor building it later in the game, but I WILL build it.

-Arrian

[MadDjinn]

Automating workers for trade routes is fairly useful...

not only do they do roads everywhere, but they will link up and improve all resources within your cultural borders! and they prioritize those as well.

[Solomwi]

Originally posted by Arrian
I never had a problem with road/railroad spam, and have been kinda amused at the lengths people wanted to go to get rid of it.

-Arrian

Nor have I. I always enjoyed the sight of my entire continent being inside my borders and every tile railroaded (except volcanoes, of course).

To be clear, the reason I like that they de-emphasized it in the early game is that it allows you to get improvements up that much quicker, and not have to choose whether you want to road that tile that gets you nowhere, but is being worked or road out to your next city/site/enemy. Now you build roads solely to get somewhere, which feels more natural to me.

[Addled Platypus]

single roads, asume all others placed


follow up poll: rr all over

its all the same

[kotaro24]

Eventually I wind up with roads all over. What's important is the order they're built in; which is generally:

1) Road to local resources (to develop and defend them).
1.5) Ignore roads in order to develop special tiles (before doing any of the following 'road' improvements).
2) Roads between my cities (for resources).
3) Connection to nearest neighbor Civ(s).
4) Road all tiles immediately touching each City tile (so if my in-city unit attacks a city-attacker and wins, I have a chance to retreat the unit back into the city).
5) Once railroad appears, RR all forests, etc.
6) When nothing else to do, fill in the rest of the gaps, for unit travel speed and to give enemies something (EDIT: ... to pillage).

Nobody mentioned Number 4. Am I dreaming that ringing my cities with roads gives my injured units a chance to retreat back into the city?