ANY Way to destroy your own roads?

[ingolfson2]

Originally posted by Axxaer


Yes

Not weird at all. In other games, that is called roleplaying. Immersing myself a little deeper than the bare interface allows. Maybe a bit unusual for a strategy game, but part of the fun for me.

I actually like to keep a lot of forest around my cities, because it looks better and makes for a healthier natural habitat. Environmentalism civic at 200 BC ;-)

[Thank God I don't have to chop the trees down to build ships (look at real world Greece, that was lushly forested once) and Firaxis even allows me to make good ingame use of the forests. Lumbermills, yeah!]


As a final note, I found a workaround for my neatness fetish. I can use the worldbuilder to change what I want, even in a active game. Of course I didn't change anything except delete roads/railroads. Still, I hope they won't 'fix' that in a patch.

Pillaging your own improvements works only on non-road stuff, BTW. Talk about inconsequent design :-/

[Harovan]

I'm with you on this matter, ingolfson2. Roleplay and immersion are valid categories for some players. There are people, who prefer perfection over difficulty, who try to simulate traits of the particular leader or historical empire (and do not play Gandhi like Genghis Khan and vice versa!). And there are people, who also take pride in a perfect look.

Civ3 was a nightmare in these terms. The late game map looked like a garbage dump, a plain land without the slightest sign of trees or jungle, 100% improved and railroaded, with old tyres, empty cans and glowing goo laying around. Not to forget the polluted spots, which looked even worse.

Civ4 is somewhat better, as it provides at least some use for trees. But far from being perfect. You can't plant forests. This is very sad. Yes I know the IFE exploit - but there are nice ways to get around - the tree school approach, building forests like cottages (let them grow over 40-50 turns with only 1 food like jungle and only then make forests out of them). It is difficult to pillage roads. When you conquer land from an AI civ in the late game, it is mostly 100% roaded/railroaded, and does not have any forest anymore. There is no way to turn this scorched earth into something pretty to look at.

Each city should have an allowance of, say, 6-8 roaded or railroaded tiles. Every exceeding roaded tile should cost a fine (say, 1 gpt) and every exceeding railroad twice as much. The AI should be taught to build as many roads as it can afford.

Probably some of these changes can be modded in.

[Harovan]

On a sidenote, I remember some Civ3/PTW games, where I deliberately razed and pillaged all signs of civilization in conquered land (instead of polluting them with 1 shield, 1 gold cities) and planted forests with sparse roads everywhere. I even had mounties (cavalry units) patrolling and fighting poachers (popping up barbarians). Now that was fun.

[marvinkosh]

The main reason I don't like to have roads running everywhere is that my workers could quite easily have been occupying themselves with the construction of a more important improvement.

However towards the end of a rather successful game, I tend to find they have nothing to do except lie dormant waiting for an opportunity to work. The AI makes sure that they are always kept busy chooping down forests and building roads :P

[ingolfson2]

Sorta like a real-world bureaucracy ;-) Always busy with make-work schemes instead of downsizing useless people!

Well, in RL I sometimes profit from that (being in a profession that gets most of its work from public entities). But I would never want to cross over to the other side.

[Dry]

Originally posted by MightyTiny
As Rook said above, there's a good functional reason for why that "chaos" is desireable; in case of an invasion, you want to be able to bring additional forces in to meet the invaders ASAP - the most direct route available to them. Helps a lot if your whole empire is covered with a network of roads.

So if you don't want roads everywhere, then you are sacrificing functionality over esthetics - which is probably why very few people share your complaint, and which is probably why an option to remove roads might have been overlooked.

Not 100% true.
I agree that roads everywhere make things easier, but at some point of the game, the benefit is so small that you may sacrifice them for esthetics.
I remember in SMAC, once the my magtube backbone was build and all cities were connected, I destroyed the unesthetical raods from my core territory forests.
Railroads in CivIV do not provide the infinite movement as in previous civs and SMAC, but it is possible to build a RR network that doesn't need to spread in ALL squares. You may lose some movement point here or there, but that should not hurt you that much.

[Dry]

Originally posted by Willem
Yeah, I don't understand why you want to remove roads, it's to your advantage to have them everywhere. If an enemy force enters your territory anywhere but on your road network, it's going to hamper your units ability to get there as quickly as possible. If you have roads on every tile, that's not an issue.

The 3 windmills on the ridge near my capital, 20 tiles away from the nearest border have no more strategical reason to have roads leading to them.