Nice...I love that idea, especially if some fallen fiend can cast a pollution spell on it and ruin everyones megabux trade.

Great thread everyone, I had no idea what a dark horse roads were.

I vote for organic tracks that connects places where there are lots of foot travel.    It can be caravan's routes or where you march your massive troops.  Tracks provide minor speed bonus to travel.

I vote for Roads that need to be build, utilizing man power and material (e.g. stone).   In terms of the best UI on how this is done, allow us drawing waypoints for the workers.   (Waypoints, should be a standard feature of this game anyway as I've mentioned about a year ago)

Referring to my old post  Roads, Fortress and the Great wall on the Strategic Map, forts and defensive walls should be buildable on and off roads, offering Choke points for caravans and other units.     Let us paint on the map with roads, fortress and walls.

Haven't read everything said thus far, but here's my two cents:

Organically grown roads are a good idea, especially if they scale based on city size, research, etc. That said, more control is necessary for multiple reasons. If, for example, you want to restrict movement to a certain city, you should be able to choose existing roads and shut them down. This could be useful if you want to slow an enemy advancing down one of your roads towards your city.

Second, there's the military perspective. To any army, roads are really freaking important. Logistics are argueably the most important part of any military campaign-- it doesn't matter how well trained or numerous your army is if they're freezing, starving, and weaponless. If you want to be able to quickly reinforce an army sittting on a strategically valuble point, organically built roads aren't going to do it, since that point may not have any of the economic factors that drive organic road growth. I don't know if a builder unit should be used, some sort of magical means, or you just have the troops themselves build the thing, but player directed roads are a must.

At least, that's what I think. Sorry if I copied

thread too long...

anyway I like one of the ideas suggested on the first page where roads can receive upgrades beside the standard "cobblestones". I was thinking of something like what the Inca did where you would establish way stops or watchtowers or toll booths associated with the road that would provide bonuses beside movement such as health regen or more wealth

This is an excellent idea.  An organic road system will create a useful and lucrative transportation and commerce network through your realm, but it's going to become a liability if the enemy is poised to exploit that mobility to roll up your cities.  That's when you cast Roadwipe, and the roads are overgrown with hedgerows and oak trees.  Or smothered in lava, or blasted with craters and trenches, or buried in rockslides and swallowed up by earthquakes.  There could be several ways to do it, each with its own tactical implications.  (E.g., lava roads are impassable for a few turns, or so long as the spell is sustained, and then they cool down and become useful roads again.)

Road maintenance as a phenomenon in the world driven by city development, trade, spells, etc. whereby roads appear or disappear, develop or degenerate -- that sounds good.  Road maintenance as a per-turn fee draining your budget?  Blegh.  It would be rather inelegant to slap an inherent counter-charge on the trade income that roads provide when we could instead assume that whatever costs exist to roads are reflected in a notional reduction to trade revenue that doesn't clutter up the balance sheet.

Jeez, a bit late for this one. Having read about half the thread, organic roads sound great and could be fascinating to watch develop. I reckon after a certain amount of time and trade a rudimentary road could come about which will offer a bonus to time or trade value. This could be taken into account by all other traders thereafter:

without something like that would you just get a patchwork of boring straight line roads everywhere? I want to see major thoroughfares develop. You could have several grades of dirt track (foot, horse and caravan) to get new routes to be attracted towards more developed ones.

King fella could decree roads with a click and a drag, represent it with a flag every few tiles and have it cost upkeep per flag dependant on the quality of road he's trying to make. Cost will drop as it goes through these levels and only he can make a good dirt track become a good road, only at the point of 'good road' do you get good military (friend and hostile) bonuses and can build patrols and towers and whatever. You could have some button to show how much trade is going through your routes, black for low, red, orange yellow, white for high to help out.

The roads should be built by a bunch a geezers who run out of the cities. Personally I don't see it necessary to penalise the cities in question for that.

Excellent point.  I retract my earlier support for road maintenance.

I maintain my support for organic, basic roads, and for deliberate, improved roads.

Its an interesting idea. Edit, that is what you said. I misread it.

So you have 5 citys in total that generate 76 infstrsucture points. You are buidling a road leading between the citys. A road costs 10 points, this turn 7 roads are built near the city?

Out in the wilderness roads cost 30 points andyou can only build 2 per turn? Builds them in the oder you planned.

I like it.

That limits the expansion rate like workers do but its far easier to manage. (and gives the user another fun resource!)

Limiting the spam of roads should be done via a desire NOT to have roads somewhere (via some danger or bouns), not by fear of crippling your econemy or simply because its so slow or tedius to accomplish.

great diagram

If you have a per-turn pool of roadbuilding capacity that has to be used that turn or it's lost, it will create a couple of related problems:

1. Micromanagement of roadwork.  If the player doesn't always have each infrastructure pool building new roads, points will be lost to no benefit.

2. Proliferation of roads.  With roads as a waste product of cities, they'll be everywhere and not special.

There are two ways I can think of to band-aid these problems, and both of them are bad:

1. Road maintenance.  Now the road system is crufted up with road micro, and the budget is crufted up with the fallout from building roads.

2. Slow growth.  Balance infrastructure points so that full-bore road building has restrained results.  This is bad because now the player's painstaking road management has only trifling consequences.

The bottom line for me is that road mechanics should reward attention but not demand it, and certainly not demand it consistently.  Even a simple Simcity 1 model where you lay out a road and it is built in exchange for money accomplishes this in a modest way -- the player who is concerned with roads can build them extensively, but it's also possible (in a MoM-like game, not Simcity) to play without roads and use other tricks, like a combination of fast scouting parties, large forces massed in cities, and dimensional gates.

But the better way to handle this is with organic roads, where players can, when concerned with roads, build and manage cities with an eye to the roads that will arise in consequence (or cast relevant spells).  When NOT concerned with roads, players can disregard the process and still get a road network, although maybe not an optimal road network for their purposes.  And players can deliberately sacrifice roads for other things, for example, by building a recruitment-oriented city that's full of houses and mustering grounds but short on anything that would assist road-forming trade links.  It's a system of meaningful decisions without being a system of chores.

Magicke was definitely onto something with the idea of rivers being useful for commerce.  As I recall, Civilization handles this pretty simply by giving a trade bonus for working river tiles, and Elemental could probably benefit from a very similar system.  Perhaps a river connection should give a trade bonus, river or lake presence in the city zone should give a food bonus, and rivers should count as links for the purposes of resource distribution (if applicable).  Trade across bodies of water might or might not require an appropriate building (as Civ does with harbors).

Personally, I like the idea of organic roads that appear over time without player intervention. I think this returns to the idea of the world of Elemental being organic and unique each time the player starts a game, however I can certainly understand the hesitation with this idea or the wish for something more controlled.

I like Progress' idea, as it functions simply and easily and makes sense. Having said that, I'd like the option to automate the road building function; Civ IV's addition of automated road construction was a heaven-sent.