I would love some mechanism for roads to decay over time. Roads and not just cities should be part of the ebb and flow of empires. Road decay could be triggered by:

• under utilization
• empty end points (road to nowhere)
• lack of funding/resources (if it plays a role in road construction)
• loss of territory control
• ...

Perhaps when you click to build road (built BY city-A TO city-B ) the game automatically presents a blueprint of "the most efficient pathway." Then, you can click and drag at the road at any point to give it significant Meandering or such (like I want it through the Valley guarded by my forts rather than the Hostile open plains)

I'm not sure what exactly can possibly be "more interesting" here. I don't think it will be any more interesting if a player will need to make more than one click to make a road. More so, given that players will always want to connect their cities with roads, i think it should take zero extra clicks to make a road. So a road should spawn automatically if two nearby cities have either a low-lvl trade building like a trade post (that building should give some other benefit too, road is just a bonus) or any low-lvl military building. These buildings signify that these cities have either trade or military needs that require a road.

lol why on earth ppl wouldnt want to make a click?

this is a strategic game, ppl wants control and strategy

things automated are not good for strategic games

ofc we want things to be easy to controlo, with a nice interface and a fun gameplay, but also we want to decide and we want strategy to matter

bad idea

Whatever you choose if the builder of the road is an enemy state, we as the opposition should have the ability to disrupt the construction.

To make the roads less obtrusive, make them a trade-off.  In Civ type games, you make a road, and you're done. A one-time expense gives you a permanent bonus. Make the roads cost something, and you won't have them in every single square.  Cities have upkeep; roads also should.

Example?  A city generates 100 Road Maintenance Units. There's a road 20 tiles long; this road demands 20 units of maintenance (does this not scale well? I'm going off the cuff here. Maybe (floor_n/2) to get cost per tile?). Whatever. Once your city is spending all its RMUs, you have to find another way to maintain these roads.  Units could do it, I suppose, but the general consensus seems that units for roads are lame. That leaves us with a maintenance cost.  Tie this in to the recurring appreciation for organically grown roads, and you need to develop a scaling maintenance cost. A trail is free; why not? I walk on it because I don't get my pants torn by thorns, and by walking on it I reinforce the trail. But a nice, big road is expensive.

Here's the obvious difficulty I see with this; if you do this, you need to allow roads to decay, and if you're going to allow a resource like a road to decay, you need the player to be able to decide which road dies first. This might not be inelegant; I wouldn't be annoyed by a system integrated into the city screen where I could prioritize roads, or select one road from a governor at the world screen and kill it.

Edited: spling erors

I don't want any small things that I HAVE to do to stay competetive like continually telling workers to mine in StarCraft.

Continually telling workers to build roads is just as boring.

I don't know how the improvements will work but if you build mines over goldmines then people should go out and build it so as to prevent the lame C&C 3 mechanic of things just appearing out of the ground.

So make it like in Majesty. You select the building (road or improvement in this case), plop it down and out from the castle comes the peasants to build.

To reinforce the importance of highlvl cities:

• When two cities reach a higher lvl the road between them is automatically upgraded

One thing that may have been forgotten here, is, what purpose do roads serve?    I'm not sure if free movement a la MoM is good since then, roads are quite powerful. It brings down the time to get units to the front but might make defending too easy....

larienna

Who the hell says that Civ IV is the best TBS??        Granted, Civ II The Test of Time is the only Civ game I've played but after 30min I've had enough.

I say Age of Wonders and Master of Magic is the best of the TBS genre.

This. But only if the road was already built previously, by the player.

NO WORKERS!

I wish people would stop posting reiterations and opinions. We need SKYNET just to organize these replies and the devs don't have that kind of budget.

Are any devs even reading this post anymore?

How about a little bit if communication? Idea-->feedback-->Dev response-->repeat

Thank goodness, someone knows what they are talking about.. 

Alright, here what I think it needs to be like: 

• You open up the road building window
• based on your technological level, you see what kind of roads you can lay down: dirt, stone, brick, etc.
• Each type uses different resources and bestows different benefits, mostly just relating to speed bonuses, but also some trade
• You hand draw the road on the map, like taking a pencil to a piece of paper.
• The road is laid down. Immediately, but only as a dirt road. If you asked for a stone road it will one day develop into that but only after it has been amply traveled on.

Here is my thought for something different though I originally jumped on the 'organic' road idea.

I'd like to have a 'transportation officer'. This would be someone I promote (train) to build/maintain the road network. The better the training, the quicker things get done and for fewer $$. Here is what they would do and the commands I could issue them.

*They would 'hold the funds' I allocate them for the building/maintaining of our transportation network. The more funds I give them, the more roads they could build (within limits) and/or the better quality they could be. If my funds drop too low I might not be able to maintain a higher quality road. I could raise/lower their spending limit when it suits me.  

*They would 'hire a crew' to build the roads depending on the money I give them. I could determine how much control I want over the placement of the roads by basic instructions. I could say "build a road to city x" and let it get done how they see fit. They would build the road in the quickest/least expensive manner. I could tell them to build a road from point A through point B, C, etc. to guide the road where I wanted. This would be more time consuming and costlier, but might be worth it later in the game. I might tell them to build it as quickly or as inexpensively as possible. Maybe I would order my officer to drop funding for a road leading to my enemy. Maybe my officer would take it upon themself to allocate more funds to the best trade routes in order to improve profits. 

The basic point behind this would be a setup that would have options for different playstyles. You could give all control to your officer or you could manange more details in the road building process. Think of it as (3) varied settings; fully automated, automated with settings or manual/micro-managing.

Roads shouldn't give a direct terrain bonus to trade but rather an abstract bonus, so whoever is going to road spam is just making it easier for the AI to quickly slip armies to any city of yours they want. The Civ IV mechanic of road spam only works because it has the advantage of allowing the defender total movement while the attacker does not benefit. If in Civ IV the attacker could use roads then there would be no road spam as they don't contribute to increasing a single squares commerce and thus it would be stupid to build roads everywhere. When roads are used properly cities are choke points, the outer cities protect the inner ones by demanding the attacker move through them. If they don't take the outer city the defender has brought time and can prepare to defend the next city down the line. As soon as you road spam you lose this advantage as a defender, the attacker can move wherever they want as quick as is possible in the game. As a defender that sucks.

So who would actually choose to road spam given these conditions?

Maintenance, what happens if you don't pay it? Will a whole road just revert back to a dirt path, will slowly over time individual squares randomly revert back to a dirt path? What an annoyance! Not fun, now roads in Elemental are like a Tamagochi mini-game.... I want to spend my time researching spells, making, moving and fighting armies, not babysitting roads.

The KISS principle. Keep It Simple Susie.