Roads: A possibly interesting idea for them

I think it would be nice to have a few types of roads. The first level should be built automatically at no cost, and represents the natural, unencourage trade. It would also, eventually, build roads between Factions, but slower than within a Faction. Its rate would also be driven by the Diplomatic Relations between the owning Factions.

Example:

Path - Built automatically within a Faction's Cities Built between different Faction's Cities more slowly, and negatively influenced by poor diplomatic relations, warfare, etc. Low bonuses to movement and trade. Brigands may appear, depending on how safe a given Faction is (oppression rating, police rating, whatever).
Unpaved Road - Just a formalized path which is cleared, and kept clear, by a Faction's workers. Perhaps this should require some basic technology (Civilization sphere). Cheap to build.
Paved Road - Paved with stones (or magic mushroom caps, or whatever). Requires technology from Civilization sphere. Higher quality, and quality can improve with technology improvements. Improves army speed, trade, etc

I don't think we need--or want--a dozen types of road, but a handful might keep things interesting.

What does everyone think?

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On a general point, I don't find upgrading roads terribly exciting, especially as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metcalfe's_law means that lots of cities means a huge amount of roads to look after. I would rather have a budget slider for road maintenance and then have the computer figure out where to spend the money. Roads organically growing in response to how much they're used appeals to me though.

I do think there's a specific difficulty with automatically building roads in that some towns will be completely inappropriate to connect because it is not really any faster than going via another city, and you would just end up with a tangled mess.

If CPU time is cheap enough for it, I would suggest you could get past this by:

#1 calculate the quickest route between the cities

#2 pretend the road has been built and recalculate the new quickest route between the cities

#3 If #1/#2 > some constant (say 1.1), then build the road, otherwise it's a pointless road and will probably look stupid so don't build it

Could probably also cache roads between cities as a network graph if the calculation is too slow, although obviously the game has a general solution for calculating optimal routes already which it uses with every automove, so this is probably not necessary.

There is a problem here though: sometimes rather than going between cities it will be most efficient for roads to connect to each-other. A solution for that is probably harder .

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I like the idea of spending on roads being used to control road growth, rather than manually buiding each and every one. That gets to the strategy aspect, without the micro-management cost. Perhaps allow the player to build roads manually if they want, in order to speed-up a particular route, or even build roads to other areas on the map (mountain passes, through forests, etc.).

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A solution for that is probably harder

You could let the player build intersections.

As an aside: it'd be neat if crossroads towns sprang up around heavily used intersections, but I don't know how dynamic (without player interference) the worldmap is going to be.

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Lore-wise, I don't think population centers can spring up without help from a Channeler, at least initially. It might be interesting if, as life returns to the land, and if space is available, independent cities did spring up.

It may also be an interesting event to have independent "strongholds" found from time to time, full of scrappy survivors who fend off the dangers of the wastes.

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