Honestly I think the power and expense of roads is underestimated in most games. The ability to move goods and soldiers quickly and safely over most any terrain is a massive advantage. On the other hand building a road is a massive undertaking and maintaining it requires constant effort. Typically that would mean it's the realm of the government to build and maintain because although it benifits everyone the benifit to each individual party is not enough for a singl individual to justify the expense. I believe roads should only be built at the expense of money and city production. Or soldiers could be assigned to build the roads (which works fine because they take up population that could be producing money and production).

Also to prevent the road sprawl make upkeep significant. And have several levels of road quality. So you could skimp on upkeep for a while if you need the cash but it'll come back to bite you later in damaged or washed out roads that need more money and resources to be repaired. And instead of building roads on every tile upgrading roads would be more efficient so in late game even an advanced empire would have the highest level of roads only around major trade hubs and production centers and second tier roads spidering out to other settlements but not randomly along the countryside.

Space Empires (4, don't know about 5) had something like this. You could tell your units the priority of their targests(like the strongest/damaged/smallest etc), how they should move (get close, stay out of the enemeis range...), when to retreat and stuff like that and they followed those orders when the battles auto-resolved

Great post Frogboy, got my hopes up that Elemental will be the kind of game i would like it to be.

I'm not to thrilled about the resource system right now, but i'll have to see more of it before i make my mind up.

Having to attract people to your towns to grow your population makes sense for the early game, considering the setting. But in the mid- and late-game fase (when large portions of the map have been claimed and civilized to some degree) i would think that maybe 95% of the 'feral' humans would have settled down somewhere, and that population growth would come mostly from childbirth in those settlements. Am i correct in this assumption? Because then there would be little use for prestige beyond the early game.

I would like to see this aswell.

I like this idea Vieuxchat. This way you can build roads to whereever you want, not just between towns. It would also be possible, like you said, to have multiple ways the same place, for instance one safe road for your caravans that avoids dangerous areas, and one more direct route for your troops that have less to fear from brigands and the like. You would have to be able to determine wich route your caravans use though.

I mostly agree with you. Having mines and other resource sites in the middle of nowhere isn't very realistic. A town would be needed to support the workers. But those sites shouldn't all be inside the village, as it is now. Correct me if i'm wrong, but logging camps are usually located away from towns, and the people that work there come to the town for supplies, time off and stuff like that. I would like it if it were possible to build on resource sites that are up to 3 tiles away from the nearest part of a town. This way a town could claim several resources, instead of having to spam multiple towns that are maybe only a few tiles apart. I just hope that not every settlement will have the tendency to develop into a big city or metropolis, but that there will still be smaller towns later in the game.

On the building of roads, how about creating a 'worker' in the town you are building from? This would be an uncontrolable unit like the trade caravans that gets created when you build something, but is removed once the building project is complete (unlike civ4's workers). So if you build a road from town A to town B, a worker unit is created at town A, and slowly moves towards town B (through the waypoints you set), creating the road as it goes. Or if you want to build a watchtower somewhere, the worker unit would have to move there first, carrying the building materials.

This unit could be used to build everything, roads and both buildings inside and outside your town. It might even be used as a sort of settler unit, reprisenting the workforce necessary to create the initial buildings of a settlement. I don't realy like how building a town works right now. Imbueing the lands with some of his essence to make it habitable is one thing, but building should take time and houses shouldn't just be magically created (apart from the initial settlement for obvious reasons).

Edit: messed up some quotes

There have been a lot of ideas thrown out there regarding roads but I personally would like to have some say into where roads are built.  There are many ways to get a road from one point to another and there will often be a reason to favor one route over another based on your future strategy.  Why not just let us draw our own roads and have them build up over time.  You could even send out a little worker unit that is handled completely by the AI.  It would a lot like you are handling caravans right now.  That way an enemy has the option of trying to interupt the building process if they wish.

This also allows you to build roads to other places such as a critical border or maybe a fort or some other important location.  Just put some limits so we don't end up with roads everywhere.  Maybe make them more expensive the further they are from a city.

Lots of good stuff here.

Frogboy yes for all those battle options... God this games getting better and better!

Ok how about this. Cities naturally build roads to each other... but slowly. Maybe you can research some tech to increase the build speed and maybe lower maintenance. Now I think we should still have builders. So you can make your own roads if you want too. Also if you plant a builder on a road, it gets a bonus to its building rate(maybe same with sovereign too but maybe he gets a bigger bonus cause he/she is really special).

Also why not make builders later on say mid to late game start to specialize in different studies(Specialized Engineers). Like you could plant say a builder in a city. The builder "might" get a bonus to its build production, or they "might" end up specializing in a mine or a factory. Maybe they might not get a bonus... It might take awhile too. Just some basic examples. From then on they would keep that bonus, but not gain any more. You should be limited in cities to how many "builders" you can have in them and limited to how many certain specialization types so you dont have only 20 city engineers. (Still the sovereign would be the best jack of all trades engineer and a bunch of engineers couldn't still match him in skill.)

Maybe later on you can get research to teach some of your military units to build roads and some military buildings. So when you build military units, there is a small chance than they might be a builder. Though they would not be as efficient as a normal builder.

I still believe we need to discuss resources more... I'll comment later on that...

Why not draw the roads on the map?

That's the way it was done in Call To Power. (Public works.) That's also what we did in Clash (http://clash.apolyton.net). You could just draw where you wanted your roads to go and then you set up some money to do it and it would be done in a given time. The economic model was way too complex, but you could simply have roads take X turns and gold per tile, so for instance building an 8 tile road between your cities that goes around the FoW (can't build roads into unexplored land) would cost 4 gold and take 2 turns.

There's no option in Player resolved to give the ai control of your side and then say "stop it you're doing badly" and taking over? Like in Master of Orion (1)?

Cities, and mines (etc) might naturally generate paths to each other, but road improvements ought to require engineer type units.  The path could carry a little trade, and an army could follow it slowly.  But a ROAD could be improved and improved for more trade and faster trave....but road engineers can be attacked and improvements destroyed.

I would also like to be able to define the goods carried in a caravan.  If I am stockpiling swords in city A to build a unit there, i don't want some of them automatically sent to city B, thus delaying my unit build.

Sadly, it looks like we won't be able to stockpile anything anywhere, except food. It's been decided by the Powers that Be that local (and even global) resource storage isn't fun, so instead training/production/construction is going to be a matter of using the highest percentage of your 'resource revenue per turn' because resources you don't spend are wasted... (Or used to speed up production, although I hope there's at least a limit to that).

Some good ideas in here. I like the idea of roads having an upkeep cost, particularly really good roads. A paved stretch of road is really good for trade and movement in general, but its a huge expense to build and maintain. You shouldn't be able to spam those everywhere. Going down the scale you can have maintained dirt roads, and unmaintained trails that are just kept down due to people travelling them.

I'm against automatic road building, particularly if roads carry an expense. If there is going to be automatic road building between towns, it should be limited to the free "wagon tracks in the field" type of road. Anything carrying an expense should have to be built manually by the player.

I suppose you could plan out a road ... and decide its "gravel" or "quality" whichever works to decide usefullness/size/and cost, decide its path, and then build it as part of the city. It takes time to build like any building, and costs a certain amount of upkeep depending on length and quality of road. In addition, any add-ons to the road will be added as a small proportional initial cost, with a proportional increase in upkeep.

A potential weakness is that one city could end up with all the road-upkeep, having completed every road-building project.

Perhaps road upkeep could be global.

I vote no on workers.  Building roads with workers in Civ is not that fun, it's a bit of a micro chore.  How about if roads were built slowly, by themselves, over time between towns and/or mines/resourses, but, they are only primative "paths" at first, which you can pay to improve.  And you can place "Signposts" on the map to mark where you want roads to pass through for sure.  Your workers/people would build roads to the signpost(s) first, then to the towns/resourses.

That would allow for personalized building of rode routes to move through or avoid certain areas, yet still keep the actual building of roads simple and automatic.

I've never played any Total War game so I don't know how it would work but I guess I have to scour Youtube to find out.

Do the team believe in that resourcesystem..?   Cause it sounds too simplified.

What is wrong with global storage like Age of Wonders and Master of Magic uses?   I haven't heard a good argument against global storeage

You click on the city and mine which you want the caravan to move between and the A.I calculates the best path. There should be indicators of how much longer you could stretch the road it before it takes an extra turn for the caravan to reach its goal.

Age of wonders doesn't have a real resource system. Cities and map features only produce gold and/or mana (granted, stored globally, but that's kind of obvious).

That is an intriguing idea.  I can see some problems with it depending on where you want roads, but the core idea is a good one.  It certainly beats engineers/settlers/road building elves.

This is looking great, and there are some fantastic suggestions coming out of the community. Heres my HK$0.02:

Roads: Several levels of road. Automatic roads that are triggered by some sensible criterion are too good and too simple an idea to pass up because they aren't really random; they are an organic response to the player's play-style in practice. This pays a huge dividend in terms of immersion, fun and emergent storytelling. I agree with other posters that this should supplement, not replace, the player building their own transport network.

And a brief note on how this might work in practice -

*L1 roads are simple tracks, trails or paths (costing no maintenance) that permit limited trade capacity and grant a small movement bonus. These are automatically built by your citizens once it makes sense to have a road there, i.e. once [fuzzy criterion here] is satisfied. An example criterion might be moving a caravan from A to B a certain number of times triggering a road along the shortest distance between the two.  Certain policies, buildings, research, population milestones or whatever can lower the threshold for these to be built.

*L2 roads are 'goverment infrastructure projects' that the player dictates the start, end and path of. These offer full trade capacity and a full movement bonus. These roads cost gold to build and to maintain. An L1 road can be upgraded to an L2 road at for the build cost minus a discount.

*L3 roads and above are like L2 roads but more expensive to build and maintain and can be built or upgraded once the appropriate tech is researched.

Battles: For the auto-resolve and insta-resolve options, maybe have n (say 3) choices of general to appoint: aggressive, neutral, defensive, keyed off the AI generals. If the player autoresolves, a large pop-up portrait of each 'general' appears with a description of how he/she will run the battle, and the player clicks on one of these to select.

That wouldn't work for your L1 roads : caravans are automatics, and are only created when a road exists.

That's a good point - the trigger doesn't have to be a unit moving though. The point I'd like to emphasise is that if an L1 road arises organically in response to the player's playstyle, the map will look more 'real' and be more satisfying than a series of roads to nowhere based on what seemed like a good strategy in turn 50 - or blanket road coverage, civ-style.

I have no doubt there's a good trigger that could be found for this. I think the characteristics of a good trigger would be that it is predictable, follows on from some action taken by the player and intuitively makes sense. I also like the idea of simple roads being triggered by a settlement reaching a certain lowish level of infrastructure (first few buildings, maybe). This would also be a visual reminder to the player to think about building a 'proper' road there.

Edit: Also could work for resources - if a resource is within n tiles of a settlement and there have been no monsters along the way for a certain number of turns, it's intuitive that enterprising subjects would get harvesting and build their own road. If the unobtanium mines of Khazad-something are within your borders but in the middle of a desert, it would take a sovereign-sponsored effort to get a regular supply flowing.

<!-- @page { margin: 0.79in } P { margin-bottom: 0.08in } -->

Roads = Brute force landscaping.

Depending on the base terrain creating a length of road requires X man hours. (Any and all units can provide labor)

Units w/ training in Engineering count as if they had 4X their number and reduce the total man hours needed in half.

Sammual

Perhaps specialized units, like engineers, would be needed for some road functions...such as building bridges or a road through rough terraine.  The natural trade roads would then wind around the hills and cross rivers at fords, usually not on a direct line between cities.  Basic (l2 & L2) roads, without bridges, would be very slow going for heavy equipment like catapaults and cannon and other siege gear.  Perhaps the fords would also be impassible during bad weather.

It seems like a good trigger is simply that the two places are big enough to have movement between them.

For any two settlements of a sufficient size, you will start to see travel between them. People go visit family, do business, ship goods to market, etc. Once enough people are doing that, a trail will get beaten down in the wilderness, as people will tend to use a similar route (and the path of least resistance). This all happens on its own, old trails didn't get there because someone drew it on a map and said put it there, people went that way on their own and formed it over an extended period of use.

I really like where this type of idea is going, those kind of roads would just form naturally over time and be really neat. Then the player can build better roads in areas where its of strategic or economic interest to do so.

Rather than roads naturally, organically developing between large cities (or perhaps in addition too) ... seeing small, rural, agrarian communities slowly pop-up along major trade routes (a la gas-station cities) would be more logically natural, and could even have nothing more than an aesthetic affect (and perhaps to increase population demographics), except maybe they are included in taxable individuals.

I like how the numbers will scale per timeframe and I REALLY like how the military will directly take away from your population.  I think this will make for some really interesting decisions early on in the game.

I also agree with the various posts on "organic" roads.  Roads were first and foremost avenues of trade.  Cities could automatically pick a path to the largest city in its general area (as suggested by someone else) as the first route.  Then as the economy grows you could add to the number of roads the city would generate.  So, if you started off your third city, it would link to the biggest city (presumably the capital, if close) and that alone.  But as the city grows it would link up to other towns.  Sort of a "Hub and Spokes" method with places gradually growing in importance.  I mean look at any highway structure around a major city and you can see how they radiate away and circle around the city, focusing on connecting the city with the surrounding areas.  Obviously a city that has access to a resource (bees, wheat, field, etc.) will have a lot of commerce to and from.  Might be easy to establish a point system for "hub" cities: +1 for resource, +1 for number of surroudning cities smaller than #...something like that

The military aspect for roads should be paid for by the player [I agree with this idea].  this would be where a player wants to make it easier for troops to move across their area and into the battle.  This idea seems like a very advanced one in a post-apocolyptic world like Elemental where, presumably, people are going to be worried about eating first.  so perhaps it should be very expensive or require substantial technology...remember the USA didn't build highways until AFTER WWII and seeing how much faster German troops were able to move around Germany.