Since Elemental's release, the road mechanic has been underwhelming. Yet, before we can discuss how to possible solutions to make the mechanic more interesting, it is important to understand why roads are not as useful as they could be. To this end, we shall outline the current road system and some of its shortcomings.
1. Roads can only be built by caravans. In general, this seems like a reasonable mechanic, as it is trade that usually pushes a society to create and maintain road system at all. Yet, in game terms, this requires a player to develop the trade technology, build a caravan, and send the caravan to some selected city. This system adds player incentives to rush to caravans over all other game aspects as the trade and movement bonuses are incredibly necessary for early game expansion.
2. Roads can only be upgraded by caravans through use of a trade route. Again, this mechanic appears reasonable as a route traveled by caravans would slowly develop over time. If you consider the slow development of any major road system, the trade traffic plays a crucial role in the expansion of both the road and the surrounding economies. Yet, trade is only one of many factors to this development, along with population and military movement. In game terms, a road is upgrades slowly based on the number of back and worth trips of a caravan and each caravan along a particular route only upgrades its particular route. This therefore cause the effect that two caravans on two different routes can travel the same road without both effecting this particular stretch of road cumulatively.
3. Roads can only be built between two cities. Since only caravans build roads along their routes between cities, then it is impossible to build a road to anywhere other than another city. This effectively prevents players from creating roads for any other purpose than the transportation of caravans from one city to another. If player wants to expand his road network to create military paths to the front lines, the player is forced to create a level 1 city near the front and create a caravan from that city back to his production centers.
4. Roads are laid out based upon some underlying set of mechanics and can not be directly altered. Whenever a caravan makes it to a city and a road is created, the underlying system determines the ultimate path of the road. Sometimes, these path go through safe passes, and other times they cut right throw a mob infested forest. In either case, the user has no direct method of modifying the path his roads take.
Generally speaking, the possible solutions I can think of to these shortcomings are as follows:
1. The easiest way to make road development better is the creation of a worker unit which is user created and has the ability to specifically lay down roads on empty tiles. Yet, as has been seen in every civilization game, these units become a tedious chore to manage overtime and eventually outlive their usefulness. Personally I would not care for such a road building unit, as it tends to lead to road webbing which is ugly and inherently beyond any level of suspended disbelief.
2. Another idea is a user paint option. That is, a user can tell a city that he wants a road between a city and other city or point, then the user paints a path for the new route. Under this system, it would still be possible to have travel upgrade a road but it would probably be more interesting to have it so that every unit entering a square slowly upgraded the road and every x number of turns downgraded the road. This would keep add a strategic level to roads as unused roads would eventual fade away while well traveled caravan paths would be promoted and become better. On top of this the number of user painted roads could be determined by some tech requirements/city requirements, this way a player would be prevented from sending huge amounts of roads out of a newly built city.
3. A last idea would be to continue to allow caravans to develop roads, but to give users the ability to modify these paths to circumvent certain situations. Here one could add a path paint option or something as simple as path conditions for determining the way the path is built, maybe through the use of sliders or user settings.
These are just some of the possible options for road changes. I am interested to hear what other people have thought of or any modifications to these. In general, I think that roads like all other game mechanics deserve a real conversation from the community on its own.
