I'd like to see this changed, too. Please.

Well FWIW that makes 2 of us.

That's a lot of typing without actually stating any issues with the current system or stating whats so great about road building in these other games.  OK so LH road building sucks and other games road building doesn't, right got that... but whats wrong with it exactly?  I'm not taking the micky I genuinely don't get it. 

Well, while I can't speak for the original poster, I can relate an experience I had on a recent map.

The terrain was rather mountainous where I built my empire, so my cities were a little ways apart from each other (say 10 or more squares).  The road between my first and second city, which was to the east of the first city went well enough.  Essentially these cities were due east/west of each other, with a mountain range in between so the road had to go to the south around the mountain. 

When the third city was put in (to the south and slightly west of the first city), a road appeared between the second and third city, forking into the first road right next to the second city, which resulted in a 'long way around' from the first to the third city, even though the third city was closer to the first city than it was to the second.  Note that there was relatively clear terrain between cities 1 and 3.

Essentially, I ended up cutting across terrain most of the time between a suitable point from the road between 1 and 2, to the road between 2-3, to shave about 8 squares from my trip between those two cities.

I then tried putting an outpost directly between the first and third city, with the intention of having a road appear between them, but instead the road from the outpost hooked into the road between the second and third city.

Soooo, if I were to make a suggestion, I would suggest that the distance between cities be given a stronger 'weighting' when determining paths.  Also, more options to build our roads manually when the algorithm does go wrong would be nice.  Each race should have a road building unit readily available, and I don't think that a 'roadbuilding' perk is the best way to go.

Now, a trait that increases movement on roads through friendly territory (instead of roadbuilding) might be a suitable replacement for this, or a spell/perk that allows a hero to create roads at a distance.  Any such ability would need to be playtested and balanced, of course.

I (and others) have suggested just building roads manually several times in other threads, but as we are now 'on a deadline', this would probably take too much time to implement, even assuming you wanted to go this route.  So giving scouts or some other generic unit roadbuilding ability, to offset algorithm weirdness would be the easiest way to go between now and release time.

This ability could also be accomplished with a unit perk (chosen instead of some combat ability) during unit design.  This perk would become available upon earning some tech, such as Trade.

I couldn't figure out what the OP was specifically calling out either.  My #1 complaint about roads was that they would route through wildlands.  I see that .85 is supposed to fix this, which is great news.  My #2 was that roads between my towns, or between my towns and outposts, would occasionally go through the AI's towns.  I haven't seen that in a while, but I'm not sure it's fixed.  I've also seen odd or inefficient routes, but I don't seem to be as upset about them as some of the other folks posting here.

This.

I have to agree both side: First of all I agree with the Devs, that automatic road building is a very good idea. The game doesn't need that much micro-management that you build every road yourself. The focus of the game is somewhere else. There are other games allready where the exact location to build your cities and roads are key decitions. We don't really need that for LH.

On the other hand an algorithym on random maps allways will find some situations where it can't find a satisfying solution. tjashen allready gave a very good example, I had many situation like that with mountains too. Another problem is that the algorithym seem to dislike building bridges of a river in many situations, instead building a long route around it. And a third problem is, when the zone of influence of a KI city expandes it can happen, that the road the algorithym did build for you suddenly is in foreign territory. There is no way any algorithym can handle situations like that. (Or you would have to refresh and rebuild your roards every few turns, which would probably cause enormous CPU or memory usuage.)

I think best would be to keep the algorithym as it is (it's well enough I think) and give the player the opportunity to add a few additional titles of road. Giving all factions the opportunity to create road building units is one possibility, the other possibility is to add a spell that spaws a road on a certain title. Road building heroes aren't a really good idea, I agree on that.

How difficult would it be to implement an option to do either-or? Have it a toggle, you turn it on, auto build roads. You turn it off, you have to manually place them. Give every nationality the ability to build their own roads.

This is a win/win for both sides. Personally, I like micromanagement, and a bit ocd, so those funky roads that are autogenerated are annoying. I wish there was a way to get rid of roads as well, that way I can build my own roads, and get rid of the crappy way the game auto generates them.

This could solve all.

Because now:

1. sometimes you dont get road to outposts at all, or for some reason you get two separate branches of roads which are not conected between.

2. Roads go through neighbour's (AI) towns instead of directly conecting my cities.

3. Roads go directly trough dragons caves or similar or wildlands.

4. Roads being built not in optimal distance.

5. If you are in between 2 AI factions and they sign economic treaty, you might get road which is crossing your lands and towns which i dont want. I think treaties between others should NOT affect MY OWN lands, because they ussualy leading armies on those roads against me later and its not fair i think.

Perhaps some of the road-related issues surround pathfinding? Overall pathfinding has improved greatly from FE, but there are times when the paths it takes are just strange. Some more work on pathfinding may result in better roads.

I really enjoy the automatic road building. It takes away from the micromanagement. That said, it would be really useful to manually create my own roads (which I haven't tried to do yet). Seems like there could be some compromise to allow it in other races.

How about giving the Mancer races a bonus when traveling on roads and then unlocking it for other races?

I agree with this ... the automatic road building is great as far as it goes, but we need the ability to manually place additional roads.

One suggestion I didn't see here that might work would be to add the option in a city and outpost to "build road to" ... say you have three cities, ABC, 123, and XYZ.  You also have two outposts - Outpost A and Outpost B.  Let's say the autoroads connected ABC to 123, and 123 to XYZ.  Outpost A connects to ABC, and Outpost B connects to XYZ.  But none of them connect to each other.

So, we click on city ABC, and select "build road to" - it then pops up a list of cities: 123, XYZ.  You click XYZ.  It will give you a gildar cost and turn cost, and add it to the build que to be built like any other improvement.

For the outposts, you click on Outpost A, and click build road to, and it gives you city options as above, and goes into the city build que of the city it's attached to, just like other Outpost improvements. 

It would also be nice to have the option to select a manual location ... so you can build a road from an outpost or city to a specific point somewhere else.

And if they implement that ... it would be GREAT to add a road upgrade feature.  Let's say you built a road between ABC and 123.  Now, you can go in and select "Upgrade Road to" ... then up would pop a list of cities with existing roads ... then you can upgrade the road (say pave it) at the cost of additional gildar, materials, and time, to increase the movement speed on that road section.  There could be different levels ... say dirt, cobblestones, magical surface, which would each be more expensive in terms of gildar, materials, and time.  There could even be a special tech that has to be researched for each upgrade.

Or, my other suggestion was that whatever critter you have that can build roads can use the "build road to" button, where the start point is their current location and the end point is wherever you click.

Or, add a "build road" toggle button, that works like Explore ... where you turn it on, and wherever you move the person you build a road.

And an extension of that ... Auto roads ... where you turn it on and the critter wanders around like an explorer, only its goal is to build roads between any two existing points in the kingdom ... it tries to connect all cities to each other, all outposts to each cities, and makes sure that all roads interconnect, instead of having one road from point a to point b and one that goes from point c to point d, but none that connect the two roads.

we also need to be able to capture pioneers instead of making us kill them all. how about an option to either convert the pioneer or if we kill them them we get a random from 1-30 bonus to population in our closest city.

Would the engineers be used up for an outpost?  If not, there would have to production cost and/or build time for the outposts.  Other than that, I really like the idea and hope that it is implemented!

Speaking of build time, how about casting Arcane Monolith produces a Monolith that builds in a few turns, rather than appearing fully-functional instantly?