Do I need roads?

[Vuvo]

Do I need roads to connect resources with my cities or do I just need to connect the cities?

[Twelvefield]

Just connect the cities. You need population (citizens) to work your tiles, though. For example, you have a city with a pop of 3. You have three farm tiles and an undeveloped Marble quarry within your city boundary. If you do 100% food production, your citizens will be on the farms and will ignore the quarry. To get the marble, you need a) to have a worker unit build the quarry and then b) to have the resource, you need a citizen on the quarry, so you move one of your city population from the farms to the marble.

To get marble for trade or for throughout your empire, you connect Marblehead City to your capitol Flintstone Town and beyond via roads or a water connection, depending on technology.

Roads can be expensive, so you don't end up often spamming them in the early game like you did in earlier Civ games.

[daniel]

Well, you should, but it's not required. Roads transfer gold and speed up movements between cities, and railroads also do that but transfer production as well. I would generally recommend building them, as it makes it easier to defend as you could quickly move in a defensive army, but it also makes it a pain if you're being invaded because they can take advantage of your roads to get to another city faster.

[NottedOkenStaf]

In Civ II, I used to build a road on every space around a city. For one thing, it increased the trade value of lots of spaces. So far in Civ V, I've built one road and it bankrupted my empire. Now I play on an archipelago map and just wait for harbors to connect my cities. And I think I'm the richer for it.

[Crim]

No, You do NOT need roads connecting to your resources for your city to work the resource

You merely need a worker to construct the improvement on it

Roads have 2 primary purposes
-Improving movement
-Connecting Cities to the Capital which provides a moderate income per turn

Without any bonuses, Roads cost 1 gold per turn to maintain
-This is easily offset by using the minimal required amount of road to connect your city to the capital which will likely actually produce a nice income.
-Tho this is based on a slightly complicated formula based off the population of each city (higher population is more money).
-This means that connecting small distant cities to the capital, might not be economically viable

[Dr. Pupper]

Generally, building roads is a good idea only if the cities are a high enough population and close enough together so that the maintainence cost is offset by the city-conection income. I always build roads, but I usually wait until my cities are about size 10.