Roads cost money?

[Charlemagne]

There's one "innovative" concept in Civ 5 which I think was a bad idea: Roads cost you a lot of money instead of giving you money, as it should be since they encourage trade. Or at least being neutral as in Civ 4. The effect is that you have to abstain from building any roads until your economy is really strong (usually around the renaissance) which is a bit ridiculous. And even when your economy seems strong, building a road network can easily break it. The lack of roads can really be a problem if your kingdom has a lot of rough terrain.

I imagine that they did it to curb road spamming by the AI, but they should at least be cheaper, allowing you to build a few early in the game.

[Matthew]

They do give money, which is dependent upon the size of the cities being connected. I don't recall the exact formula, but a general guideline is one tile per population minus one. So a city four tiles a way would need three population to break even (any more and you gain gold). Seven tiles away and need six population, etc.

Unless you are connecting a bunch of crap cities or spamming roads across the map, it should be easy to always maintain a net-positive on maintenance.

Also no reason to wait until Renaissance. You are probably losing gold in that situation by not having the gold bonus from city connections. While building roads it can be decieving to see the GPT tank, but once the connection finishes you should be getting more gold than you previously were.

[eXistenZ]

^^

You're probably losing money because you dont have roads and miss out on trade, rather than saving money on road upkeep. Unless offcours you build your cities 10 tiles apart

Not to say that roads are essential if you wanna quikcly move units around in case there is an invasion.

In Civ IV, you needed a road to connect resources to your capital. then again ,roads didn cost anything so you spammed them on every tile :p

[Charlemagne]

I wasn't aware of this. When you say "X tiles away" you mean from the other nearest city, or from the capital? And who needs to have a number of citizens, the capital, one of the cities, both combined?

[Matthew]

(city population * 1.1) + (capital population * .15) - 1

Exact formula for each connection.

For a comprehensive thread on it, check here:
http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=438745

For what I mentioned above, just the number of roads needed to connect to the route--so nearest city that already has a connection.

Capital size has influence, as can be seen by the formula.

Generally though, like I said, you should always be getting a net-positive amount so you really don't need to go into this much detail. Basically if you build them right away there may be a small window where you are paying more maintenance than gold, but after like turn 70, the size of the capital alone will cover all connections

Another side-note: Maintenance rules are if it is in your borders, you pay for it. If it is outside of your borders, whoever built them pays for it. So if you capture a city you pay for the road tiles inside your new borders, but anything outside of that you don't unless you were the original builder.

[Matthew]

Also, railroads give a 25% bonus to production in that city if it has a connection. No fancy formula, just 25% to hammers. Harbor connections automatically get the railroad bonus after the tech is researched, since you can't really build railroads across the ocean :)

[Finnway]

Also: a Commerce social policy can grant "--33% maintenance cost of roads and railroads," which can further increase the gold earned if you have a large empire.

[Typo]

Does building a railroad cost you the gold benefits roads give you?

[Charlemagne]

Thanks. I am now (judiciously) building roads again.

[GhostyGG]

I don't think so, but I'm a huge n00b at the game. I almost never build railroads because they cost so much to maintain.

[Twelvefield]

If you don't have money, then railroads won't help your bottom line. RR's do other things to help, though. I'd say it's better to have RR's than not, but only if you can afford them. I don't always build them either, but usually if I can't build RR's, I'm not gonna win.

[eXistenZ]

the production boost from RR is in my opinion too substantial to ignore. But if you place your cities to far apart, it can be a moneydrain yes.

Like for example, in a current mp game the huns (also human)have settled a city far away from their start position (cause it had great luxuries, excellent location). But the road to it will cost him quite a bit

[thedUWUmslayer]

Ok back up. All of these comments are good, good advice and what not, but no one has pointed out the elephant in the room. Of course roads cost money to maintain, if you dont maintain them, theyll just fall apart, bridges being washed away by rivers, potholes, and all that. And of course youre just paying upkeep on the roads if they dont go anywhere, you cant trade with someone who isnt there, the road has to actually connect to something before you get money from it.

[Charlemagne]

Seeing all this it seems sound to make tightly knit kingdoms with cities 3 or 4 hexes apart, instead of trying to take advantage of the new (in civ 5) 3-hex range of cities. Might as well since cities, even huge, rarely seem to take advantage of their whole expanse, after a point they tend to assign population to specialists instead (when you're letting the AI manage that as I do).

[eXistenZ]

Originally posted by Charlemagne:

Seeing all this it seems sound to make tightly knit kingdoms with cities 3 or 4 hexes apart, instead of trying to take advantage of the new (in civ 5) 3-hex range of cities. Might as well since cities, even huge, rarely seem to take advantage of their whole expanse, after a point they tend to assign population to specialists instead (when you're letting the AI manage that as I do).

3 hexes apart might seem a bit too few, cause that will cause massive overlap (and looks quite ugly to me). Its not necessary to work all the tiles. And your border expansion will even before halfway go beyond 3 tiles.

Dont also forget that there is a 1unit/tile rule. You will need a place to stall your military units, especially lategame you'll need adequate space. Even if you dont use them they will act as a deterrent towards the AI

@pandoradog22: roads didnt cost upkeep in Civ IV, so its not that obvious :p

[BlitzMartinDK]

Originally posted by eXistenZ:

the production boost from RR is in my opinion too substantial to ignore. But if you place your cities to far apart, it can be a moneydrain yes.

Like for example, in a current mp game the huns (also human)have settled a city far away from their start position (cause it had great luxuries, excellent location). But the road to it will cost him quite a bit

In my opinion, the gratly increased internal movement for RR is really important.
Also, in that mp-game, the huns would be better off building another coastal city close to the "great luxuries"-city, and make a road to the coast-city, with the harbor connecting to the capitol.
It seems your capitol needs either a harbor, or a road-connection to a harbor, for overseas "road" to work, though?