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It puzzles me that having an existing pre built road does not reduce the cost of building sealed roads. I can understand rail because incline/decline must be fairly level.

I'm pretty sure it does ?

(Though it does it for rail too for IPs, even more so, to the point where the dirt road is more than free on hard terrain.)

"5.2.2.5. road ConstruCtIon Costs
The AP Costs for constructing a Road is calculated with the Road Construction Movement Type. Dirt Road construction costs 20 IP per 10AP. Sealed Road construction costs 50 IP per 10AP. Constructing a Sealed Road over a Dirt Road gives you a -40% reduction on costs."

The original cost is 4800 IP/Hex.

I still feel the cost should be reduced as you discover certain technologies. We use to do it with pick axes, then dynamite, and now boring machines and heavy equipment.

ORIGINAL: zgrssd

"5.2.2.5. road ConstruCtIon Costs
The AP Costs for constructing a Road is calculated with the Road Construction Movement Type. Dirt Road construction costs 20 IP per 10AP. Sealed Road construction costs 50 IP per 10AP. Constructing a Sealed Road over a Dirt Road gives you a -40% reduction on costs."

The original cost is 4800 IP/Hex.

Good find - I missed seeing this in the manual.

My sense is however that it still seems excessively high cost when most of the excavation work is done for the dirt road already.

ORIGINAL: BlueTemplar

I'm pretty sure it does ?

(Though it does it for rail too for IPs, even more so, to the point where the dirt road is more than free on hard terrain.)

I was thinking rail would have to blast tunnels and build more bridges to solve elevation problems.

ORIGINAL: Mercutio

I still feel the cost should be reduced as you discover certain technologies. We use to do it with pick axes, then dynamite, and now boring machines and heavy equipment.

What part of the metal and IP cost are Pick Axes, Dynamtie, tunnel supports, boring machines and bridge (building)?
Hint: Basically everything beyond the basic price

It is hard to understate the expense of a tunnel. Even in our day and age, bridges and tunnels are herculean tasks of engineering.

ORIGINAL: arvcran2

ORIGINAL: BlueTemplar

I'm pretty sure it does ?

(Though it does it for rail too for IPs, even more so, to the point where the dirt road is more than free on hard terrain.)

I was thinking rail would have to blast tunnels and build more bridges to solve elevation problems.

Railways on a flat terrain as the 2nd most efficient form of transport. (The only thing that can beat it is shipping).
However in turn it absolutely can not deal with elevation changes. Curves are not exactly ideal, but they can deal with it. With a train, the only way is straight - and thus expensive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbUsKWbOqUU

I found this little thing on the cost of tunnels:
https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/so ... neling.pdf
It puts the cost in the 20-35 Million € per Kilometer.

I found figures ouf ~1 Million € per Kilometer of road.
So yeah, liteally 20-35 times the cost. The price increase is realistic.

I think it's better not to question how a city-state can build a 1000+ km highway/railway in a single planet-season, while we're at it. [:D]

Yeah, it doesn't make sense for "pre-built" dirt roads to give an extra bonus to sealed roads when the construction is instant.

ORIGINAL: Pratapon51

I think it's better not to question how a city-state can build a 1000+ km highway/railway in a single planet-season, while we're at it. [:D]

One seasons equates to about 2 earth months in time.
Just in case the scale maters.

I think it's better not to question how a city-state can build a 1000+ km highway/railway in a single planet-season, while we're at it. [:D]

Right... this might be my only quibble with the road building system.
Perhaps there should be a road-crew requirement or something like that -> 100 spare workers needed from a zone per hex of road/rail building.
Or, maybe a player could hire/fire cache of road builders that are on-call (and tracked in the SHQ inventory like recruits and colonists).

-Mark R.

Industrial Points are what approximates this... but yeah, it's weird that they can be stored.

If it helps, imagine this turns construction is telling the universe what your IP did over the last couple turns.

They were produced over the past two months and spent over the past two months on... this road.

Although yes, it is a little odd to think about your IP storage tanks somewhere filling up and draining.

Yeah, I get that, but it does mess with intelligence and planning to discover the enemy who had no logistics for a thousand miles around suddenly has a nice paved road. That should be a rather difficult surprise advantage to gain.

Another way to curtail sudden-road-syndrome might be to simply limit road building to hexes within a certain distance of a hex with logistic points. That could be a simple way to better model the situation.

-Mark R.

That would be quite annoying though.
Oh, I know, maybe the IP cost should increase with either each new road/rail hex on that specific road/rail, or anywhere during the round.
(Kind of still annoying though, but not too dissimilar to worker recruiting micromanagement. Could also have dedicated stratagems helping with that !)

Another indirect way to avoid this would be to be able to find out what item stocks the enemy has via recon (spying).

I think it may be more realistic if the difficult terrain increase for railroads was as it is now for IP, but reduced for metal. Over mountains, marsh and so on, you would need extra metal for more track curves, bridges, tunnel reinforcement, etc., but the increase here would be nowhere near as much as for the sheer amount of labor and associated industrial products (digging equipment, explosives, bulldozers/graders etc.)

I believe that the overall cost of rail in difficult terrain had already been severely reduced ?

(If you make it too cheap, then this lessens the usefulness of airbridges...)

ORIGINAL: mroyer

Yeah, I get that, but it does mess with intelligence and planning to discover the enemy who had no logistics for a thousand miles around suddenly has a nice paved road. That should be a rather difficult surprise advantage to gain.

Another way to curtail sudden-road-syndrome might be to simply limit road building to hexes within a certain distance of a hex with logistic points. That could be a simple way to better model the situation.

-Mark R.

It takes at least another turn for Logistics to actually flow over this road. So you still get reaction time.
Plus the real limitation is the trucks and trains anyway.

However a lot of our slow roadbuilding is due to permits and socio-economic impact studies. All thingas a Shadow Empire could ignore. In reality we can do Kilometers per day.
Honestly, waiting the for concrete to harden can take 1 month, easily the longest part of the building process. And rain can cause the biggest delays (as it softens the ground).

There could be one option to limit road building - by looking at what operational supply would be from the existing road.
However that causes a question between useability and fairness. And I get the feeling usability should win out.