Roads III: Across the Wilds

The building of roads must be more dynamic.

Yes, a certain infrastructure must be in place for a road to start. But it is misguided (as I have tried previously) to require that same level of infrastructure for each intermediate hex. Roads will frequently be built across areas of wilderness. How do I capture this?

The road, after all, merely connects two locations. It is not itself a location. So while we might require an infrastructure index of, say, 50 to begin and end a road, it might pass through many areas where the infrastructure index was much lower, like 5 or 10.

A bridge (generalized river crossing) also should not be a static threshold, but should vary based on the size of the river (measured by drainage $d$). \[I_d = 100 \ln(d)\] Bigger rivers require a large infrastructure to be built to maintain their bridges.

Maintained roads are not the only option for travel. Cart trails or other paths can be available as well. So perhaps the "road system" should be primarily for heavy trade, and not necessarily for point to point movement of a player party.

I could also check if two locations can already be connected before placing a new road between them. This would reduce the total number of roads which need to be placed. However, just having a single connection is not enough. We can easily imagine a scenario in which a road between two distant cities is placed among the most optimal route at the time, but 100 years later, a more favorable route (perhaps through a large intermediate city) is possible. We can't expect our people to shrug because there's already a road there! So perhaps this can be tweaked.

That still doesn't improve things a lot. But - maybe they don't need to be "improved." A country with a road system like this could be a military or industrial power.

Limiting the number of roads by population of a city?

This might work. But I still need to tweak it to generate longer networks.