Roads and Farming

[Juan_de_Marco]

I have another question, regarding the building of Roads and Farm improvements.

They take really short, and they cost really little. While the impact of both facilities made a vast difference in warfare, and economic power...
I see that Quinn Inuit has made a post somewhat related to this: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=191210
because the type of society determines for a large part what army it fields, and the type of society is built upon economics. The later Parthian empire was feudal in the way that the Persian empire was feudal (King of Kings and so on), but that too was drawing on more than a thousand year of farming economics.


But this idea is slightly different: the cost of improving a farm. In medieval times, when most of Europe was starting to be exploited economically, it usually took a generation to cut down the forest in an area, and make the soil suitable for some basic farming. the Manses or domains were tax exempt on average for 10 years (give or take based on the environmental circumstances. marshes took longer to generate profit, so the farmer was offered longer tax exemption).
source is this book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Europ.../dp/0140154094
Now this is not the middle ages, but if I recall correctly it took the Romans also a generation before they made the province in modernday Southeast France call "Provence" populated with veterans on farms; after defeating Gallic tribes around 150bC it took until 118bC before they founded Narbonne. and that is not even adressing the question when these provinces started to contribute significantly to the armies.
And, of course, building a farm improvement - and with it the society that supports your lifestyle or culture - is expensive. much more expensive than building an amphitheatre in a city. because it requires so much more manhours.

Roads seems on the surface to be the same story, but I don't know enough about it to say something with certainty. It seems very unlikely that a road would be built within a year or two. Of course if you want to win the game you'll probably want to build them as fast as possible so you can transport troops faster from your core-area to that frontier, but shouldn't the interesting thing in the game be the trade-off you have to make between transporting troops and convincing the peasantry to adopt your way of life? I would suggest also a longer buildtime for roads.

anyway, my 2 cents.

[Carados]

I'm in favour of making it a difficult choice for players in how they develop a city. Quinn has some plans with the farms but I'm not so sure what the plan is about the roads.

[Quinn Inuit]

I don't think the roads should take longer to build. 1, 2, and 3 full years is a substantial amount of time. The Romans built the Appian Way in only a year or so.

Your points about the farms is well-taken. I think the problem here is that we're trying to represent two separate things with that tree: first, the clearing of the land, and second, the development of agribusiness. I think the latter can be safely represented with a relatively short build-time (especially because it is tied to settlement size, so some of the social changes that are prerequisites for the different farms have been happening in the background for many turns), but you're right that we haven't considered the form sufficiently. Therefore, does it seem reasonable to rebalance farm build times from
4
8
12
16
20

to

20
40
8
12
16

The time increase will be counterbalanced by a massive taxable income bonus from farms, making them much more strategically valuable than they are now (farming was pretty important back then, but isn't currently in-game).

The income bonus will be balanced (and then some) by increasing all upkeeps by a factor of at least 1.5. Probably two, because I'm lazy and want all ExRM players to suffer (including the AIs--I don't discriminate).

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

I also don't want full stack armies running around even as much as they do now, but causing suffering is important, too.