How to build paved roads in Chach as Baktria?

[alpharomeo]

The town has stone walls and is a Closely Allied Oligarchy. According to the help text, I should be able to build paved roads but the option does not show. Is there another requirement somewhere?

Also, after I build highways in Baktria city, the bridges disappear from the strategic map.

Thank you for any help.

[QuintusSertorius]

You can't, Chach is a pastoral settlement. Carriage roads are the highest level you can build roads to in pastoral regions.

Someone already highlighted the vanishing bridges issue, that's been fixed for 2.3a.

[alpharomeo]

Ok, thank you for the quick response, Sertorius. Looking forward to 2.3a.

[alpharomeo]

So I found out that Prophthasia and Asaak are also pastoral settlements with no paved roads option.

I guess there are historical reasons why one can't build them there, but I am playing a different version of history! In my game, there are economic and strategic needs to invest in fast roads there. Chach is the biggest cash cow after Baktria. Prophthasia links up the north-south axis parallel to the west front. Asaak is a salient into the enemy land (Parthia and Hayasdan). Royal treasury stands at 300k minai. Yet I can't build paved roads where I want?

[myarta]

The team tries to strike reasonable balances between what's feasible and what's not, to make historically interesting challenges. You do have almost 300 years which is enough, if you wanted to start a major project, to build out of scratch a city, import settlers, and pave the whole region. Unfortunately these conditions must be set at game start. There aren't a lot of coding options for supporting this, though: you can either make it so that pastoral regions can't make big roads across the whole map, or not. You might be able to code a toggle that kicks in later in the game if certain conditions are met, but it would still unlock them across all pastoral regions including some desert ones where it would never make sense.

I tend to like bringing out great infrastructure in a lightly ahistorical way if I have to really work for it as the push focus for a long time, like the Royal road that we have represented as buildings in certain places.

I guess you could make a building tree called 'infrastructure investments' and block it from desert provinces, make it expensive and long, and its tiers could possibly unlock exceptions (through upgrade line triggers, not building production triggers) to some of these limits. So you could pour a lot of money and time into Chach and eventually upgrade its roads.

Not sure if the team has any interest in that. If not it could possibly be submodded. There's a limited number of building slots and some have to be kept reserved for future factions.

[Dargaron]

On a related note, I recall comments made earlier in the development process about "constructible" wonders. The two templates I remember were for wonders that aren't on the field at game start, but were reasonable results of a particular faction becoming wealthy and powerfu, and a sort-of generic "Monument" chain that sucked up excess gold like Scrooge McDuck.

Are those still an option, or have they been dropped?

[alpharomeo]

Wow, myarta, thank you for the answer but it's above my head. I gather there are technical difficulties to model historical challenges.

Just throwing my 2 cents out there, but how about a price multiplier to make roads more expensive depending on its location? Troop recruitment has a discount feature, for example, conditioned on having the right temple. Each settlement has a "building" describing its geography and history (interesting reading, BTW, thank you for the educational entertainment), so one can condition the road cost to that region-specific building. One can also have a duration multiplier (similar to the Zeus temple reducing construction time), to represent obstacles in realizing such a project. There would be no need for new mechanism or trigger, yet you can still produce a reasonable historical model.

Ok, you are thinking more in terms of centuries of work. So another 2 cents How about having different levels of road sophistication I, II, III, etc (like the top tiered farms)? With the more accessible regions have short construction times and the less accessible and less developed regions having longer times. That way, the construction slot isn't busy for 50 turns for one project and one can build other stuff meanwhile.

[Jurand of Cracow]

On a related note, I recall comments made earlier in the development process about "constructible" wonders. The two templates I remember were for wonders that aren't on the field at game start, but were reasonable results of a particular faction becoming wealthy and powerfu, and a sort-of generic "Monument" chain that sucked up excess gold like Scrooge McDuck.

I'd be happy if this would come into the game.

a price multiplier to make roads more expensive depending on its location? Troop recruitment has a discount feature, for example, conditioned on having the right temple. Each settlement has a "building" describing its geography and history (interesting reading, BTW, thank you for the educational entertainment), so one can condition the road cost to that region-specific building. One can also have a duration multiplier (similar to the Zeus temple reducing construction time), to represent obstacles in realizing such a project. There would be no need for new mechanism or trigger, yet you can still produce a reasonable historical model.

I'd be happy of this as well, but I don't think the engine allows something like this?

Ok, you are thinking more in terms of centuries of work. So another 2 cents How about having different levels of road sophistication I, II, III, etc (like the top tiered farms)? With the more accessible regions have short construction times and the less accessible and less developed regions having longer times. That way, the construction slot isn't busy for 50 turns for one project and one can build other stuff meanwhile.

I don't think shortening the building time is a good idea.

[alpharomeo]

If anyone in the team is reading this, I'd like to propose another idea regarding constructing big structures.

In SS, you can recruit several units at the same time and they have different recruitment time depending on their level. Is it possible to do the same thing with buildings? That way, one can invest in a very long project and still build smaller buildings in parallel.

Edit: @Jurand, the idea of shortening building time is to enable the player to take turn building different structures. If one could build several things at the same time, it would not be necessary of course.

[QuintusSertorius]

Settlements only have one construction slot, that's hardcoded. By contrast, you can set the number of recruitment slots. The two aren't related, I'm afraid.

[alpharomeo]

I'm out of my field here but is it possible to use the "repair" function (since you can repair multiple buildings at the same time)? Could you trick the code into thinking it's repairing buildings to simulate parallel construction? In other words, the script keeps track of a percentage of the building to repair and call the repair function every turn.

[Nimor]

Should be possible to divide big projexts into chunks and use the building upgrades to symbolize the next steps7phases, so the player would be able to build some smaller buildings in between. But I don't think the team is very much inclined to dedicate limited building chains to such an inefficient use(as the hardcoded limits of the engine are concerned).

[Kull]

On a related note, I recall comments made earlier in the development process about "constructible" wonders. The two templates I remember were for wonders that aren't on the field at game start, but were reasonable results of a particular faction becoming wealthy and powerfu, and a sort-of generic "Monument" chain that sucked up excess gold like Scrooge McDuck.

Are those still an option, or have they been dropped?

The closest we have to this is opening the upper levels of certain existing building chains to allow for the construction of Wonder-type buildings that historically weren't present on the map at this time. For example, there's general consensus that we need to remove the Carthage Walls/Port wonder, but we would replace that with a conditional ability to construct a new Port Level (in Carthage only) which uses basically the same icons and descriptions. Not actively working this now, but it will *probably* be a feature on v2.4

The only caveat is we might have a more important use for the unused upper levels of the majority of the existing buildings. I'll leave it at that, but potentially we could do some VERY interesting things to provide much greater differentiation between factions of the same culture.