Roads in elemental (in light of some economic models)

If there are weather effects (and if there are I would prefer that it was simply raining, sunny, snowy worldwide rather than emulating weather patterns) then units travelling on dirt roads could get bogged down, while those on stone roads would not... just a thought.

I love the idea of different types of roads with significant costs associated with the best. At first, all roads should just be regular dirt paths. These could be upgraded to be wider, compacted better, etc. In the middle you could have cobblestone roads, and at the upper end you could have actual stone-paved roads. Stone-paved highways, while conferring very large bonuses to speed and possible defense, should be major undertakings. I like the idea of making roads a strategic aspect of the game. It would be very, very expensive to make all your roads the best that you can, so you'd have to choose the most important routes and focus on them. This would make the world and empires feel more organic and more real, and make the player think about which routes are the most important (instead of just paving over everything because you can).

That's all separate from magic, of course. Through magic you should be able to achieve more or less the same affects as through 'mundane' roads, and then some. But again, if you want to create the magical equivalent of a stone-paved highway, the cost shouldn't be trivial. You should also be able to improve your entire road network as a whole by a little but, but also to focus on specific routes.

Weather affecting roads would be neat! It also lets you weather-proof roads with magic. And, even though this isn't the main topic of the thread, I would love weather patterns vs. global weather). 

Upgraded roads have another interesting strategical aspect, like enemies could follow those roads, since they would always link key locations on the map. 

I do like the idea of roads as an important role on strategy. And that will depend on how resources are goin to be managed. If resources are goin to be global, without need of transportation, there's little to do with roads besides troop movement.

I like Denryu's idea of integrating weather into the road system and having different effects for different quality of roads.  Anyone who has traveled down a muddy two-track after a big rain knows that weather can have a big effect!  This weather could occur naturally or it could be magically induced and thus bogging up troop movements and trade at critical times.  It would be really fun to integrate all of these things.

you could upgrade roads in MoM, and all that did was help troop movement.   If there are caravans, then upgrading roads would be much more important.

I always hated upgrading my roads, because wandering deamons would touch a road somewhere in the middle of nowhere, then they'd shoot down my road, around like 3 well defended cities, straight to my so-so defended city that happened to be in a rich spot (like max pop 18+) and I couldn't afford to lose

I wonder how would it be tough. We know that channelers change the enviroment around them (green pastures the good guy and rock&lava the bad guy) and I wonder if it's just a cosmetic change or if it could affect weather too.

One way to counter the problem mentioned by Landisaurus would be this:  There could be a defence bonus for caravans and other units traveling on their own roads within their own kingdom (there are always people (farmers, common folk) traveling the roads (although not depicted as units) ready to lend a hand in a fight or at least tell other traveling band to be prepared for trouble down the road.  But there should ALSO be a built-in penalty in defence for an enemy being caught on your roads (folks have alearted the patrols, a good ambush could be planned, ect.).  A large army could overcome such a penalty and benefit from the quick travel but a small enemy band would be advised to stay off the roads and avoid being seen.  I suppose some units could act as spies and appear to be (at least to the general populance) part of your kingdom-in this case they would not incure any penalties.

As far as demons and the like following the roads-perhaps roads could also be blessed-thus negating any advantage for the undead.  I suppose with a really strong bless I road could even act like a barrier to some magical beings.

Weather patterns would be way cooler, but would be a "bear" to code (sorry!) and would just be a big pain for the engine to track what squares were getting rained on at agiven time, etc etc. If they could come up with an easy way to do this it would be cool, but I would not want a lot of programming resources set to accomplish this.

Worldwide weather, on the other hand would be pretty easy (I THINK). Weather condition for the world just flip a switch, dirt roads become mud roads, or whatever other terrain could be affected, same with any other weather condition. That's the only reason I went with global is it seems that would be relatively easy to implement and still add some fun.

Should the whole road system be something like the road system from Empire Total War?

Worldwide weather is indeed a lot easier then localized weather, especially if you want semi-realistic localized weather. That being storms appear and follow actual sane weather patterns, instead of just randomly appearing and disappearing. I don't expect that in the game.

TBH, it might be better to have no weather at all except what channelers conjure up. A random storm hindering an attack is somewhat less cool then a channeler conjuring a worldwide blizzard as a defensive spell to slow down invaders.

I don't think localized weather would be a problem... It wouldn't need to evolve realistically, but it shouldn't be too crazy on any given turn. For example, a random number shouldn't be rolled for every single tile - it should be generated as some sort of pattern, and that is actually not hard to do at all. There are plenty of very easy ways to generate patterns that could be used. Those could be easily adapted to account for things like terrain type and even season to generate static weather conditions for each turn. Taking into account season would be nice (and really not much harder - it's just a matter of different types of weather having a different probability for each season, it wouldn't really complicate the actual generation process) - it'd allow for seasonal considerations. If you march your huge army towards the enemy in the middle of winter you should expect delays and slower progress, but perhaps a less prepared enemy.

Edit: it's also not that hard to have randomly generated patterns randomly evolve, either. It would be hard to make it evolve like real weather patterns do, but easy enough to make weather patterns move and shift and not just be totally different every turn.

Yes, well....getting back to roads.  What WAS the road system like in Empire total war?

Also, should the road sections have a chance to naturally degrade over time?  Didn't the Civ series do something like that?