Network · Part 1 · About 9 minutes
Roads: grades, tolls and upgrades
Roads are the mode you shape most directly: you choose the grade, draw the path, set the price and widen it later. Each of those decisions has a cost that outlives the day you made it.
The one-minute explanation
Building a road is four decisions in sequence: grade, lanes, endpoints, then the path itself. The first two set speed, capacity and price per kilometre; the endpoints set what the road is for; the path decides what terrain you pay for.
Afterwards, two levers remain: the toll, which converts a corridor’s usefulness into revenue at the cost of some traffic, and the upgrade, which raises grade or lane count on the road you already own.
Building a road
Choose a grade and a lane count—grades with a single lane option skip that step—then click an origin and a destination settlement. You can also drag between two settlements on the map to jump straight to the quote.
Shaping the path
The game proposes up to three routing options at different distances, and you can take one as-is. But the preview is editable, which is where the real savings are:
- Drag an anchor to pull the road away from expensive terrain; only the two neighbouring segments re-route.
- Click the line (or empty map) to insert a new anchor.
- Drag an anchor onto its neighbour to delete it.
- Once you have edited the path, a Reset path button and an optional Smooth path toggle appear. Smoothing is off by default and is a cosmetic curve-fit, not a cheaper route.
Editing the path replaces the route-option picker: once it is your path, the alternatives are gone until you reset.
Reading the quote
The quote is a forecast, not just a price. Beside distance, terrain factor and lane multiplier, it estimates average and peak saturation, status, speeds and travel time for the road you are about to build—assuming traffic divides among the parallel roads that already exist. A quote that opens at high saturation is telling you the lane count is wrong before you have spent anything.
Water crossings add a bridge or tunnel choice, each priced separately. A single span longer than 55 km cannot be built at all, and blocks the confirm button until you re-route.
The road list
Roads sharing a name and physically connected collapse into one expandable group row with aggregated distance, cost, maintenance, revenue and net income, the worst saturation among segments and the slowest average speed. Same-name roads that are not connected stay separate—the grouping follows the network, not the label.
Beyond the obvious columns, three are worth watching:
- Cost is cumulative capital: the original build plus every upgrade since. It is not the asset’s current book value.
- Net cash income separates real money from accounting; a road can show a book loss while paying its own way in cash.
- Payback divides capital cost by monthly net cash flow—toll revenue minus maintenance minus renewal. Non-cash depreciation is excluded, but overhaul is cash and counts, so payback lengthens while a road sits inside a renewal window. It appears only on tolled roads, and shows nothing at all when net cash flow is zero or negative. That blank is the answer.
Pricing a road
Only expressways, regional rapid roads, national routes and provincial roads can be tolled; local tracks cannot. Expressways and regional rapids start tolled by default.
The toll editor shows a revenue curve for passengers and cargo, each with its peak marked and your current rate riding along it. Beside each rate sits a retained share—the fraction of traffic that would still pay at that price. Watch the two together: the point where retained share falls off a cliff is usually just past the revenue peak.
The rate slider is expressed as a multiple of the max-revenue rate, and the strategy dropdown offers five choices:
A fixed rate you set. It stays where you put it as the economy changes around it.
Snap once to that reference point, then stay fixed.
Track max-revenue or break-even permanently. The sliders lock, and the rate re-derives itself as costs, incomes and traffic move.
Two cautions. The retained-share preview is a single-link estimate—real demand also weighs your other roads, so a corridor with a good free alternative will lose more traffic than the preview suggests. And toll changes do not re-route traffic immediately; the effect appears at the next monthly tick.
On a road group, the toll button shows whether segments agree—and applying a change overwrites every segment in the group at once.
Upgrading
Upgrades go one way: to a higher grade, or to more lanes at the same grade. There is no downgrade and no lane reduction. A road already at the top grade with maximum lanes cannot be upgraded at all.
The price is not simply the difference between two build costs. It re-prices your existing path, terrain and crossings at the new grade, adds a share of the current road’s cost, then multiplies by a coefficient that rises with the grade you are leaving—upgrading a local track is proportionally much cheaper than reworking an expressway. Before confirming you see every affected figure old-versus-new: grade, lanes, speed limit, capacity, saturation, speeds and travel time.
The upgraded road keeps its identity—id, name, path, distance—but its recorded cost basis is replaced by the new replacement cost and its build date resets. This is why the list can show a large cumulative Cost while maintenance and depreciation follow a different, smaller number; the reasoning is in What your transport network costs.
Demolition
Demolition costs a percentage of build cost that rises with grade, and the confirmation states the amount. Only that cash cost leaves the fund; the remaining book value is written off without a second payment. Demolishing also rolls back the construction grant the road once gave its endpoints, so the settlements lose a little of what building it granted.
Practical habits
- Let the quote's saturation forecast pick the lane count. Widening later costs more than building right once.
- Edit the path before accepting it. Terrain factor is the largest multiplier in the quote, and one dragged anchor around a ridge can change the price substantially.
- Toll the corridor, not the segment. Group tolling exists because travellers experience the whole road; pricing one segment of five mostly moves traffic onto the other four.
- Prefer a follow mode for roads meant to pay for themselves. Break-even follow keeps a road solvent without revisiting it as costs drift upward with the economy.
- Read blank payback as a verdict. A tolled road with no payback figure is not covering its own maintenance.