Quick Start · Part 2 · About 4 minutes
Your first roads
You have found a corridor worth serving. Now build it without overpaying — because the difference between a careless road and a considered one is several times its price, not a few percent.
Pick the grade first, and mind the gap
Five grades, and the prices are further apart than the names suggest:
| Grade | Cost per km | Speed | Tolled by default |
|---|---|---|---|
| Expressway | $8,000,000 | 140 km/h | Yes |
| Regional rapid | $3,000,000 | 80 km/h | Yes |
| National route | $1,500,000 | 60 km/h | No |
| Provincial | $600,000 | 40 km/h | No |
| Local track | $80,000 | 30 km/h | Cannot be tolled |
An expressway costs more than five times a national route per kilometre. Early on, with everything undeveloped, that is rarely worth it — a national route is the sensible default for a first inter-city road, and you can upgrade it later without rebuilding.
Speed is not decoration: it decides journey time, and journey time decides how much of the demand you actually capture.
Let the quote choose the lanes
Do not guess. The quote is a forecast, not just a price — alongside distance and cost it estimates average and peak saturation, speeds and travel time for the road you are about to build.
Read the saturation line before you confirm. A road that opens already congested was built with too few lanes; one that opens nearly empty was built with too many, and you will pay maintenance on the surplus for the rest of the game. Adjust lanes until the forecast looks reasonable, then commit.
Reshape the path — this is where the money is
The game offers up to three routing options and you can take one as-is. Do not. Terrain is the single largest multiplier in the quote: height differences along the route multiply construction cost by up to five times, and the multiplier is averaged over the whole road.
So dragging the route around a ridge does not just make the hard part cheaper — it lowers the multiplier applied to every kilometre.
- Drag an anchor
- Pulls the road away from expensive ground. Only the two neighbouring segments re-route.
- Click the line
- Inserts a new anchor where you need finer control.
- Drag an anchor onto its neighbour
- Deletes it.
Watch the cost as you drag. If it does not move, you were not paying for terrain there and the straight line was right.
What happens when you confirm
- A road drawn through an intermediate settlement is split into separate links at that settlement. Your list will show a group of segments rather than one road — that is correct, not a bug.
- Expressways and regional rapids arrive already tolled, at a recommended rate. You do not have to do anything, but you should know it is happening: pricing affects how much traffic uses the road at all.
- Water crossings are priced separately as a bridge or tunnel, and a single span over 55 km cannot be built. The confirm button stays disabled until you re-route.
The cost that never stops
Construction is the visible number. Maintenance is the one that decides whether you survive. Every road charges you every month, forever, whether it carries anyone or not — and it does not care that you built it for a good reason.
This is why one well-chosen road beats three hopeful ones, and why the grade table above matters more than it looks: an expressway is not only five times the build cost, it is a permanently larger monthly bill.
Next
Part 3 is your first railway — which does not work like a road, and costs a great deal more when you get it wrong.
For the full road toolset — upgrades, toll strategies, road groups and demolition — see Roads: grades, tolls and upgrades.