Road building?!

[Bassmoewe]

The AI doesn't build roads. Is there anything I can do about it? Is there possibly a mod? Or which files would need to be edited? Is it hardcoded?

 

[DukeLeto42]

I don't know if the AI knows how to handle army stances. There is a way to set whether or not the AI will take army actions (military colonies and the like), but army stances and building budgets are something I can't help you with.

Despite definitely not knowing enough about the underlying limitations, I suspect not. Road-building requires a fairly holistic view of your nation, which AI struggles with. For example, let's take "building a road up to Germania as Rome." You as a player immediately see:

1. You have land up there without road access (the AI can recognize that)
2. What constitutes road access (the AI can say there aren't roads in the region, but it doesn't matter if you have a bit of road in Germania if it isn't connected into the broader network or doesn't reach certain parts of the region)
3. Moving troops up there is slow (the AI can process movement speeds there, but then you have to define how much the road can help, where troops would be coming from, and how slow is too slow)
4. That you need to move troops up and down from there for wars and handling rebellions (you need to define insufficiently stable territory and long-term expansion plans beyond "I have claims in region X")
5. That it's cheaper to build a road up there than field the extra army you'd need to dedicate to the north otherwise (the AI can budget based return on investment from a building, but asking it to forecast the utility of a structure for military strategy is another matter).

 

[olivenkranz]

AI does build roads, but it takes a long time. Also has to be comparatively rich.

 

[Bassmoewe]

this is something I've never seen before, and I have over 1500 hours of playtime. Does it have to do with me playing without invictus? Can I adjust the probability of construction or the costs for roads in the files?

*Correction! I haven't seen it since the update that introduced the Engineer Cohorts.*

 

[guiskj]

I wouldn't mind if Invictus were to add some predefined road routes and gave the AI some triggers that would auto build these roads.

 

[olivenkranz]

I wouldn't mind if Invictus were to add some predefined road routes and gave the AI some triggers that would auto build these roads.

The South Arabian mission tree gives you free roads across all of Arabia

 

[DukeLeto42]

I wouldn't mind if Invictus were to add some predefined road routes and gave the AI some triggers that would auto build these roads.

This one's fairly easy to do, in the grand scheme of things. A fairly simple decision gated by it being an AI, holding the relevant territories, and having X amount of gold.