I tried placing my buildings close to each other since villagers can always traverse through a building’s empty areas (and can phase through buildings when they have to) & i got to a stage 4 town in like 7 hours on the highest difficulty on great plains map. Your villagers spend so much time traveling for shelter, food, stocking, etc that you can manage much better without artificially increasing travel distance just because you wanted to put a road in. Besides it looks dumb to see all your villagers converging on a road just to start jogging. And since they usually have to break from a straight line to access the road it’s probably only saving pennies worth of travel time.
I did use a road for a few coal mines a good distance from my settlement but otherwise saw no need for them at all.
Roads cost desirability and small plazas counter that by being placed ‘under’ them. Its better to just use small plazas and no roads around houses for cheap and efficient desirability improvement (not for movement)
Cobblestone is good for speeding up for long distance travels in cardinal directions.
One thing that OP didn’t realized is that on dirty and cobbled roads your villagers walk faster. I missed the count of how many times on beginning of settlement a road saved my settlers from predators.
Although the game isn’t Timberborn, there are many aspects from that game I’d like to see here. Like builders and haulers buildings for them to be while they are idle. Or better yet, they can be a better help when it comes to transferring goods from buildings when idle.
