1.) The priority of road-building tasks (i.e. the game’s internal priority) seems to set to the lowest, i.e. builders won’t work on roads unless there is no other type of construction available. IMHO the opposite should be true, roads are a top priority plus building them doesn’t take up as much time as other projects and I’d rather get them out of the way.
2.) Setting “priority” on road-building upgrades is a PITA, the info card just says “Upgrading” and unlike other contruction tasks there is no button you can click to set it as a priority task. Instead you have to select each little rope square, which are hard to click on accurately especially in built-up or heavily forested areas where other objects get selected instead. In addition, there are often multiple of these rope squares per road section.
My experience matches both of yours, sort of. The basic roads will be built Immediately, regardless of how important anything else is. I’ve learned not to lay out any roads at first, or they will be built before shelters, firewood cutters, hunter’s shacks, or anything else!
Upgrading to ‘cobbled’ roads, on the other hand, takes forever: in numerous instances, a road marked for upgrading sits there for 2 or more years without anything being done, even when there is plenty of stone and workers available.
So, “Road priorities” seem to switch completely between basic road building and Upgrading to cobbled roads.
Have you tried increasing the number of builders to 20 or 30 while you are building lots of things? Roads won’t ever get done if you keep the number of builders at 3 or 4.
The game should probably give the player a hint when it senses that the builders are overloaded.
Even at the beginning of the game they’ll prioritise roads over most other stuff. What would be nice would be a way to build roads and then disable them from being built so they’re in place, but your workers won’t touch them until you want them to. Yes, you can disable them atm, but that means clicking on every single piece of road you put down which is tedious to say the least. An option to select roads for disabling en mass would be nice. Similar to the Clear option when you choose a section of road to get rid of, highlight a section and then disable it from being built.
