ong ago, Rome settled on straight streets and rectangular blocks as the most efficient urban layout, and you are encouraged to plan your city accordingly.

Roads and paths are essential to the smooth running of your city. Your citizens refuse to walk on anything else (although immigrants are less fussy).

New roads begin as dirt paths, just like the one crossing your province at the beginning of the assignment. As the desirability of the area around the path grows, your citizens will automatically widen and pave these paths into true roads .

You can further enhance a road by building plaza on top of it. Although this can be quite expensive, it is extremely sought after by your citizens; the desirability of an area rises significantly where you build plazas on top of roads.

Almost every structure you can build must connect to a road, which means having at least one piece of road adjacent to at least one piece of the building. Buildings without road access can neither recruit nor send out employees (wells, fountains, aqueducts, reservoirs and forts are the only exception to this rule, and do not need road access to receive their allocation of labor).

All people who deliver their services as they walk along roads can only deliver these services to buildings very close to the road. This applies to a wide variety of people, including prefects, engineers, market traders, bathers and entertainers. Structures placed too far from a road will not receive the benefits of other buildings' workers as they walk by.

Long, straight roads are better for traffic flow than are short ones with many intersections. Every time citizens reach an intersection, they must choose which direction to go in. This means that you have far more control over where people will walk when there are fewer intersections on your roads . If a citizen finds his path blocked, he turns around and goes back the way he came.