Idea: Straight roads could be created using a spell (Essence, perhaps?  Emeril would be proud...).  Otherwise your minions are stuck digging it by hand, which probably means following the terrain.

I agree: on the map scale only landscape features would affect the straight line of a road, on the zoomed in scale everything from a boulder to muddy patch can divert a track. On the map scale a scematic representation may be of more use than an aestetically pleasing dirt river.

mountains, cliffs, dense growth, agressive localized wildlife, etc deters roads, while settlements, freshwater features, etc attract them.

To see track formation, you can look at places in suburban areas where footpaths or bike trails take square turns and have only grass or low growth on the inside of the corner (no curbs or fences to deter shortcuts). In due time enough people will cut the corner that a dirt track will form, often several progressively outward.

Or when a shortcut is possible through a small thicket, say from a schoolyard to an interesting pace such as a convenience store, several competing paths will evolve inside the thicket, skirting large trees and avoiding thorny bushes, diverging and merging.

It would be great if traffic would create the paths, as in Dwarf Fortress for example, but not truly neccesary. It does require each individual moving unit to calculate its optimal path, which is in DF a major drain on the system resources. But DF has collisions and blocking. Caravans/units, I feel, could be able to move fairly unimpeded by each other (maybe a small speed penalty for crowding) to avoid having to recalculate their optimal path each time they meet another unit on their path.

good point P^2.

though the meandering is pretty repeditive and unrealistic looking.   My theory is they plan to have it meander and they haven't gotten that entirely working just right.  But the point does stand that roads are not going to be perfectly straight.

I think one of the issues is that the curves seem to take place on a tile-by-tile basis, rather than in aggregate. Most curves should be long, gentle curves encompassing several tiles, with the occasional swerve (what they have now) thrown in. I think that's make a huge difference.

Also, even when the road is straight sometimes it should be offset from the center of the tile. If you look at the screenshot, all the straight segments are perfectly aligned.

Don't you just love discussing the road aesthetics?

I love this idea of a cloth map and making it 100% playable on that map.  That way if you have horrible system requirements you can still enjoy this game.

Well maybe some of the multiplayers gamemodes can be build around this. The benefit is that there will be always people 'testing' this mode during beta to find out if it keeps to be fun playing it this way.

Funny this is coming up now: playing GalCiv2 zoomed out and playing by icon is something I actually do quite a bit.  Every now and then I zoom in just to enjoy the eye candy, but i'll be honest: I'm probably looking at icons or detail screens at least 75% of the time.

Diablo2 is still a lot of fun, too.  Graphics enhance, but don't make, a good game.

I'm really glad Stardock is willing to push the envelop in this regard.  I have noticed that their UI design is excellent, and this too can make up for less glitz.  All that said, the graphic detail is still very well done, especially given the relatively small art staff.

I think the teaser from the Demigod team showed the developer changing the detail view distance.  GalCiv2 also has this feature.

Me like.

I concour. Brad et al should look @ this.