How does one make road intersections?

[watchful]

#11273

Appears I cannot make roads intersect with other roads, at least not without some kind of building entrance or flag?

Is that what flags do? Serve as a kind of interconnection point?

But once there is a road on a position, I cannot make a flag unless I tear down the road first. How do folks deal with this? Do they put down flags first, then make roads and buildings?

(No, of course I did *not* read the manual. Can’t lose another corner of my man card.)

[rnlf]

#11274

Flags are essential to building roads, yes. Roads always start and end at a flag and you’ll have carriers and/or donkeys going back and forth between two adjacent flags.

There’s no other way to have intersections.

[watchful]

#11288

I guess what confused me is that roads take space away from the limited building spots. That felt really counterintuitive to me. Combined with buildings forced to face lower right with only one connection point, and it’s just really awkward. I guess other games spoiled me.

[fastwinstondoom]

#11289

Yeah, it’s kind of backwards in that you sort of have to place the building sites first and then work the roads back towards your existing road network.

[voxel]

#11290

Flag placement is really important. generally, an item that needs to travel from point A to B will be carried along the route that has the fewest number of flags. So one long road between two distant flags will be considered a shorter route by the pathfinding than an equal road with many flags along it. But of course the many-road flag has a higher carrying capacity as more goods can be moved along it simultaneously. Imho this network management is secretly what the settlers games are all about.