Why not do like the Roman Empire and let any military unit to build a road?

Of course the building speed will have to depend on the number of troops, but that would completly remove the need for a specialized "worker" unit.

double post ...soz

I'm ok with it either way, however if you go ahead and implement a "builder" I'd like to see it to be able to do alot more then just build a road.  That is one of the more annoying things about some games that after you build a road over your entire map, you have to kill the builder or just have him idle.  Seige ability helps that some, but if there is a stack limit, rarely is the builder used in combat still.  Let him build/improve mines, help on quests with caves possibly (collapse cave, kill bad guy), etc....

If improvements will be allowed outside of the city it would make sense to have roads be build-able to them as well, not just from city to city.

To start building a road, click on the city where you'd like to start the road, then you draw in tile by tile where you want the road to be. Each tile has a certain cost in materials and time which could be accumulative the longer you make the road. Workers will rush out from the town to make the road and when finished will go back to the town.

OR...

Seeing as how things like Mines and Farms will be build-able, why not make a unit to build things like that and roads? It's not a bad thing and can also bring another factor to strategy. By killing a factions construction units you limit their growth. *shrugs* Just a thought.

A player should be allowed to guide where the road will go.  I don't think it needs to be very granular, just a set of 'waypoints' and a start and end location.  I don't have an opinion on builders but road construction should be stopped if an enemy unit is on any part of the built road.

Well I still think you should have more than one point of road. First type of road could simply be a trail, built automatically by trade caravans between cities. It might have a minor speed boost but would primarily be for commerce.

Second type could be a real flagstone road. Requires stone quarry and soldiers with paving tools. Then you spend money and get a real speed improvement road. The roads would build faster and cheaper if they followed trails, but could be built anywhere you want them to for the right price. Roads not on trails would require a small upkeep fee to keep it good condition since normal trade taxes aren't paying for them.

I like the idea in CIV IV where you have workers who are able to build many things - not just roads: forts, farms, mines, irrigation, other improvements.  Some Mods to CIV IV, in particular Fall From Heaven and some mod mods to FFH did took the concept further - similiar to what is suggested in some of the posts above - for example, giving workers stats and attributes so they could have hit points and also make them promotable so you could choose promotions to add to their stats (+10% work rate) for example.  This avoided the problem of just having workers build roads so that you have to disband or idle them once the map is full of roads.  It also made the worker unit more interesting because you became invested because they were promotable. 

I could see not wanting to necessarily have a seperate worker unit for Elemental War of Magic, but maybe a military unit (along the lines of the Army Corp. of Engineers) or a recruitable caravan who has the ability to construct forts or establish trade routes AND build roads and is also promotable might be interesting.   

Im not certain if the economic system in Elemental is going to be advanced enough (i would love to be wrong) to have developing roads. I would love to see roads grow based on the amount of trade or activity is spent on them and your upkeep/efficiency rises accordingly. So it starts as said above as little trails then grows to better roads as the need arises.

Perhaps trails should develop naturally as your citizens engage in trade between your settlements and then you can upgrade them through research and magic.  If you need a road that goes someplace unusual a spell that magically carves a dirt path out of the ground sounds good to me (Or makes a rainbow highway, that would be cool too)

Click and drag?

I'd rather not have to allocate a thimbleful of roadwork every single turn.  I want to devote my attention to road-building on a per-project basis, e.g., "all right, I need a road linking my mountain mines with my primary city," and then I lay out that road.

The combination of "we want to avoid workers" and "we want more depth than roads just appearing" suggests to me that the problem with the worker system is the micromanagement.  Road-building workers are to Civilization what peons are to RTS games, and people do tend to prefer post-peon resource management (Total Annihilation, Company of Heroes, Dawn of War, etc.).  That and naval transports, and again, autotransportation is popular (units turning into boats in Rise of Nations instead of requiring separate transport boats).

I don't care for the idea -- endorsed by several posters -- of building roads with military units.  It doesn't solve the micromanagement problem, and it creates a conflict between keeping military units in strategically good spots (or campaigning with them) and building roads.  The Total War series had watchtowers built by military units for at least one game, but doing this was a weird little chore, and by ETW they had abandoned it in favor of automatically revealing the map within and aroundyour territory.

So how to automate?  I don't think automated workers like you see in Civ are the right answer, since they still exist at the unit level and periodically demand attention.  Instead, I propose a system where the player designates a road path (possibly with a waypoint system, as Malex1 suggests) and then cities automatically send out work parties along existing roads to build it.  The work parties can get to the end of the existing road and start work in a single turn, but any enemy presence along the road back to the town will cause the work party to disperse (as Malex1 also suggests).  Work parties are tiny figures and obviously not controllable units.  They do not run the risk of being captured and cannot be manipulated directly -- although it IS possible to issue a stop roadwork order to a particular town, or all towns, if there are more pressing demands for the resources involved.  (Presumably, they take a cut of the city's production.)

However, that's the more involved approach.  I'm not sure how much of the game is supposed to be road-building.  I think I'd rather be managing resources, capturing nodes, training and equipping units, building and organizing cities, researching and casting spells, waging war, etc.  KellenDunk's suggestion of roads emerging organically from your trade network is the best in the thread so far.  It's more radical, but it's elegant.  Players wishing to devote resources to a mobility advantage will presumably still have options such as teleport spells, flying creatures, magic gates, and so on.

- no build worker.

- Build road tile by tile and then the worker form nearest city automatically come out to build it.

- What about build road to pass some resource, place , natural building( Shrine,altar,Haunted house) and you can take some effect form them like Sid's Railroad.

Since we are going to be able to build buildings outside of cities, I have two ideas:

1. You can build inns outside of cities.  Caravans between cities will use the inns as waypoints and create roads automatically.  There should also be local caravans that create roads between mines etc. and the closest city.

2. Make roads an out-of-city building.  This way, it goes into the building queue, so there is little micromanagement, and the construction speed depends on the city's productivity.

EDIT: Seems I got ninjaed.