Construction rules - Building roads
For the Construction action on our Clan Workbook, I think we can use this for at least 3 different things:
Construct buildings
Clear farmland
Clear roads
We have a spreadsheet for the construction of buildings and a rule of 15 mandays per acre for the clearing of farmland. I don't think we have any rules for clearing a road - correct me if I'm wrong. If we don't, here is what I propose:
Clearing a dirt road is essentially the same as clearing farmland, therefore we can use the same math of 15 mandays per acre and apply it to the length and width of the road
1 acre = 43,560 square feet = 15 mandays
Using the same equation (let me know if you want to see my math), you could get 0.11 miles per manday per 5 feet of width of the road.
We could round this down to 0.1 miles per manday per 5 feet of width, assuming roads take a little bit more effort than farmland
With this, we could say 1 mile of road for a 5-foot wide road = 10 mandays, 1 mile of road for a 10-foot wide road = 20 mandays, and 1 mile of road for a 20-foot wide road = 40 mandays.
My assumption would be a 5-foot wide road is more like a "path" only meant for foot traffic and maybe horses. A 10-foot wide road would allow for wagons and such in one direction. A 20-foot wide road would be a main road allowing for large traffic in both directions.
I also think large roads, if connected to other main roads, could improve things like Traffic to the settlement.
I may try to build some roads at some point so would like to figure out how much time it would take.
I like this.
I think this is a bit generous. There's a lot more to building a road than clearing land. It would be more like preparing a building site. You've got to grade and level the roadbed, etc. I can't imagine one man building a 10 foot wide, mile long road through a wilderness area in 20 days, or even 20 men building a mile long road in a day. The 15 day metric for clearing farmland assumes that you've found an optimal lightly forested plot of land. A road needs to go from point A to point B, and the terrain won't be as convenient as a cherry-picked plot of land. You'll have to overcome more challenges. If you use the farmland example, then you should probably assume that an acre would be closer to 30 (heavily forested) days, not 15.
If you're re-building a road on top of an old roadbed, then your original calculations make more sense.
I guess I was assuming a few things:
A road is not always through a heavy wilderness area. There may be patches of wilderness and patches of grassland, etc.
The farmland is not always assuming optimal conditions. Considering most of the farmland is directly adjacent to a settlement, this seems unlikely.
Farmland (and calculations thereof) would also require some amount of grading/leveling.
A road is much more conducive to optimization where I could make small curves to avoid large clusters of trees or bad terrain. Farmland, on the other hand, requires you to clear every single tree in a massive plot.
Yes, probably different amount of time/effort if you want a road that looks something like this:
https://www.landesgeschichte.uni-goettingen.de/roads/viabundus/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Alte_Salzstrasse_Breitenfelde.jpeg
Versus some kind of trail that looks more like this:
https://qph.cf2.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-02221aa19b9604870e8a00381fc73797-lq
I like where you guys are headed on this and will defer to your final results. Can you produce a chart that would represent the final results?
I am just going to trust you guys will come up with something that works for our game.