Civ V Road Planner

Plan Civilization V road networks on a hex map. Place cities, mountains and water, then compare three networks: the fewest road tiles, the fastest travel, and a balance of the two.

Use it

Open index.html in a browser. There is no build step and nothing to install.

• Pick a brush (City, Mountain, Water, Land, Road) and click or drag on the map. Keys 1–5 switch brushes.
• The Road brush forces a road onto a tile. Every plan includes forced roads, connects them, and counts them as road tiles.
• On touch screens, tap or drag sideways to paint; swiping up or down scrolls the page. When the map is wider than the screen, a Move brush appears for scrolling it sideways.
• Painting a tile with the brush it already has turns it back into land.
• Use the Shift arrows (or arrow keys) to move everything on the map one tile. Cities never fall off the edge.
• Pick a map size or enter a custom one, from 4 × 4 up to 50 × 50.
• Choose a road plan from the dropdown above the map. Balanced has a shortcut value you can step up or down.
• Pick a cell in the travel table to trace that route on the map.
• Your map is saved in your browser's local storage.

The three plans

Plan	What it does
Fewest roads	Minimum Steiner tree connecting every city. Exact (Dreyfus–Wagner) for up to 12 cities, approximate above that. Among equally small networks, road segments are re-laid to shorten trips.
Fastest travel	Every pair of cities gets its shortest land route, overlapping where possible, then unneeded tiles are pruned.
Balanced	Starts from Fewest roads and greedily adds shortcuts. A shortcut is built only if it saves enough total travel per new tile (set by the slider) and cuts at least one trip by 2 or more tiles.

Rules

• Roads can use any land tile. Mountains and water block them.
• City tiles count as road at no cost.
• Travel is measured in tiles moved along roads. Total travel sums every city pair.
• Upkeep assumes 1 gold per road tile per turn.