Slitherine

Is there a reason why a paved road can negate 90% of the effect of forests, but is completely ineffective with dense forest? It would seem to me that a road should negate most of the effect of any terrain it's passing through, other than water, essentially.

I have nagged the devs about roads since the early beta days.

My view is that a road is a road is a road. It should provide road bonus whatever terrain is under, even dense forest and mountains.
It is up to the scenario designer to use roads correctly.

Indeed. By tinkering with the costs in the chassis.txt file in my mod, I was able to make it possible for a wheeled unit to go through dense forest via a road, but impossible for it do so without a road. The reason I was doing this, of course, was with a mind to replacing the artwork and info for a terrain type that I wouldn't need (or creating a new one entirely if possible) for use as an unfordable river. Basically, I put down the terrain type, then run a river through the hexsides. Infantry could cross it (in the real world via inflatable boats) so they would take the normal penalty, but heavy vehicles would be unable to enter the hex.

Of course, I hit a snag in that the pontoon bridge that engineers can build will not negate the forest effect unless there is a road tile into the hex. But, at least I'm partway there.

I was able, by taking some of the advice I was given here, to use the neutral hex method and some triggers to make a river unpassable by anything other than infantry/engineers, unless there was a bridge there, but it's not perfect, and I'm still looking for a less brute force method.