Coda
Versed in the lewd.
- Joined
- Jan 27, 2019
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He said "effective" difference.Yea... That's just wrong...
Dwarf roads will last a thousand years without any effective maintenance... With a human road you will be lucky to get five before it's overgrown to a level of uselessness...
Which means the roads will require maintenance, and maintenance costs money and time.
Basically put, you're sacrificing long term profits for a small short term advantage.
When you're using it, the difference between a perfect road and merely a good road is fairly negligible. You're right that there's a difference in maintenance, but as long as you can put in the upkeep -- and mind you, humanpower is a lot easier to come by than dwarfpower -- you're really not losing much in practice.
You could argue that you're sacrificing long-term profits, but I don't think that's true, either. You can start profiting from the human-built roads sooner, and roads have a network effect: the benefit you gain by connecting a new place with a road increases the more places there are already connected by roads. Getting the road network built out faster means that you get exponentially more revenue in the short term, and even beyond revenue there's also the advantages you gain for administration and information mobility.
There's also opportunity cost. If you have the power to ask the dwarves for that kind of commitment... what could the dwarves have been making for you instead that CAN'T be acceptably replaced with human equivalents?