Has a final determination been made on this?

For my money, I'd like to be able to connect any two points on the map with a simple point and click.  No builder units, but the cost of the road, when laid out, comes in turns, gold and materials, (eventually, of course, clay and stone).  Animations of little workers doing that job is fine, as long as I don't have to manage them.  Once done, you click on the road to upgrade it (dirt to tile, tile to stone, stone to magical stone (uses crystals), all with increasing costs of time, gold, and resources.

It doesn't go into a build queue of a given city, it comes off your national resources (hence, no cost of people, which are city resources).  During attack, you can destroy a section of road by doing damage to it once a given warfare tech has been earned (one above fortify, maybe).

Costs are calculated on a per square basis, but you can draw the road, and have a HUD that gives you the cost of your current sketch in real time.

Using units to do it doesn't seem like a good idea; too much detail.

I don't consider it a massive change.

1. Inns could still spawn at game start.
2. More inns could spawn occasionally (I think they do in the current system, too), and when they do they would prefer to appear on the side of roads.
3. Roads could only make a slight detour (say, max added distance 5 squares) to reach the inn. Just so that inns don't appear strangely 3 spaces from the side of the road when they could just as well be next to them.

What? No the roads shouldn't adjust when new inns appear. New inns could be spawned along roads. Roads could just prefer to go by existing inns if some happen to be between the two cities. It's just an idea. The other one, about new inns spawning along roads is the one I like more (and would be easier to implement), anyway.

My 2cents, however late in the disucssion this is, are that:

-Roads follow trade routes and are created by trade, initially as a rough track or muddy path. If you are doing away with caravans and not requiring the player to set up trade routes as they did with caravans, roads/trade-routes should appear as an auto-generated shortest route link between cities, and be no more than a rough track.

-The player should be given the choice about upgrading and maintaining their roads. Muddy tracks are cheap, but slow and slower in winter/autumn/rain. Paved roads are fast but expensive to build and maintain.

-The player upgrades their roads from muddy tracks to paved roads (and anything in between or above) through the city build screen. This will upgrade all roads in that city's area of influence (and possibly any areas of influence contiguous/overlapping to the target city's).

-Roads can only be upgraded if they lie within the city/faction's area of influence. A stretch of road on tiles outside of the area of influence will not be able to be upgraded.

-Inns, and any other type of road/trade features follow trade routes. Inns gravitate to roads, with a preference to heavily used roads and intersections.