I'm a month late coming to the conversation and it looks like iplaygames has fled before Brugle's blinding might, but I have been kinda thinking about how to square this circle myself:
That would simplify the game enough so that many of us wouldn't enjoy it. Thankfully, there are many different games. (I would probably never have started to play Pharaoh if it was that simple.)
Thing is... setting the path of providers so that everything's predictable is basically what we wind up doing, in most cases. We just do it with roadblocks/gatehouses and a carefully constrained road network.
I'm in agreement that a large and complex system taking meticulous planning to maintain is not a flaw per se, and I appreciate that people get a kick out of challenges, but various aspects of caesar/pharoah have always felt somewhat... immersion-breaking to me in this regard, I guess. I don't think it's asking the world for your prefects to exercise a modicum of intelligence about what buildings to inspect, for example, rather than getting the sense that I'm herding a crowd of lemmings through perpetual-motion recursion loops so as not to hurt themselves.
I know that Children of the Nile and Caesar 4 went down this road, but while the former was received pretty well the latter was not, so I'm... curious what other form of challenge the game might throw at the player? Maybe just arrange things so that proper non-dirt-roads are more expensive to build and maintain, and dirt roads drag down desirability? That way the player would have an incentive to keep their road network compact, at least within residential neighbourhoods, without non-loop arrangements necessarily leading to infrastructural collapse. Any other ideas?[This message has been edited by Pelagius_II (edited 06-30-2019 @ 03:24 PM).]