So, what I propose is a yearly maintnance on roads and farmland such a 1/2 a gold piece per square of improved land.

So what are your ideas?

Next thing we could do is start arguing that buildings also need to be maintained, and that taxes should be collected dependent on the amount of people, and that people would have to work in the buildings like the courthouse. All these changes are great, but if they are implemented we won't have Civ anymore, we'll have SimCity on the empire scale or something.

Just a thought

The road builing implementation can be handled like the 'public works' in Civ Call to Power.

It would only be a tax paid every turn and would be very small (it would only be on roads)

Later fortress was built on accurate design (and sometimes also early major fortification as the chinese Great Wall, but that's already a Civ wonder ), often with the work of many slaves/war prisoners and local population.

At the time of WWI diggin simple trenches went back to the common soldiers shoulders (but military engineers worked on main fortification), and almost the same happened on WWII.

Still main fortification was build by civil workers in peace (Maginot line) or by prisoners (Normandia beaches' defense).

In short, I suppose that digging trenches is actually represented by (F)ortify units, where building Fortification really is the job of engineers.

I agree that often soldiers built roads, not only some centuries ago but during WWI and II too (usually under the project of commanders that have engineering skills), and that could be added for infantry units but at a slower rate than proper settler/engineer.

As I already wrote on some old threads, I would indeed prefer some special feature we can add on the Unit workshop, paying the price.
Do we want a unit able to build things AND strengh enough to fight and survive? That's good, pay the prize please!

Meanwhile, let me clear up a few of my ideas from my last post here. What I meant DarkCloud was that at some point we would end up saying that a building would need to be maintained not only by the abstract gold, but also by a concrete material like wood, or stone. Taking that into consideration, I just really didn't want to add that kind of micromanagement to the game that already has more than enough of it.

There should be a special feature in the unit model to allow some units to make better fortifications that work better faster. The feature would be 'engineer training'