Forum

The smaller roads (not on the map) count as off-road for a reason. Those that have ”navigated” backroads before the era of gps remember how easy it was to get lost, especislly without maps.
Add to this the changes that war makes to roads and yeah, it will not be as easy as following 4-8 lane partly ruined highway.

Winding backroads with twists and turns and craters and not clear roadsigns might be easy to follow on google earth but not so easy while driving there without a map.

I really like the FL approach here: all hexes have roads but the only the main ones that are easy to follow are marked.

I'm not saying that they get a free extra road.

I'm just saying that to the players, it looks like they're just trekking through wild woods, when in fact there's roads going in specific directions there.

I'm using it as a tool to let my players know that there are (or, were) roads going in X direction that they can nominally follow. Sure, there will be obstacles that mean they have to leave the road occasionally, and the risk of an ambush is much greater, but it does mean that they get to follow something in the right direction.

When they decided to go towards Örebro on one of those roads, it still counted as going off-road due to them having to go around obstacles every so often, and it did mean that they ran into a marauder roadblock while driving.

But, it also meant that they didn't have to roll to make sure they were going in the right direction. Since they were following the roads general direction.

The risk with google maps is the existence and/or quality of today's roads 2 decades ago...after ~3 years of war. I know my hometown changed quite a bit over my professional career.

Does that matter to your game? That's for you to decide.

Usually, it's the larger roads that have been added over the decades, not the small backroads.

Looking back over the last 30 years or so in my immediate area (Malmö, Lund and the surrounding areas), I can actually only think of smaller roads being closed, not built. (unless you count roads inside of villages and the like, but I'm talking about backroads here, not town roads).

Bigger roads have been built over the years, though. That's the real issue. New construction comes with new traffic, which leads to bigger roads or new large roads (I hesitate to call them highways in Sweden).

Those are easy to spot, though, so they can be ignored.

Lastly, it's pretty easy to go into the road view on google maps and see if the road seems new or not.

Take my two roads, for example. Just google Pershyttevägen to see the state of the roads. (hell, the second road doesn't even have a name and isn't paved)
These are not new roads.

Personally, I have resorted to google maps, because the 10x10km size of the hexes is too big for my tastes and the maps are not detailed enough when it comes to smaller roads etc.

But, if you buy the Foundry VTT module, you can connect your computer to your TV and show the map on there

I use OpenTopoMap, it looks much more like a map printed, especially if zoomed all the way in. Also, map.army can use OpenTopoMap as a skin and then you just can drop in all the little map symbols from APP-6D, if that's your cup of tea.

Personally, I have resorted to google maps, because the 10x10km size of the hexes is too big for my tastes and the maps are not detailed enough when it comes to smaller roads etc.

But, if you buy the Foundry VTT module, you can connect your computer to your TV and show the map on there

I use OpenTopoMap, it looks much more like a map printed, especially if zoomed all the way in. Also, map.army can use OpenTopoMap as a skin and then you just can drop in all the little map symbols from APP-6D, if that's your cup of tea.

That does look great for showing the players.

I'll still be using google maps/earth for looking myself, since it gives the possibility of street view.