Any chance of getting rid of bridges?

I realize one could do away with road upgrades, but would there be any chance at all of getting rid of the bridges themselves but keeping roads and highways? If we could just have river crossings at every river instead?

I guess I am hoping that there might be some sort of 'redirect' when the exe searches for the battle map buildings - and maybe something could be done in that area. But I know nothing at all about how the game handles battle map buildings, so it's a shot in the dark to even ask the question.

I would also like to know this, though I suspect it is hardcoded...but I guess cas files can be edited to look invisible, although that would really only work on the start map. The road (bridge) efefcts the river too it would seem (bridged rivers are deeper on the battle map)

A way of getting rid of the bridges is to make all the rivers navigable. The drawback is the roads are not crossing such rivers.

Teleklos, if you don't upgrade the road, will the crossing be somehow upgrated to a bridge anyway?

Not sure what you mean? I'm sure the bridge can't be upgraded if the road isn't - but I'm not willing to go so far as to not allow roads to be built.

Since the roads don't cross, wouldn't you just create a landbridge to cross where one road ends another would begin?

Your trade won't go through at the same rates though - it's like no road exists there at all. But a small amount of trade by land will still take place, even if no road connects. I think you mean 'crossable strait' instead of landbridge though, right? Looks like water, but acts like land?

Did you try to change models in data\terrain\aerial_maps\bridges\ ?

No, I haven't ever messed around with models. But if I just got rid of the bridge models, there still would be the problem that where the bridge existed there would be a steep drop and the units could drown.

However, on most (all?) bridge crossings, there is a fordable place usually on the battle map also. I wonder how the AI would deal with it if it was forced to use the fordable place instead - if the bridge was just gone? Any chance someone could test it out?

How the heck AI would know that there is no bridge?
I guess they would try to cross not existent bridge just because it should be there.

You might try changing the physical info files of the bridge (there must be such a thing), I assume that this is what tells the AI that there is a bridge.
There's also this "custom tile" thingy which could be tried (although it would involve some amount of work to do this for every crossing).