What caused the change?
Labs / History
All Roads Lead to Rome
Click between two cities to lay a road — plains are cheap and fast, hills cost more and slow you down, and rivers need an expensive bridge. Then click one city and another to dispatch a courier, who races along the fastest route while the readouts tally your building cost and delivery time in days.
Labs / History / All Roads Lead to Rome
All Roads Lead to Rome
Click between two cities to lay a road — plains are cheap and fast, hills cost more and slow you down, and rivers need an expensive bridge. Then click one city and another to dispatch a courier, who races along the fastest route while the readouts tally your building cost and delivery time in days.
Why it matters
Why explore this?
History is about change over time and the choices that shape it. This model helps you compare causes, consequences, and patterns without treating the past as a list of dates.
Explore
Try the model
Route Roma → BrundisiumRoads 7Cost 0 talentsFastest 0 d
Investigate
Questions to test
Predict first, try it in the model, then use what you observe to answer.
What to try
- Is the cheapest network to build always the one that delivers messages fastest?
- A river bridge is pricey — when is paying for the shortcut worth the days it saves the courier?
- Switch relay stations off. How many more days does the same journey to Brundisium take without fresh horses waiting along the way?
- Push the road standard from a dirt track to a paved via — does upgrading the surface help more on plains, or through the hills?
- With the full network built, does the courier ever avoid a road you laid? What does that tell you about how Rome chose its trunk routes?
Explain
Make sense of what happened
Build an explanation with a cause, a change, and a consequence. Then identify evidence from the model and one limitation of what the model can show.
Check
Before you leave
Who or what was affected?
What can this model not tell us?
If you can answer all three using evidence from the model, you understand the main idea. If not, return to Explore and change one setting at a time.