Road placement can knock one or two players out in the first round or two, on random boards with unfortunate initial placement and four players. Probably the weakest thing about the game—sometimes you pick the best spots available at placement, but are effectively doomed from the start unless other players screw up really badly, and it's that extremely bad kind of losing-early where you're technically still playing but also can't do much. Like, if you want to make other people's experience as bad as yours, you can just give resources to someone to play kingmaker rather than futilely trying to build stuff, which is surely more entertaining than doing nothing, but is also not exactly a positive kind of entertainment.

Playing with three mostly fixes it, but then there are fewer people to trade with. Using a set, balanced board layout can help, but IMO gets kinda boring.