A few general questions

I've installed Civ4 again and I'm playing the latest AND. I never fully understood trade routes, but perhaps I forgot what little I knew, because I don't know what is happening at all.


Here in the top left of the city screen are my trade routes.
1. What are the counts "Domestic: 5 Foreign: 9" showing exactly?
2. In the list of connected cities, isn't it supposed to show the commerce for each route?


This is when I mouse over the trade icon in the scoreboard.
3. I have signed some "Right of passage" agreements, and as far as I remember that established trade before. But the tooltip shows "Total Yield: 0, Routes: 0" for all of them.
4. Wasn't there supposed to be a religion icon in the scoreboard?


I'm playing a Perfect World 2 map for the first time and I'm on an island (the red Japan).
5. Now it dawns on me that at the moment trade is enabled by Coast and Rivers. My only coastal connection is the Aztec, who hate me and we don't have any agreement. Is that why the foreign trade routes are blocked?
6. Since Astronomy (for ocean travel) is very far ahead it seems the only way to keep my civ developing is to go to war? I'm wondering how island games work out with Astronomy so far into the tree.

We actually got rid of trade routes a while ago because the processing time required was so intense that it was dragging down the overall performance.

Instead of trade routes, you get commerce based on your connectedness buildings. For example, look at Harbor. It generates 1 commerce for every connected domestic city, up to 5. Later buildings generate more commerce and commerce from foreign cities. Buildings in the Harbor chain, the Paved Roads chain, the Tavern chain, and the Toll House chain all have connectedness commerce.

So your city screen is telling you how many cities you are connected to and then that will be used to generate the commerce from the buildings.

Trade Routes are gone. I keep meaning to write a civilopedia article on it, but basically it has been replaced with a much simpler concept.

Instead of trade routes, you have connected cities. This is what is shown where trade routes used to be, in the top left of the city screen. Certain buildings give commerce from having connected cities. Certain civics may increase or decrease the commerce from connected cities. Connectedness is similar to trade routes in that you must have a path (either road or ocean) to have the game consider a city connected. But the differences are that by default, you earn nothing from connected cities, and certain buildings provide a flat bonus. See the port building for an example of this.

I wrote up a lengthy rationale for the change many months ago, but the distilled version is this: Trade Routes were hard to understand, it was impossible to predict the effects, and finally, bad for game performance in the late game. This trifecta, of complexity, unpredictability, and slowness caused us to look into a system to replace Trade Routes. Connected Cities is this system. In contrast, connected cities are easy to understand, as connected cities are listed in your city screen (and paths are pretty obvious to see visually), easy to predict the effects, as long as you are capable of counting, and simple to calculate.

Edit: Ninja'd by Vokarya.

I'm not normally a big fan of fundamental rules changes, but this one I supported because the end result was the same; some numbers go in and commerce comes out. But to simplify the concept for both the player and the computer makes the change worthwhile.

Thank you both, that explains a lot.

I guess the lack of religion icon is a bug as it is present in the options. There are some other places where religion icons don't show up, like in the civics screen (xxx for cities with <missing icon>).

The missing religion icon is a bug because you are using steam. Go to this page and read the note for Steam users: http://anewdawn.sourceforge.net/pages/install/

Thanks!

You may want to include that info in "Main Download Information", because Steam is quite popular and some players come straight to the forum.

Good idea!

@45°: Could you take care of this ?

dbkblk said:

Good idea!

@45°: Could you take care of this ?

Click to expand...

Sure, done

If trade routes are gone, then "Free trade agreement" doesn't "Increases trade revenue", right?

topka said:

If trade routes are gone, then "Free trade agreement" doesn't "Increases trade revenue", right?

Click to expand...

You're probably right, although I haven't checked. Also similar UN resolution should be changed, it's on to do list.

All right...so is city connectedness measured among all realms constantly or is it still split between foreign and domestic and civics must be activated to improve the benefit?

Connectedness is split between internal and foreign. Civics influence that, for example coinage prevent foreign connectedness.

I think you guys need to expand on this, you have something great here.

You definitely need to add buildings that gives food and production as well per domestic connection, not a large bonus but enough, like 0.2 per domestic connection and maybe 0.1 per foreign, all maybe dependant on the differing resources the two civs have and don't actively import (just because two civs aren't specifically trading two resources doesn't mean your merchants still aren't buying them).

Maybe that's a little too much but my point being is that you have come up with a really smart and interesting system as a replacement to a clunky and rusted one, it would be a shame to not use to it's full potential.

Edit: Or instead of a flat production boost, have it be percentile, +1% food/production per domestic connection up to 10% or something.

45°38'N-13°47'E;13851208 said:

Connectedness is split between internal and foreign. Civics influence that, for example coinage prevent foreign connectedness.

Click to expand...

Ah, yes, I was afraid of that. That's precisely the civic element that I'm trying to edit. But it isn't working through CIV4CivicInfos. There likely is another file which I must edit, but of which I have no knowledge.

So, if someone did wish to remove that internal/foreign split, how would someone do that?

I'm not sure it's possible if XML doesn't work. I haven't written that part of the code but it might be in the dll

Thanks for your help 45°38'N-13°47'E

I'll deal with it, considering that I really like this new city connectedness feature.

I think free trade agreement should add one commerce per connected foreign city.

jackelgull said:

I think free trade agreement should add one commerce per connected foreign city.

Click to expand...

I think it's too much, but I'll consider some change.