The power of early food trades

Dtekkar · Jul 11, 2013

The ancient/classical era value sea routes within civs are overtuned. In the midgame though, I definitely can see the high risk high reward of the sea routes tuned up and working as advertised. I just had a Venice game where the sea routes were extremely lucrative but getting plundered frequently, and the land routes held rocksteady all game long. Backstabs are the worst, I lost god knows how much gold in the renaissance to Wu. After that I had caravels watching the full length of supply lines but missionaries were still trickling in and pick off 2 or 3 routes a go before the caravels could scout them and take them down. Once I started pulling frigates off the front lines for backwater supply line duty, I understood why the sea lines offer such lucrative rewards.

But in the early game, deep within your own borders, a close sea route of only a few tiles kinda lets you work every mine and hammer out all the things.and is trivial to protect, and yeah, it gets kinda silly without the downside.

KWagle · Jul 11, 2013

OmniPotent42 said:
I think it should at least deduct the food from the city the trade route is based in, that seems pretty weird to have free food and production come up from nowhere. Caravans and cargo ships do not create anything other than commerce, nor should they.

How many sardines can one city eat? There's nothing unrealistic about being able to ship a pile of food your people can't use to some other place, and get food they can't use in its place (AFAICT, the recipient city can send food the other way.)

Martinus · Jul 11, 2013

wetroofwoof said:
how is the food determined? if you make a domestic route and you can't make a international? it takes up a trade route?

Yes, it counts against your overall trade route limit, so the main cost is the opportunity cost of the lost revenue from an international route. Still, very good, especially if you have routes to spare.

Martinus · Jul 11, 2013

kaspergm said:
That does not necessarily have anything to do with it. A feature can be overpowered compared to the rest of the features in the game, even if everybody has access to it. If a Trade Caravan had given 50 fpt in ancient era, it would clearly be overpowered - or let's at least call it unbalanced. I can't myself say whether the 6 base is too much or not without playing the game, but it does seem ... high. Remember that the food in trade route is sort of "mana from heaven", you don't take it from anywhere (apart from the production you put into the unit, which is admittedly a large investment in early game), so it's not irrelevant how big the number is for overall game balance.

I disagree. The fact that the number of trade routes is limited and that one of the uses (food per turn) is not clearly better than the others (gold or production) is what makes it balanced. It's like complaining that a great engineer special ability is OP, because it lets you finish a wonder in one turn.

Simply put, trade routes are very powerful and it is a no-brainer that you should at all times try to keep them at the maximum available.

iggymnrr · Jul 11, 2013

Toyed around with this some. The mechanic used feels a lot like the trade routes used in Colonization. To avoid a complex trading screen, limits on the number of trades routes have been put in place. Flexibility is also reduced. There doesn't seem to be any way to switch from a land route to a sea one without waiting for one to expire and then deleting a unit and building another. It is like instead of fixing a previous problem they have tried to hide old problems by removing a lot of the manual control.

EEE_BOY · Jul 11, 2013

Tabarnak said:
I will take the +6 food anytime. The comparison isn't even close. Food is transfered into science and hammers for your cities. More population brings more gold later. The evidence is clear, at least for me. I still think that these early food trades are OP.

No cities are riversided...but yeah 4 salts is still awesome. Still, you can compare better starts(deserts with adjacent mountain, marble,etc)

-------------------------------------------------------------

What some people still don't understand is the food/hammer/gold/ratio. And for now the ratio is way too unbalanced.

Food>Hammers>Gold

Food can be transfered into population, which gives more science and production(buildings), which lead to more gold.

-------------------------------------------------------------

You can generate gold with ambassies(1 gpt), you can sell ressources(horses and iron) in grapes of 3 or 4 for 4 or 5 gpt respectively, you can also sell luxs for 6 gpt(if they have enough gpt). Meanwhile, it's preferably better to concentrate on growth(population), the milk cow of civ games.

Indeed. I agree. The starting food should be nerfed at least by half. Even 1/3, because classical era is very close anyway.

Or require both cities to have granaries. Granary is op already, now food trade even makes it superb.

oddtail · Jul 11, 2013

Quick question to those of you already playing - does the bonus food/production from trade routes get a percentage bonus, if the target city has an appropriate building/policy?

Devell · Jul 11, 2013

Whats the best way of protecting trade routes? Is it possible to assign an escort that stacks and travels with the caravan/cargo ship?

budweiser · Jul 11, 2013

Has the city growth schedule changed? Is it the same amount of food to get the next pop point as G&K?

My rule of thumb on my cap is turn number divided by 10 = my pop. Any less and I am lagging, any more and I am ahead of the game.

While, I have been focusing food, in my Venice games, I haven't been obsessive about it and haven't gotten a super huge city. Mostly because I have been running almost full specialist slots.

Happiness for me seems to be the biggest limit on growth.

budweiser · Jul 11, 2013

Devell said:
Whats the best way of protecting trade routes? Is it possible to assign an escort that stacks and travels with the caravan/cargo ship?

The best way to protect a sea route is park a galley on a single coast tile at each end of the route. Then there is no way for barb galleys to get in.

ggmoyang · Jul 11, 2013

oddtail said:
Quick question to those of you already playing - does the bonus food/production from trade routes get a percentage bonus, if the target city has an appropriate building/policy?

Yes to

, no to

oddtail · Jul 11, 2013

ggmoyang said:
Yes to , no to

That's an unusual discrepancy... seems like a bug. I could see the bonus being applied to both, or not being applied to either, but this seems rather inconsistent. Can't really think of a reason why production would deserve percentage bonuses less than food...

...oh well, bonuses to food will probably work really well with my favourite strategies =)

SamBC · Jul 11, 2013

Remember that almost all percentage bonuses to food are bonuses to growth, not to raw food. So the inflating effect is much smaller.

oddtail · Jul 11, 2013

SamBC said:
Remember that almost all percentage bonuses to food are bonuses to growth, not to raw food. So the inflating effect is much smaller.

I hadn't considered that, you're right. Guess I'm so used to playing with civilizations that get a lot of food bonuses that I tend to forget that

Blitz Spearman · Jul 11, 2013

How do you guys manage the happiness cap to abuse it so much? In my last game as Morocco I REXed 6 cities, with a total of 6 luxuries (2 in the capital, one in each city, except one that I did just to get Cerro de Potosi). Endured some unhappiness for a while because two of the lux required work boats, but by the start of medieval era I was ok. I got liberty and had roads everywhere for the +1 happy, and also got Cerimonal Burials + Pagoda, but even then I was really hard pressed to get Colosseums, Circus and the Circus Maximus up as fast as possible, because happiness kept dropping to zero just with the normal growth (even had to rushbuy one or two Colosseums and send a production trade route for the Circus Maximus). And all that without any food route, just sent them all to an AI capital to milk a little bit of that cheating science lead.

I don't see how more food would be usable, specially with the new unhappiness penalties on gold, production and combat strenght.

andrewlt · Jul 11, 2013

That's what puts a limit on this. You need some trade routes to get enough gold to bribe city states as well.

AlazkanAssassin · Jul 11, 2013

KrikkitTwo said:
you could probably make gold for less than a million$ an ounce

Sure, but it comes out radioactive. :nuke:

Elz Majesto · Jul 11, 2013

budweiser said:
Venice gets twice the caravans. Its easy to get 2 Merchants of Venice early allowing 2 food caravans back to Venice.

I did this in my game last night, but I only used sea routes. The game just hit the industrial age and my cap is at 30 running full Specialist in every slot.

To expand on this, when you puppet your city state with the merchant, purchase a cargo ship for 480 and you should be raking in any where from 6(ancient)+ food per turn. Brings a whole new meaning to the Food City States

Tabarnak · Jul 11, 2013

Blitz Spearman said:
How do you guys manage the happiness cap to abuse it so much? In my last game as Morocco I REXed 6 cities, with a total of 6 luxuries (2 in the capital, one in each city, except one that I did just to get Cerro de Potosi). Endured some unhappiness for a while because two of the lux required work boats, but by the start of medieval era I was ok. I got liberty and had roads everywhere for the +1 happy, and also got Cerimonal Burials + Pagoda, but even then I was really hard pressed to get Colosseums, Circus and the Circus Maximus up as fast as possible, because happiness kept dropping to zero just with the normal growth (even had to rushbuy one or two Colosseums and send a production trade route for the Circus Maximus). And all that without any food route, just sent them all to an AI capital to milk a little bit of that cheating science lead.

I don't see how more food would be usable, specially with the new unhappiness penalties on gold, production and combat strenght.

If you go wide it might be less useful. You need a granary in capital before and if you Rex you don't need one that early. If by any chance you can keep a large happiness flow after REX then you can counsider food trades.

No happiness = no food trades.

Martin Alvito · Jul 11, 2013

Blitz Spearman said:
How do you guys manage the happiness cap to abuse it so much?

Monarchy and fewer cities. The wider you go, the harder it gets to stay ahead of :c5unhappy:

.

The basic issue is that Monarchy is the single best :c5happy:

management tool available, assuming you can generate enough :c5food:

to keep the capital growing. If you can stack the equivalent of a pair of Hanging Gardens in the capital, it's easy to stay ahead of the exponential growth of the food box.

The power of early food trades

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