Trading Posts

I don't care much if trading posts are removed, but if they are, they better replace them with something. If there's no choice between what to build on tiles, it'll take a lot of strategy away from the game and from controlling your workers.
I do agree with you here. I like that with the introduction of trade routes most of the gold you collect comes from trade routes and city connections. But if the trade posts are removed and with this the number of improvements gets reduced, than the choice which improvement to build is kind a obvious and takes away some joy in and usefulness of micromanaging.

I do think that a replacing improvement yielding gold needs to be introduced. Here comes a [village --> town] system in my mind. A system as in civ IV (cottage --> hamlet --> village --> town ) is a bit too "time-stretched". But this improvement you can't spam on all the tiles by discouraging it with negative modifiers and limiting the amount within a city radius around 4-6 per city. Once you unlock this improvement with the required technology (best one of ancient or classical era techs) you only can build 1-2 of these. The limit increases with certain techs, as an increase with each era would increase the limit too much. As for the negative modifier I had in mind that villages/towns that have one or more adjacent villages/towns or a city will yield 1 less gold. This will also let the player spread out villages/towns in a “realistic way”. Here I am already proposing that a village will have at least a 2 gold yield and town 3. This will make them yield more than TP's but this wouldn’t be game breaking since you have a cap on it.

Also with this improvement I would love a change in a different aspect as well. Now all the population clutters into the city tile. And there is no limit for population. In civ 3 if your city wasn’t adjacent to a river then you needed an aqueduct for population higher than 7 and you always needed a hospital for population higher than 15. Having a limit of 10 population that a city can “house” and that each village would increase this with 4 and a town with 6. And when you have the maximum amount of town the cap on population is removed. This concept will make the placement of these villages/towns strategic as you need to defend these tiles from being raided. Otherwise raids of these tiles would reduce your population.

I also have two other propositions for these villages/towns. When you place a village/town on a tile the cultural borders will grow in that direction more easily than others. This way you can steer cultural borders in a way besides tile buying. The other idea is when a city has sea (resource) tiles and isn’t coastal you should be able to build workboats if the city has a village/town adjacent to a coast tile.

Well this is just the basic idea of how I think a replacement of a TP improvements needs to be done with additional abilities. This idea still will have some flaws, as for one what happens when a village/town tiles swaps to another city, but I do think that this can be solved in a proper way too.
 
I wonder if trading posts will be used to extend trade routes? If a caravan starts with a 10 range than building a trading post will allow it to extend 10 hexes past it.
 
I don't know if this has already been settled or not, but look at this video:
http://youtu.be/EMO79ylKga0?t=4m8s
The build trading post button is still there. I don't know if it functions differently but there is definitely a trading post type improvement.
 
We've seen pictures of them by now. Rumors of their death were greatly exaggerated.
 
Which in my opinion is actually unfortunate, it means more gold will be on the map - to much so in fact. I still don't see a reason to use international trade routes when production/food are much more important/powerful with domestic trade routes
 
I don't use trading posts very often, so I don't think this will change much except with puppet cities.
 
What's a trading post?

But seriously. I never use trading posts because I can always get more gold from 1) working more production tiles to construct gold-yielding buildings faster and 2) working more food tiles to grow citizens who then work more gold tiles. And since gold is so fluid with all my trade deals and purchases, I never look at gold as a constant flow the same as food and production. Gold is just something to expedite with. To me, the only tangible benefit for trading posts is the science bonus in the Rationalism tree, far too late in the game.

I think new trading post could be built only on road and grow in the rate proportional with amount of trade passing the road, and will be "worn" if they're no trading in the road for prolonged time.

Which is the way it should be. Trading posts should be as strategic as forts and citadels--a hub or chokepoint dependent on favorable geographic conditions at the moment. Otherwise, that's what the customs house is for!

The only issue then would be a lack of choices for regular empty tiles. Basic grassland or plains then could only sustain farms, I'm usually not so keen on pushing some of my minor cities pop that high. I do miss watermills, if rivers are losing their gold bonus it'd be nice to have them back, otherwise you get a weird situation where the supposedly prime riverside tiles end up being ignored.

Perhaps these ignored tiles will be where the future archaeology sites will appear.
And another thing we have to consider, less tiles improved means less chances for the pillaging option that heals wounded combat units. Maybe this way we can finally move combat away from cities and focus on defeating armies in the field instead of capturing cities (cities that we might not want, and simply puppet or raze, but we have to capture nonetheless in order to demand peace).
 
Which in my opinion is actually unfortunate, it means more gold will be on the map - to much so in fact. I still don't see a reason to use international trade routes when production/food are much more important/powerful with domestic trade routes

They are removing the gold that you get from tiles next to rivers and coastal tiles. So there will be a lot less gold on the map which will no doubt mean you have to trade.
 
They are removing the gold that you get from tiles next to rivers and coastal tiles. So there will be a lot less gold on the map which will no doubt mean you have to trade.

Again not an issue. Many players have little problem playing without rivers/oceans. A human player can survive without much gold easy, growth/production matter most. (AI with bundles of gold per turn make it easy and it isn't hard to get gold at the minute, trading post removal would have been a good step. Removing gold from rivers/oceans is parsley tidwinks compared to removing trading posts.


It looks completely unbalanced at the minute, I wouldn't be surprised if they have to nerf domestic trade routes with the first patch [Like they did in Vanilla with Maritime city states and everyone saw that coming as well]. Domestic Trade Routes >>> International trade routes, no point for international at the moment
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I rarely build trading posts either, but removing trading posts would have been a good start. Still waaay too many sources for gold in game
 
Again not an issue. Many players have little problem playing without rivers/oceans. A human player can survive without much gold easy, growth/production matter most. (AI with bundles of gold per turn make it easy and it isn't hard to get gold at the minute, trading post removal would have been a good step. Removing gold from rivers/oceans is parsley tidwinks compared to removing trading posts.


It looks completely unbalanced at the minute, I wouldn't be surprised if they have to nerf domestic trade routes with the first patch [Like they did in Vanilla with Maritime city states and everyone saw that coming as well]. Domestic Trade Routes >>> International trade routes, no point for international at the moment
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I rarely build trading posts either, but removing trading posts would have been a good start. Still waaay too many sources for gold in game

It's not only the player who is going to have less gold, the AI is going to have less gold as well.
 
Again not an issue. Many players have little problem playing without rivers/oceans. A human player can survive without much gold easy, growth/production matter most. (AI with bundles of gold per turn make it easy and it isn't hard to get gold at the minute, trading post removal would have been a good step. Removing gold from rivers/oceans is parsley tidwinks compared to removing trading posts.


It looks completely unbalanced at the minute, I wouldn't be surprised if they have to nerf domestic trade routes with the first patch [Like they did in Vanilla with Maritime city states and everyone saw that coming as well]. Domestic Trade Routes >>> International trade routes, no point for international at the moment
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I rarely build trading posts either, but removing trading posts would have been a good start. Still waaay too many sources for gold in game

Considering the heavy involvement of the civfanatics community through the frankenstein group in the development and testing of this game, i have every faith the new system will be more or less balanced at release.
 
Have we seen any confirmation on what the effect of trading posts is in BNW?

It would be awesome if the effect of trading posts was somehow linked to the presence of trade routes. For example, if they produced 1 gold for every trade route passing trough them. This would make land through which lots of trade passes more valuable, providing an interesting geopolitical aspect to trade routes.
 
It looks completely unbalanced at the minute, I wouldn't be surprised if they have to nerf domestic trade routes with the first patch [Like they did in Vanilla with Maritime city states and everyone saw that coming as well]. Domestic Trade Routes >>> International trade routes, no point for international at the moment

That seems a little excessive given how we have yet to actually get the game, let alone enough info to make an informed decision on trade routes.

As for Domestic Trade Routes being better than International Trade Routes, that depends on how much food/production you can get and what factors influence it. Is it dependent on the size of the host city? Is it dependent on the food/production surplus of the host city? Is it dependent on tech? Also, given that the number of Trade Routes are limited, is it really worthwhile to have every Trade Route be domestic. Growth is fine, food and pop is powerful, but there are constraints to high pop, especially if you lack the infrastructure and income to support it and that is gold. What use is a pop 30 city that can't afford to support a University compared to a pop 15 city that has both a Lib and a University with an army to take you out?

The entirety of BNW retooled the economy to be focused mainly on International Trade Routes, from apparent changes to TP's and rivers, to the very gold multipliers that make Tall civs profitable and feasible. For all we know, you can't afford not to go for a few ITR's without going completely bankrupt, at which point what use is your huge 30 pop city? Build Markets which now multiply gold from ITR's? Spam TP's whose gold is possibly multiplied by ITR's?

We don't have enough info as to the importance of ITR's to gold, and saying otherwise would be putting the carriage before the horse. For all we know, they might have to tone down ITR's to make DTR's feasible. We just don't know yet.
 
Considering the heavy involvement of the civfanatics community through the frankenstein group in the development and testing of this game, i have every faith the new system will be more or less balanced at release.

That faith may be a bit misplaced the frankenstein group (with varying composition I suppose) has been involved for almost the entire development cycle of civ5. Despite that some of the systems on release versions of the game have been very imbalanced and had to be adjusted with a patch.
 
I've always wished TP's were gone, and instead, as a city increases in population a "sub-urban" area would spawn within their cultural borders on a specific set of tiles (unimproved, farm, camp, pasture), with a greater chance to appear along a river, road, or railroad. They would give a set economic bonus for that tile (gold/production).

I think it would better represent urban sprawl and the economic pull of urban centers. With traderoutes, it would also properly represent the push/pull of dwindling farming space and the need to import food.

Maybe the first "sprawl" town would appear at 6 pop, then every 4 pop after.
 
Unfortunately, if they eliminate Trading Posts, then they eliminate the only choice left in the Improvement system, and all that's left will be busy-work.

If TPs are out, then gold production will be similar to science production, in that the key factors will be population size, infrastructure, trading, and tile resources (luxuries etc.).

I think that corresponds to one of the walk-throughs I watched, which mentioned that population size is one of the factors in the equation for determining the benefits of a trade route with a particular city.

So, to maintain a strong economy will make foreign relations and trading partnerships crucial, since internal trade routes only provide additional food and production, I think.

Interesting change, if it is true that TPs are out.
 
They aren't out. We've seen them in videos as recently as the May press build.
 
I've read somewhere that a Trading Post only gives 1 GPT on roads and 2 GPT near the coast
 
I think they probably are unchanged.

A Trade Route can be
~9 prod/food
OR
~18 gold

An Industrial Era tile improvement can be
2 prod/food
Or
2 gold. (Trade Post)

So my first source of gold will be Gold Trade Routes..with farms/mines
Trade Posts will be for low production areas...or if I'm maxxing out gold.
 
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