Extending the length of a trade route

CaptainPatch

Lifelong gamer
Joined
Sep 6, 2007
Messages
832
Location
San Rafael, CA, USA
I think that the trade route length limitation is far too short. For example, during the Marco Polo era, the Silk Road (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_Road) extended for 4,000 miles. That would be significantly more than the two, three, or four cities away that Civ V/BNW allows.

Now, there is of course the factor that the longer a route is, the greater the risk that a barbarian or enemy will plunder the caravan marching by. But running that risk should be a judgement of the player as opposed to a rule limitation. ["... you've got to ask yourself one question: "Do I feel lucky?" Well, do ya, punk?"]

Tempus fugit and suddenly there are roads all over the place. Lengthy routes across wide open spaces is one thing, but when travelers are on a road, well, there's this temptation to roll on to the next town... and the next, and the next after that. (It's the main reason Polo's journey lasted for as long as it did.) So how about: A city may establish a route that is connected by roads of any length? (With cities strung together like pearls on a string.) But just like a route being broken by a barbarian plundering the caravan, if a road is destroyed or city razed anywhere along the route, the route is broken. Of course, the longer the route, the greater the probability of that happening.
 
Well that 4000 miles wasn't just one trade route between two cities or even two parties. It was multiple trade routes stopping at multiple cities. It's the equivalent of using one route between your cities and then another route starting at the destination city going to another city.
 
The point being that the established route goes to City A, and then from there, there is an established route that connects to City B, and then from there, there is an established route to City C,... and so on through the entire alphabet. Further, many/most cities would be stopovers for multiple routes. So even if City F got razed, a caravan could route around the resulting "hole" to get to the specified route endpoint, and then back again.
 
I have also noticed that if you can't reach another civ or cs you can't build caravans even for internal routes
 
I have also noticed that if you can't reach another civ or cs you can't build caravans even for internal routes

I think you can still build internal routes but you need a granary or workshop or there is nothing to transfer.
 
What I would like to have is the possibility to create chains of trade routes.

If you can reach Genoa by cargo ship (or caravan) from Venice, it would be cool if it let you connect Constantinople to Venice via Genoa with a second cargo ship. Then Venice to Tyre via Constantinople/Genoa with a third, all the way to Karakorum. The more links in the chain, the more profitable the trade routes (they could even add a bonus to the science exchanged if you connect multiple civilizations or CS etc.).

The risks of pillaging, or that a war breaks the chain, would be enormous in the early game, which would reflect quite well such early trade routes, but the rewards if you get lucky and pass through civs that keep their land free of barbarians... big. If a caravan or cargo ship is destroyed, the units further in the chain would have to be re-assigned.

This would make the Venice UA even more interesting since with the double # of trade routes they could theoretically extend their network farther than anyone.

Another cool result is that forcibly some cities in the game would become trade centers - say if Paris, Venice and Madrid can only reach Russia by using Constantinople as stopover this would be quite profitable to Suleiman, and make the AI wary of declaring war and losing all that in the early/mid game, before more cities founded and more of the map having been discovered give the players far more combinations, making those early trade centers decline.. The mechanics to calculate benefits would be largely the same, between the first city in the chain and each linked city, with a bonus (+x%) increasing with the number of links in a chain.

That might have to come with a slight nerf of the benefits of direct trade routes when you enter the Middle-Ages, to balance things out, or perhaps the nerf to direct instead of chained trade routes could apply only to Venice.

The ability might eventually disappear to revert to direct trade routes when reaching Industrialization or the modern era, to leave intact the current late game mechanics (ideology tenets, SP etc).
 
Part of the problem (as I see it) is that the current system takes ALL of a caravan run's yield and parcels it out evenly with gpt payouts. In Reality though, the payout would occur at the endpoints. (With the payout at the far destination being reinvested in goods to sell off when they got home.) That would be better reflected by how a Great Merchant generates money on a Trade Mission. (Except that you wouldn't get the money until the Great Merchant came back home.) Making the system reflect Reality would make for quite a nail-biter. Imagine the anguish if you had a caravan nearing the home destination, carrying a 1,000 gold payoff, and it gets plundered by barbarians. Have that happen several times in a row and you'd be cussing about how rotten the mechanic was. Though it would tend to make players more conservative about where and how far they dispatched caravans -- which, would actually be more realistic behavior for a merchant taking BIG risks.
 
Well if you only got payout when merchant caravan returns home....

Then gpt in this game would be alot even lower than it already is in the stone ages. XD Would require firaxis to do more work like renaming barbarians into rebels for when they spawn from civ's unhappiness but we know how firaxis is. So that won't even happen.
 
In Reality though, the payout would occur at the endpoints.

It would. Right now the feature is a weird hybrid. For revenues purposes a "route" represents several ships or caravans on a regular schedule on it, one of them arriving home with some profits each turn. The "route" is a single unit for the purpose of allowing its pillaging, and to justify the fact you can't end a trade route before it's "back home".
 
Top Bottom