Trade route strategies

Option 1) 7 cities, all internal trade routes. Massive food and production.

But, eventually you'll be limiting yourself... stuck at -50 health unless you spend all your production and technology on health-boosting techs/buildings. But, if all your production and research is going towards solving unhappiness, isn't that detrimental? In a game where the tech-path isn't linear, this is essentially a waste of time. You could be focusing on end-game techs instead. And the culture penalty is non-trivial.

Option 2) 7 cities, all external trade routes. You'll more than *double* your science during the early game, have tons of gold, and can focus exclusively on techs that boost culture/tech or drive you to the end-game. Furthermore, the wider you go, the more this helps. Each city is +5% tech cost, but trade routes give more than 5% tech bonus.

Example: 22 cities = 2x the tech cost of 1 city. If 21 external trade routes doubles your science (as I have seen it do), then 66 external trade routes would *quadruple* your science. Sure, managing them all would also make you want to commit suicide, but this seems like a valid approach.

Once the value of those external trade routes starts to taper off, and you have more health buildings at your disposal, you can switch to internal trade routes for the production-heavy needs of the end-game.

The obvious problem with this is that internal trade routes give production, not just food, and the other problem is the inherent unhealth of 22 cities... not to mention the culture penalty.

Option 3) 7 cities, using exclusively internal trade routes, planting generators everywhere. You grow slowly (almost zero food comes in from internal trade routes when you have no surplus) but have a ton of production and gold. The obvious problems with this are the science and culture penalty.

Option 4) 7 cities, 7 internal trade routes, 14 external.

To me this feels like a better balance. Slower growth to combat unhealthiness. Still, too much culture penalty.

Option 5) 4 cities, 6 internal trade routes, 6 external.

This feels like the sweet spot to me from the games I've played. However, maybe I'm just so used to Civ5 that I can't appreciate the value of going wide. The AI seems to go wide all the time, but I tend to tech faster than the AI...

So, thoughts?

Due to the fact that you can't have all internal trade routes (unless you have 7 cities), you might as well send them for the science and energy. The science gained from the AI is a pretty big deal (not so much the energy, but nice for CVs) especially for the low production cost of trade routes, and a lot of the time I find that internal trade routes will lessen the amount of food they give due to a lack of surplus anyway. I would just say to vary it based on how the game is going.

For all of my colonies (except the capital) I use one of the 3 routes internally, with the capital as target.
The other 2 usually get used externally partially with the best trade target, but partially also with the aim to have every other faction be covered by at least one trade route (to get diplomacy bonuses with every faction)


This gives me one city (i.e. the capital) that is a true powerhouse for production and is used by me for the production of wonders (enabling me to easily outperform the AI with regards to the production of wonders on Gemini)
I also get a good growth in science and energy (with the energy getting used ti immediately purchase some basic buildings and units [like the trade depot + convoys] as soon as the outpost turns into a colony).

I usually plant as many cities as I can on coast, and then 1-3 on land for strat resources. The coastals go external for the extra science boost, the land cities go internal. Plus with coastals you have a better chance of routes to other players' capitals thanks to continental surveyor.

I use a very similar strategy to Proteus but only build a few wonders. If I have extra production in capital I spam military units and fight.

Capital - 3 external trade routes, worker production maximizing food and production. (Rename capital to aa.. to show at top of alphabetically sorted list.)

Outlying City - 1 trade route to capital, remaining to outpost/new cities. Rush buy trade outpost/caravans in new cities. Academies and generators built around city.

Does anyone worry about giving the AI extra science and income?

I mean, I'll make it a point to prefer routes with factions that are NOT ahead or near-peer to me.

Hi Cromagnus, nice to see BE is taking more than just me away from the Civ 5 gauntlets somewhat [emoji6] .

I've been tailoring my # of cities to the faction/win condition. Am working on my first Harmony win try right now and am going wide as supposedly the more cities you have with a Mind Stem, the faster your Mind Flower blossoms. Want 10 cities at least. For a Purity win, I want to build enough cities to enclose good spaces for my Earthling settlers at the end (or else enough to dominate my landmass and leave safe space around the edges) That would depend on my landmass/settlable space size. I think the crazy coup domination wins people are getting ideally have an OCC or 1/2 expo cities at most.

Not sure about the ideal conditions for a Supremacy win. Domination wins seem to rack up unhealth and per city penalties as you conquer so I think the 4-7 swwet spots you posit would work You need enough cities to crank some trade routes and units out. I think Contact victories are pretty agnostic, so your ideal # of cities in a vacuum you arrive at would work perfectly there.

As for Sponsors, Elodie seems naturally suited for a small tall Empire as she walks down the Knowledge path.The Slavs seem theoretically better with more sprawl to increase orbital coverage but it's unclear that matters much. Africa seems better small as you don't want your wide empire to grow faster! The ARC seems better suited to non-ICS as agents don't need a large empire to support them. Hutama's trade routes get cities going sooner and quicker if you want, but doesn't necessarily mean ICS is ideal for him.

Anyway, those are my initial thoughts after some Domination and Contact wins/tries. I definitely think Sponsor and Victory Conditions play a much bigger role in ideal empire size in this than in Civ 5, so far at least.

I'm wondering, does specialising one city on food and the other on pproduction increase the output of the internal trade route between the cities?

Cromagnus said:

Option 1) 7 cities, all internal trade routes. Massive food and production.

But, eventually you'll be limiting yourself... stuck at -50 health unless you spend all your production and technology on health-boosting techs/buildings. But, if all your production and research is going towards solving unhappiness, isn't that detrimental? In a game where the tech-path isn't linear, this is essentially a waste of time.

Click to expand...

During the initial phase (~120 turns?) going unhealthy is unavoidable. But you can still probably avoid the Panicked state (< -20) with minimal time investment in Clinic/Cyto/Pharma in each city. With ITRs that takes at most 8-9 turns per city for all three. So you won't be "wasting time" for very long. Once you reach Biowells, Profiteering, and Magnasanti, acquiring positive health and even Utopian state (> +20) is trivial. If for some reason those are not enough, Gene Garden and Biolab are not hard to set up too.

Cromagnus said:

Option 5) 4 cities, 6 internal trade routes, 6 external.

This feels like the sweet spot to me from the games I've played. However, maybe I'm just so used to Civ5 that I can't appreciate the value of going wide. The AI seems to go wide all the time, but I tend to tech faster than the AI...

So, thoughts?

Click to expand...

There's really no reason to stay on four cities. With ITRs, new cities will never drag your colony, and the production capabilities of your core cities will also linearly scale up.

So to my understanding trade yields are based on the difference of in what the tiles create with 4 categories.

A) Internal-Food
B) Internal-Hammers
C) External-Science
D) External-Energy

So ideally you want internal trade routes to be like this if you are going internal trade routes predominantly

City A which has very high food production
trades with
City B which has very high hammer production

eventually though it is going to be like this

City A which has very high food production. Either Farms or Biowells
trades with
City B is your Specialist city with Academies if you go science, Manufacturies or Mines if you go production, Terrascapes or Dome if you go culture, etc.

Thus I see Ideally you will do this. Make 8 cities (any more and it is not fun in my mind.) The reason for 8 is the math ends up perfect with all the cities have a trading partners, they partner is all the "opposite" of them, and the person you trade with makes logical sense in the order of which cities appear (you can't trade with city 7 if you do not have a city 7 yet) You will also want to tell the city govenor to focus on F in food cities and S in your specialist cities. You do this if you do not want to micromanage the tiles yourself.

0-Capital-Food at first, switch to specialist once you have all 8 cities for by then your capital will be huge. When your city is huge you will have diminishing returns with population growth with how much food has to be raised as well as diminishing returns on what tiles are the best tiles.
1-Food
2-Specialist
3-Food
4-Specialist
5-Food
6-Specialist
7-Food

F is Food
S is Specialist

The Odds trade with the Evens

Who trades with who
0 the Capital (Food at First Swap to Specialist) trades with 1,3,5 (F)
1(F) trades with 0,2,4 (S)
2(S) trades with 1,3,7 (F)
3(F) trades with 0,2,6 (S)
4(S) trades with 1,5,7 (F)
5(F) trades with 0,4,6 (S)
6(S) trades with 3,5,7 (F)
7(F) trades with 2,4,6 (S)

To my understanding this way makes sense, any thoughts?

If I understand correct, Roland00, you have 0 trading with 1 AND 1 trading with 0. You can't do that. If 0 trades with 1, 1 cannot send a mirroring route back to 0.

Here's my general strategy and understanding:

1. Internal TR yield is based on differential of hammers and food. Therefore, in order to maximize yield, you need to understand this and control growth.
2. Since the Bionics tech is part of any developed strategy, Biowell improvement from the tech allows you to grow and expand healthiness.

So based on this, this is what I typically do:

1. Spam Biowells in the capital. It will keep the food yield sky-high and keep you healthy. Maintenance cost is trivially offset by external TRs.
2. Every satellite city is spammed with Generators. The satellite city will want to grow enough to work useful tiles but not have too much food or hammers since it will decrease the yield to the capital. This also helps manage health and prevents your satellites from working crap tiles (like +2f). Remember that there are very, very few +bonuses based on population anymore so there's no need for large population counts.
3. 1 TR from satellite city to Capital. All other external. Why? Sending other internal TRs to satellite cities will grow them quicker which translates to less yield from that city to the capital (remember, yield is based on differential).

The goal is to have an absolutely monstrous capital while controlling satellite city growth to manage health. Considering most VCs are capital-hammer-centric (meaning all the crap like Transcendental Equation, Emancipation Gate, Mind Flower all cost a ton of hammers), we want our capital to have an insane amount of hammers.

It's just a basic evolution of the early Civ5 ICS strats (keeping satellites at 4 then 6 pop and capping them).

Cromagnus said:

But, eventually you'll be limiting yourself... stuck at -50 health unless you spend all your production and technology on health-boosting techs/buildings.

Click to expand...

If you're on -50 health, you haven't picked the right virtues.

zenmaster said:

Hi Cromagnus, nice to see BE is taking more than just me away from the Civ 5 gauntlets somewhat [emoji6] .

I've been tailoring my # of cities to the faction/win condition. Am working on my first Harmony win try right now and am going wide as supposedly the more cities you have with a Mind Stem, the faster your Mind Flower blossoms. Want 10 cities at least. For a Purity win, I want to build enough cities to enclose good spaces for my Earthling settlers at the end (or else enough to dominate my landmass and leave safe space around the edges) That would depend on my landmass/settlable space size. I think the crazy coup domination wins people are getting ideally have an OCC or 1/2 expo cities at most.

Not sure about the ideal conditions for a Supremacy win. Domination wins seem to rack up unhealth and per city penalties as you conquer so I think the 4-7 swwet spots you posit would work You need enough cities to crank some trade routes and units out. I think Contact victories are pretty agnostic, so your ideal # of cities in a vacuum you arrive at would work perfectly there.

As for Sponsors, Elodie seems naturally suited for a small tall Empire as she walks down the Knowledge path.The Slavs seem theoretically better with more sprawl to increase orbital coverage but it's unclear that matters much. Africa seems better small as you don't want your wide empire to grow faster! The ARC seems better suited to non-ICS as agents don't need a large empire to support them. Hutama's trade routes get cities going sooner and quicker if you want, but doesn't necessarily mean ICS is ideal for him.

Anyway, those are my initial thoughts after some Domination and Contact wins/tries. I definitely think Sponsor and Victory Conditions play a much bigger role in ideal empire size in this than in Civ 5, so far at least.

Click to expand...

Zenmaster, hehe, yeah, for now anyway it is. I'm still undecided as to whether I want to invest a lot of time in this game.

For Harmony, the difference between 4 cities and 10 is less than 10 turns, because the point accumulation only occurs once you complete the Mind Flower, and the default time is like 25 turns to begin with. I think with 4 cities, I shaved 4 turns? So, 21 turns with 4, 15 turns maybe with 10? 20 cities might make a big impact, but really, the only thing that matters IMHO is how quickly you tech. However, if you can put out 10 cities without impacting your tech rate, than it might make the difference in a gauntlet.

Until they nerf trade routes, Hutama is definitely my favorite right now. 2 extra trade routes make a huge difference in science and culture. (Assuming you get culture stations, which makes a massive difference. 2 +10 culture stations in the early game is like double culture...)

milk_steak: The problem is local health caps. You can easily cap out local health in all cities and still be unhappy. Biowells don't help there. You basically need wonders and/or virtues to either give global health bonuses, or reduce unhappiness, to stay at +20 health. (Which is worth doing IMHO)

I do agree it's perfectly fine to go negative early during your expansion, but there's no reason to. If you focus on production and gold, you can still get mad tech from trade routes and spies while you expand, without exceeding the population your local health can support. The question is, which approach yields better results in the long term? Going wide (and keeping each city small) I've been able to get pretty good results, tech-wise, better than I've achieved going tall. The main issue is slow virtue accumulation. Going tall still helps with that in CivBE. And fast virtue accumulation makes a big difference.

Shafi-is-back said:

I'm wondering, does specialising one city on food and the other on pproduction increase the output of the internal trade route between the cities?

Click to expand...

I've heard some say it does, but I haven't heard confimation. But isn't it about surplus when it comes to food. If every city in your empire has a trade route with the capital, then every city will get the benefit of the capital's large food surplus. I think.

milk steak said:

Here's my general strategy and understanding:

1. Internal TR yield is based on differential of hammers and food. Therefore, in order to maximize yield, you need to understand this and control growth.
2. Since the Bionics tech is part of any developed strategy, Biowell improvement from the tech allows you to grow and expand healthiness.

So based on this, this is what I typically do:

1. Spam Biowells in the capital. It will keep the food yield sky-high and keep you healthy. Maintenance cost is trivially offset by external TRs.
2. Every satellite city is spammed with Generators. The satellite city will want to grow enough to work useful tiles but not have too much food or hammers since it will decrease the yield to the capital. This also helps manage health and prevents your satellites from working crap tiles (like +2f). Remember that there are very, very few +bonuses based on population anymore so there's no need for large population counts.
3. 1 TR from satellite city to Capital. All other external. Why? Sending other internal TRs to satellite cities will grow them quicker which translates to less yield from that city to the capital (remember, yield is based on differential).

The goal is to have an absolutely monstrous capital while controlling satellite city growth to manage health. Considering most VCs are capital-hammer-centric (meaning all the crap like Transcendental Equation, Emancipation Gate, Mind Flower all cost a ton of hammers), we want our capital to have an insane amount of hammers.

It's just a basic evolution of the early Civ5 ICS strats (keeping satellites at 4 then 6 pop and capping them).

Click to expand...

I do a similar strategy, but instead of just having the capital and then small satellite cities, I have 3 core cities and then many satellites. I reasoned that +15 food +15 industry is much better than 15 energy and 10 science, and internal trade routes don't help my rivals. Because of this, I delegate my first 3 cities as 'core' and have each satellite city send one trade route to each of them. Spam biowells in the core cities and generators in the satellites, just as you said. Land trade routes were giving +4-5/+10-11 food and production with industry, so with only 10 cities I had 3 core cities that could pump out a military unit every turn. My satellite cities were still reasonably good, and all of them managed to build every useful building. I never dropped below -20 health, and I ended up at utopia fairly easily.

Lanth said:

If you're on -50 health, you haven't picked the right virtues.

Click to expand...

Exactly, the lower half of prosperity eliminates all health issues.
Which is a problem for the other trees, because they partially depend on positive health. Bringing health to +20 via prosperity might earn you more yields (including science and culture, but not only) than having a few knowledge and industry policies and -20 health.


I also boost my capital sky-high.
There are a few industry policies that give +% to the capital in terms of gold and production, making this strategy even better. And there is a policy giving a production boost for every building already existing in the capital. There are also a ton of things that don't need to be build locally (units, planes, sats, trade units).

But I don't dogmatically distribute my TR's in a certain fashion. If a city has good naval connections to foreign cities, I send all its routes outward.

Cromagnus said:

milk_steak: The problem is local health caps. You can easily cap out local health in all cities and still be unhappy. Biowells don't help there. You basically need wonders and/or virtues to either give global health bonuses, or reduce unhappiness, to stay at +20 health. (Which is worth doing IMHO)

Click to expand...

In the strat I outline, I only build Biowells in the capital. You should certainly not hit population health caps there, especially with 7+ internal TRs feeding it (unless you take deep Prosperity Virtues like Eudamonia which, frankly, doesn't feel necessary between Biowells + Joy).

(edit- I just caught that you're going for +20 health/utopia. Agree that only Biowells won't be feasible and you'll need Joy and Eudamonia if that's your goal.)

Joy From Variety Virtue is insane, though. I learned that it gives +1 health from every basic resource, not every unique basic resource. With this Virtue, basic resources become the luxuries of old and if you place cities to maximize resources (which we all do anyway), this already offsets satellite city base unhealthiness.

Empedocles said:

I do a similar strategy, but instead of just having the capital and then small satellite cities, I have 3 core cities and then many satellites. I reasoned that +15 food +15 industry is much better than 15 energy and 10 science, and internal trade routes don't help my rivals. Because of this, I delegate my first 3 cities as 'core' and have each satellite city send one trade route to each of them. Spam biowells in the core cities and generators in the satellites, just as you said. Land trade routes were giving +4-5/+10-11 food and production with industry, so with only 10 cities I had 3 core cities that could pump out a military unit every turn. My satellite cities were still reasonably good, and all of them managed to build every useful building. I never dropped below -20 health, and I ended up at utopia fairly easily.

Click to expand...

This sounds interesting! I will give it a shot next game, thanks.

I don't think crazy micromanaging of trade routes is really paying off for the most part, as things stand right now. From my experience if you expand at a roughly linear rate, and keep your cities growing, the natural flow of city growth/expansion seems to pretty much work itself out without much thought. Strong trade route yields all around. I would be surprised if the yields would be improved that much under the "ideal" trade route setup, which, would require a ridiculous level of micromanagement (and constant re-calculation). For me at least, it's pretty clearly not worth it.

Empedocles said:

I do a similar strategy, but instead of just having the capital and then small satellite cities, I have 3 core cities and then many satellites. I reasoned that +15 food +15 industry is much better than 15 energy and 10 science, and internal trade routes don't help my rivals. Because of this, I delegate my first 3 cities as 'core' and have each satellite city send one trade route to each of them. Spam biowells in the core cities and generators in the satellites, just as you said. Land trade routes were giving +4-5/+10-11 food and production with industry, so with only 10 cities I had 3 core cities that could pump out a military unit every turn. My satellite cities were still reasonably good, and all of them managed to build every useful building. I never dropped below -20 health, and I ended up at utopia fairly easily.

Click to expand...

Interesting, but do you end up with enough science this way? 1 trade route can make as much science as a smaller city. Without spamming academies, sending 2 trade routes out will probably more than double the science from most of your cities.