Fact: City connections are better then trade routes

I am very late in the game and with maxed out ocean trading for ridiculously high amounts, it never surpassed my roads. EVER. Roads are the king of gold.

So for all you warmongers out there. Make some damn roads. It's easier to defend and generates more gold then anything else.

Once your cities start growing, this is undeniably true, but there is also a finite number of City Connections you can make. So it's not like this in any way replaces trade routes. And really, is there anyone who was ignoring roads? The benefits of a road network seem fairly obvious, I thought.

Rather than ship packages by truck to the city next door, my civ prefers to ship it via transoceanic cargo ship. My people appreciate goods more after they've circled the globe a few times.

Dux1 said:

The benefits of a road network seem fairly obvious, I thought.

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Should be, but some are crying the death of war-monger games since apparently there is no other way to get gold in the game other than trade routes--of which for some reason you are not allowed to use during war. Or something.

Luxury tiles, road connections, regular trade deals, religion, and trading posts all work the same as they always did. Really, trade routes simply replaced the gold you'd normally get by working river/ocean tiles.

Funny story about that Jatta. Knew a guy who lived in Singapore and there was a certain brand of mouse that's manufactured there. It was literally cheaper for him to order off of amazon and have the same unit shipped to and then from the U.S. than it was to have it shipped straight from the factory to his home.

So there is some Truth in Telivision here, in a way.

I already hate myself for doing this, but I am compelled to http://www.elearnenglishlanguage.com/difficulties/thanthen.html

But yes I quite agree that CCs are more lucrative than TRs. I couldn't believe it when I made my first CC the other day to see my gold go up so much compared to the 4 active TRs I had going. Connect your cities!

godman85 said:

I am very late in the game and with maxed out ocean trading for ridiculously high amounts, it never surpassed my roads. EVER. Roads are the king of gold.

So for all you warmongers out there. Make some damn roads. It's easier to defend and generates more gold then anything else.

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Harbors are better yet, but those connections can be hard to defend.

Also, a common warmonger strategy, that is if anything more important now - with both fewer ways of managing early-game unhappiness and greater penalties for unhappiness that hit warmongers particularly (as they affect combat strength, production and gold) - is to raze cities upon capture, which means you have few cities to connect.

kingchris20 said:

I already hate myself for doing this, but I am compelled to http://www.elearnenglishlanguage.com/difficulties/thanthen.html

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It's the internet. At this point my brain just auto-corrects these sort of mistakes.

Way worse on facebook, anyways.

I WUZ AT DA BAR N I C DA BABE GRL

Back on topic, I don't think it was ever disputed that city trading routes were still lucrative, and anybody who sees caravans and cargo ships as a replacement for building roads to cities with 4+ pop is a nut.

It is good you still get gold from city connections. Hearing about trade routes at first made me nervous that roads would end up costing more than they could possibly make, and especially when I saw early gameplay videos that showed trade routes not requiring roads, only getting length increases.

And I think the reason people see warmongering as ruined now is simply because trade routes with a civ typically end up more profitable than taking over that civ, which indeed, is a bit off. Thusly why I think getting control of a Religion from conquering Holy Cities and an increase in plundering profits, somewhere bringing back Autocracy's culture plunder would give one incentive to consider churning out the amount of units needed to get the kind of profit that a single trade route or two would do better. Late-game this is alleviated by how capitals will typically seem as though every single building is a Wonder, but early on the target city might just have a few, and they might be ones you won't get much out of taking. The Great Library is a bit more appealing with those GW slots, but eh. Though now that there's so many shiny buildings to build, taking wonders from other people sounds like a viable plan, actually. Especially since them building it means less time they put into a defensive military...

I've never thought of this as city connections OR trade connections. You want BOTH!
Also, unless you run out of coastal cities, have all trade connections use cargo ships for 2X the benefit.

Gyra Solune said:

And I think the reason people see warmongering as ruined now is simply because trade routes with a civ typically end up more profitable than taking over that civ

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Capitals start near two unique luxuries. Taking over a neighbor generally results in monopolies over two resources. Yeah, usually comes with a war-monger penalty, but Civs will still trade with you, just not at full value. So what? When you are sitting on a crap ton of luxuries, you can afford to sell them at discount and still come out ahead.

Don't forget that puppets spammed with trading posts is yet another source of gold you wouldn't normally have had.

Really, I wonder how many here have experience with domination games. Normally you'd end up breaking the game by late medieval/early Renaissance. The loss of a few trade routes is laughable when you are pulling in several hundred gold per turn just from city connections and trading post spam.

When I began reading this thread. I got the impression that one can link cities to eachother (like, directly), and not just the capital, for increased revenue. Because I thought it was simply assumed that one would build a road network to link all cities to the capital.

Does anyone honestly not build a road network for that purpose, and troop transport, etc.? I'd like to see how many people do this. You are under suspicion!

joncnunn said:

I've never thought of this as city connections OR trade connections. You want BOTH!

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Exactly. It's not like claiming "international caravan routes are better than internal caravan routes" or something, where they're directly competing for a very fixed resource and you actually need to choose. You generally want both road connections AND whatever international trade routes you can muster. There's nothing whatsoever stopping you from having both. (And you really should.)

joncnunn said:

I've never thought of this as city connections OR trade connections. You want BOTH!
Also, unless you run out of coastal cities, have all trade connections use cargo ships for 2X the benefit.

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This exactly. You want (and maybe need) all the gold you can get.

Also, are we taking into account road maintenance? At least in the early game, my revenue from city connections isn't much more than the maintenance costs.

Teholb said:

When I began reading this thread. I got the impression that one can link cities to eachother (like, directly), and not just the capital, for increased revenue. Because I thought it was simply assumed that one would build a road network to link all cities to the capital.

Does anyone honestly not build a road network for that purpose, and troop transport, etc.? I'd like to see how many people do this. You are under suspicion!

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I do! I build roads if I know I'll be invading a nearby city with a lot of rough terrain. Being able to get those catapults/trebuchets/cannons in place and fire without taking a shot is a huge advantage, as well as being able to send in reinforcements quickly.

I've built strategic - as opposed to primarily economic - roads on occasion, but it's pretty rare, and there aren't a lot of circumstances where it makes sense. The most common case is something like when my closest city to an ocean is a few tiles away from that ocean, there's rough terrain between the city and the ocean, and I know I want to fairly regularly embark units into that ocean, I'll build the two or three square road to the see, but even that seems pretty marginal. Building superfluous road connections between cities themselves is rarely helpful; if you plot out different city combinations, it's easy to see that superfluous roads rarely save much time if your road network is reasonably efficient in the first place. Sort of the best-case scenario for superfluous roads is something like you have your cities cities in more or less a giant loop. In that case, closing the loop clearly assists travel between the two cities that'd otherwise have a gap between them by quite a bit.

Some of this is just me not being very good at the game, but I usually end up feeling that by the time I realize that a strategic road would make a big difference, it's too late for me to actually get one in place there.

City connections don't give beakers though.
I find the beakers handy in early stage of game.

RedScharlach said:

This exactly. You want (and maybe need) all the gold you can get.

Also, are we taking into account road maintenance? At least in the early game, my revenue from city connections isn't much more than the maintenance costs.

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If the city is so small it won't pay for the road for the city connection; chances are it's so small that running 8 food per turn to it for 30 turns would be the best thing to do with a spare trade connection. That additional population early may allow it to work a gold producing tile (and will definitely speed up the point it which it can pay for the road.)

Exactly how are you making this comparison? Without maxing anything I got something like 30 gold per turn from my best trade route, that's not something you can get from a normal city connection, you can hardly break 30 pop with a non capital city, it's possible, but very unusual.

Isn't it that perhaps you are comparing the total gold from roads with the total gold from trade routes? Because then the reason is probably because you have a lot more city connections than trade routes.

At any rate you can still use your trade routes to send hammers and food to your cities, thus improving the population which in turn improves the gold from city connections.

Killlbray said:

Exactly how are you making this comparison? Without maxing anything I got something like 30 gold per turn from my best trade route, that's not something you can get from a normal city connection, you can hardly break 30 pop with a non capital city, it's possible, but very unusual.

Isn't it that perhaps you are comparing the total gold from roads with the total gold from trade routes? Because then the reason is probably because you have a lot more city connections than trade routes.

At any rate you can still use your trade routes to send hammers and food to your cities, thus improving the population which in turn improves the gold from city connections.

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the fact that late game, you have 10 trade routes. While you can have an infinite amount of roads. Then you can half the maintenance. Then its based on population which can get insane later.

My connections blew away my trade routes. The easiest way to get fast gold is to invade civs with high pop wide empires. You get over 10 civilians, free roads, gold spamming, and crazy money for the connection. Order is the only way to go for war civs.

So much free happiness.