No way to defend sea trade routes

rexman07 said:
I agree that protecting sea trade routes right now just isn't fun.


But that's missing the point.

Having to protect my trade routes against unseen, unpredictable, potential threats -- EVERY TURN -- is not FUN! It's far, FAR too fiddly.
That's why so many people like the idea of a "patrol this trade route" option. It would remove some of the tedium.
Click to expand...

This I think is the point a lot of people are trying to make. I don't know what went behind Firaxis walls but ultimately I don't think they were looking to make it this big of an issue to guard. Who wants to micro ships to guard ships?

An easy solution may be to make it take 2 turns to plunder a trade route. That way at least if you have a navy you have a chance to respond. Or make it so trade routes cannot be plundered if there is a combat ship within movement range.
 
rexman07 said:
I agree that protecting sea trade routes right now just isn't fun.

I'm in a game as the Ottomans, where I built the Great Lighthouse, used my first Trireme to capture a barbarian Galley (which I then sailed home and upgraded), and then captured a third one. I had these three ships patrolling my coasts to protect my two sea routes. Yet I STILL lost two naval sea routes to barbarian Galleys that somehow snuck through the cracks!

So, maybe I did a poor job distributing my boats or whatever to protect my trade routes. That's fair. I'm new to the expansion.

But that's missing the point.

Having to protect my trade routes against unseen, unpredictable, potential threats -- EVERY TURN -- is not FUN! It's far, FAR too fiddly. We're talking about spending, maybe, an hour of my life over the course of a full game just on positioning my units to guard against barbarian spawning or declarations of war that never came.

I consider it cheating to just reload from a recent autosave whenever something bad happens to you. But with the current implementation of naval trade routes, I'm tempted to just park my Caravels in my cities, and then if one of them gets randomly plundered, I'll reload and send out the Caravel to guard it.

That's why so many people like the idea of a "patrol this trade route" option. It would remove some of the tedium.
Click to expand...

Explore your surroundings, take the Honor opener and destroy those barb camps that pop up. Barb camps always pop up with a land unit in them first, so you have a number of turns before they start spawning ships.
 
I don't understand the issue really. You are trading far away from your borders for a greater amount of money (risk vs. reward). If you don't want barbarians to pillage your trade routes, either expand your empire along the route for greater visibility, build a bigger navy for visibility and keep them on alert (you don't have to manually use them and don't use them for anything else), or become friends with any city-states or empires on the route for more safety in their territories. If you don't want other empires to raid your trade routes, then don't trade with them, or don't declare war on them with routes in or near their borders, or just trade with city-states with a route nowhere near other countries. You can't, won't, and shouldn't have complete safety - that's the risk you pay for higher gold. I don't think it needs to be altered at all.
 
People just want the bigger rewards of cargo ships vs caravans but they don't want to work for it.

That all I see. It's pretty typical in a gaming community, "give me this instant reward or I will quit". Next comes the threat, "if you don't do as I say, no one will buy it and the product will fail".
 
Calouste said:
Explore your surroundings, take the Honor opener and destroy those barb camps that pop up. Barb camps always pop up with a land unit in them first, so you have a number of turns before they start spawning ships.
Click to expand...

I was going to respond with this as well. Well said.

I think the system is fine as is...much better than pre-BNW.
 
Philosophia said:
It's annoying to have the trade routes pillaged so easily because it's such a big part of keeping up in gold. Also, I find that wars in history have usually been beneficial to the economy. Think of World War I and how it, partly, created a huge influx of money in the 1920s through a large amount of jobs. Again in World War II when the United States became a leader in the world's economy because of how much production was needed and thus more jobs. I think that, yes, there should be some consequence to going to war and that consequence should discourage the player from being at war all game. However, I don't think the player should have no way, or rather not have an adequate way of preventing key sources of money from being ruined because this just wasn't the case in real life to my knowledge.
Click to expand...
Eh what? Have you ever heard of the Great Depression? Europe was ruined in the 20s, and Germany's economy was destroyed after both wars. Not to mention that they were starved into submission by the British blockade in WW1. Britain as well was facing severe resource shortages because they couldn't defend their water trade routes.
 
Calouste said:
Explore your surroundings, take the Honor opener and destroy those barb camps that pop up. Barb camps always pop up with a land unit in them first, so you have a number of turns before they start spawning ships.
Click to expand...

I was running Trireme patrols on the same coastline. Sure, Honor would help sometimes, although one of the two times I was plundered by a barbarian Galley that must have spawned on the other side of America (which I couldn't explore without Open Borders, which don't unlock until friggin' Civil Service). However, I think it's clear that a design goal of the game is that no single social policy is "required" to play the rest of the game adequately. I like that the trade route system buffs the Honor opener, which otherwise feels pretty weak for me. But I reject out of hand that Honor is the "expected" solution to protect trade routes. Surely there should be other ways.

Adjuvant said:
People just want the bigger rewards of cargo ships vs caravans but they don't want to work for it.

That all I see. It's pretty typical in a gaming community, "give me this instant reward or I will quit". Next comes the threat, "if you don't do as I say, no one will buy it and the product will fail".
Click to expand...

I know what you mean: people come on in here complaining, "I haven't adapted to the expansion's changes yet, waaaa." But reread my post. I got three Triremes to patrol a relatively tiny area of coast, and I still got bushwhacked twice. Now it's the Renaissance, and I've four Caravels, with both Great Lighthouse and the Exploration opener, and I'm protecting all five of my international sea trade routes.

But it's not FUN. It's TEDIOUS.

This discussion reminds me of the column written by Mark Rosewater, Lead Designer of Magic: the Gathering. Here's a sample column where he talks about common design mistakes, and I feel like several of them apply to the current trade route system.
http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtgcom/daily/mr253

Mistake #1 – Making The Audience Do Something They Don’t Want To Do

You, the designer, can make the player do anything you want, but you can’t make them enjoy it. A good designer makes the game fun because he lets the players essentially do what they want to do.​

An example Rosewater gives from Magic: he designed Odyssey block, whose mechanics revolved around the graveyard. Often in Odyssey block, the "correct play" was to use some irrelevant ability like "Discard a card: this creature gains first strike until end of turn" just to get more cards into your graveyard, because you had some other ability like "Threshold -- If you have 7 or more cards in your graveyard, this creature gains +4/+4." But you know what Rosewater discovered? Players don't enjoy discarding their cards to eke out some weird advantage. Players like to play their cards!

Back to Brave New World. As a cautious player, I don't really want to send my caravans and cargo ships into potentially hostile countries across hexes that I don't have visibility on. But the game gives me very strong incentives to do it. Can I really afford to choose 3 gold per turn with Tyre over 7 gold and 1 science per turn with Washington?

Mistake #2 – Making The Audience Do Unnecessary Work

Patrolling my shipping lanes every turn is tedious. And most of the time, they don't get attacked, so it was unnecessary.

Mistake #3 – Don’t Put Things They Care About Out of Their Control

lankypeter made many helpful suggestions about ways to lower or mitigate the risk of international trade routes, which also makes it sound more fun. Thanks! But there's still a definite feeling of loss of control here. Maybe a barbarian camp will spawn along my trade route; maybe it won't. Maybe my cargo ship will be beyond closed borders when a barbarian Galley sails up; maybe it will be behind my Trireme. Maybe America will sink that barbarian Galley before it sails up to my cargo ship; maybe it won't. Maybe another nation will declare war on me who is close to a trade route I established 28 turns ago, or maybe they won't.
 
Acidrain said:
To pillage a trade route, one has to move their unit to the same tile as caravan/cargo ship, then pillage trade route button appears on the unit command menu.
Click to expand...

You can also sit a military unit on the route and when the cargo ship enters the tile it is auto-pillaged. This happened a couple times for me on land trade routes :) You don't get a pop up or anything, there's just a quick flash of text at the top of the screen turing the turn change.
 
Iberian said:
This I think is the point a lot of people are trying to make. I don't know what went behind Firaxis walls but ultimately I don't think they were looking to make it this big of an issue to guard. Who wants to micro ships to guard ships?

An easy solution may be to make it take 2 turns to plunder a trade route. That way at least if you have a navy you have a chance to respond. Or make it so trade routes cannot be plundered if there is a combat ship within movement range.
Click to expand...

That would be great. If trade routes had hit points, that would give you time to defend them with troops you have stationed relatively nearby, without having to micro. Every. Single. Turn.

In fact, those of you defending the current trade route implementation... did you think Civ 5 got embarked units perfectly right when the game first came out? Remember?
* You couldn't stack embarked units with naval units.
* Any naval unit could one-hit-kill any embarked unit.

The system sucked! You could bring two Destroyers with your embarked Tank, but if the enemy went between two Destroyers, your Tank was gone, and there was nothing you could do about it. Sure, there were workarounds -- I remember building these comical "iron curtains" of Destroyers (D) enveloping my embarked units (e):
Code: 
  D
 De
Deee
 Deee
  D 
   D

So yea, I could do it. Each turn of moving that armada took several minutes of careful positioning. If I screwed up one hex, BAM, my embarked Great General was dead.

Ugh.

And you know what happened? They changed it! Now embarked units can stack with naval units, and also embarked units don't necessarily get one-shotted by any naval unit that crosses it, but might take two or even three hits to sink. It's a MUCH better system. It's less all-or-nothing, and it's less fiddly, and you don't have all that paranoia of "I can move my embarked unit to this hex... unless there's an enemy Caravel in this ONE hex that I don't have visibility on."

I am positing that similar improvements lie out there for the trade route system.
 
Honestly, maybe my mistake is simply getting too upset when I lose a trade unit. They're not that expensive. Maybe you're expected to lose and rebuild some of them in a normal game? Like, I can accept losing a Scout, although I try to avoid it. But I'd never expect to actually lose one of my Workers to barbarians -- that's why I build an Archer or whatever.

I just feel like they could have designed things differently so that I felt less bad about losing trade units. Like, if trade units weren't immortal, it would feel less eventful when one explodes. (On the other hand, if I had to rebuild the trade unit every 30 turns, I'd be complaining of how tedious that was!)
 
Securion said:
Since sea trade gives you insane amounts of gold, the trade routes should really be vulnerable. But to be honest, I liked the whole "attach a military escort over the trade ship to ensure its security"-idea...
Click to expand...

This. Even with a fleet of destroyers and battleships patrolling the seven seas, my trade routes are still vulnerable because they're totally automated and seem to move AFTER I've completed my turn and placed my naval units on top of them to protect them, which makes any effort at protecting them quite useless.
 
I guess I just don't understand the frustration really. I mean, if I send a trade route into the fog of war, I fully expect it to die before the 30 turns end. I just do. I take the risk knowing I am going for that early cash grab. If I don't want to rebuild the unit and want to take on less risk, I can keep it close to home. I have even lost a cargo ship to barbarians when it was in the borders of another country. There is nothing I could have done about that, short of open borders (and I hate open borders, not that it makes sense). Risk vs. reward. Just park naval ships on both sides of the trade route in alert mode (far enough on either side to see bad things) and you should be okay. That's how I have done it so far in a few games and I usually only lose cargo ships when others DOW me.
 
lankypeter said:
I guess I just don't understand the frustration really. I mean, if I send a trade route into the fog of war, I fully expect it to die before the 30 turns end. I just do. I take the risk knowing I am going for that early cash grab. If I don't want to rebuild the unit and want to take on less risk, I can keep it close to home. I have even lost a cargo ship to barbarians when it was in the borders of another country. There is nothing I could have done about that, short of open borders (and I hate open borders, not that it makes sense). Risk vs. reward. Just park naval ships on both sides of the trade route in alert mode (far enough on either side to see bad things) and you should be okay. That's how I have done it so far in a few games and I usually only lose cargo ships when others DOW me.
Click to expand...



Several people have mentioned this fact of Risk vs Reward. While it is a great concept that I would like to see remain in the system we still need to address the fact that the current system for protecting the trade routes is probably not the most fun. Can you do it? Yes. Is it fun? No.

As a community we have a lot of smart people with good ideas of how to keep the game fun and balanced. If you have 3 sea based routes covering about 20 hexes each you need at least 9 ships to even have a good chance of intercepting a plundering foe. I am fine with the economic cost of this decision, what is tedious though is manually having to move 9 ships every turn whose sole purpose is to protect a trade route.

Give the cargo ships HP like an embarked unit. Or make it so you cannot plunder a trade route if there is a warship within movement range of the cargo ship. This still means you have to have a navy but it won't be so boring to micro.
 
If you mouseover your cargoships, it will show you the route it's taking.

Park some ships along the route or on a single point so they can fan out and respond to problems. I usually base my trade routes through only a few cities, sometimes only 1 city for sea routes, so they all converege at some point out in the ocean as they turn back home. That port is where you want to base a navy around.

You're not going to be able to defend it 100% but part of trade route planning is also knowing if you can actually defend the route.

Just as you'd be playing a high risk game sending a caravan into the fog of war in the early game with possibility of barbs all over vs. your neighbour's capital which is explored and easily defended and closer

Sea routes that go through city states you control and friendly borders are safest.

You're never going to achieve ultimate power in terms of 100% security with your trade routes, but it's always about taking risks that make sense
 
In one of games in progression..

This city state Melbourne is only reason why my trade routes was so safe.

Melbourne freaking had 15+ privateers patrolling the huge bay and stamping out every single barbarian ship that tried to sneak in.

Despite me being having poor production, due to Melbourne's strong naval presence I was able to Send a couple of privateers and several land units to aid Melbourne in smashing the barbarian camps stationed on the coastline. And eventually establish further and further port cities.

Melbourne in that game was a shining beacon of awesomesauce.
 
Trade routes should be vulnerable, but you shouldn't need to station sentries to protect them on the high seas--that's just unrealistic. As realism goes, it's common throughout history for trading caravans and fleets to have military escorts. It would be reasonable for the game to allow me to attach a ship with greater or equal movement to a cargo ship, with the effect being that the enemy can only block the trade route by interposing ships to block, but can destroy the cargo ship only by destroying the escort first. To balance that out, perhaps allow ranged attacks on cargo ships, which fits with the modern era (WW2 subs didn't have to board enemy freighters to sink them). Or if you really want to go overboard, impose a diplomatic hit for that use of ranged naval attacks to simulate the real world effect that unrestricted submarine warfare had on Germany's WWI diplomacy.
 
I agree that there should be someway to fend of attackers,but i don't want to use Frigates or any kind of available ships in Civ.I want them to have their own escort which only purpose would be to defend cargo but it can't be used to wage war,also i would like that escort is weaker than any other warship,but strong enough to beat barbarians or at least hold long enough before help arrives.
 
Chilly5 said:
War is not a viable option any longer.There is literally no incentive for a player to go for war mongering, especially in a water-dominated map.

AI spam ships and manage ships better than a human player can, such that the instant a war is declared, you can expect all of your trade routes to be ripped apart.

You can argue "well historically trade routes were the first to go in a time of war." Yes maybe that's true, but "historically" trade routes were important units to protect for this reason. Given the current game mechanics, I've sat frigates on top of my cargo ships but somehow the enemy still destroy my trade routes. The fact that my cargo ships have no vision also limits my ability to save them or protect them.

Given how exposed trade routes are, especially to an enemy AI's navy, there needs to be some way to defend trade ships. If trade ships don't get the option to flee (like workers do when barbarians come by), then there should at least be an option to attach a military escort over the trade ship to ensure its security.

As it stands right now I can expect 0 income from trade routes the instant a war is declared (particularly crippling as I'm playing Venice). This puts me in a tough corner, since on the world stage in the game I'm playing right now I'm behind technologically, diplomatically, and culturally. Military is the only forte my civ carries right now, but I can't fund a military if England's caravels destroy my trade routes left and right without any way for me to defend them.
Click to expand...

Destroy England's caravels. The best defense is always a good offense.
 
Dexters - To my understanding, mousing over will show you the trade route, but will not show you how many spaces it will advance in the next turn.

It's really quite ridiculous how unwieldy trade ships are.
In one instance I was facing off against two Greek galleasses off my southern coast. How they got there I cannot imagine, considering I had the entire greek home island surrounded by sieging frigates, but whatever. To deal with the galleasses I quickly bought and upgraded two frigates and sent them south.
I killed one of the galleasses (other was one shot from death), and noticed that my trade ships were enroute through the same path. I made sure to put my frigates over the trade ships to prevent their plunder.
In the next turn...for some reason not one but two tradeships (i guess i didnt see the other one)...suicide-ran into the parked galleass, and all of the effort of my defense frigates were for nothing. The trade ships suicide-ran into the enemy galleass.
Why?
Why...what argument can you possibly have that this makes sense?
Sure trade routes are vulnerable in real life...but...in real life people are not blind...trade vessels will dodge enemy blockaders...especially if they are in vision range...
It's just plain nonsensical really.
Ways to fix this:
- If I could attach my frigate to the trade ship, the trade ship would not die instantly. Instead there would be a "enemy nearby" notice and I could halt the trade for a turn to fend off against the enemy boats with my frigate.
- If I could at least...redraw some lines of the path of the trade route, I could avoid obstacles that are visible to me.
- Don't make the trade ships suicide-run into enemy ships when enemy ships are plainly visible...

A lot of people are making the argument about U-boats and how historically trade-routes were very susceptible.
This is great and all...but situations like the Spanish losing their treasure ships...is an example of over-extension. In game equivalent would be the Spanish sending out too many cargo ships while not having the Navy presence to defend all of them.
It would not be easy to defend a huge trade empire, every cargo ship would require the attachment of another ship, which means more cost of production as well as more upkeep gold.
At the end of the day it's still cheaper to destroy a trade fleet than it is to make one, but to have it the way it is right now, where a trade fleet is literally a open buffet for any enemy ships...(especially considering how the way the paths are programmed, multiple tradeships will travel down a single line, meaning a single enemy ship parked on that line will result in numerous trade ship casualties).
But if you invest in a huge trade empire, and also have the navy to back it up (think Britain in the 19th century), then you SHOULD profit! It should be a contest between naval power that determines whether the trade routes will die or not.

Rexman is putting it in a really good way too. The biggest problem with this defending tradeships issue is that it's just tedious, and not fun.
It's also not fun/tedious to pirate enemy trade routes.
I'm not sure, but I did not notice a system whereby I can see enemy trade routes, not even if I had a spy in their city I could not see their routes. The only way to pirate enemy trade routes is to send out ships in random tedious exploration missions on the off chance to catch random trade ships.
The AI on the other hand, somehow seems to know all of your trade routes and paths and can lock on and destroy them. Their ships are located everywhere, and it's not fun micromanaging each ship each turn to follow trade ships to make sure they are safe (when the process should be easily automated).
 
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