No way to defend sea trade routes

The problem I have with the automated routes is that is the turn times.

First its you're turn after that the trade routes mouve automaticly after that its the barbarians city states and then the other AI.

This means if you put a ship on a cargo ship to protect it. Then it will mouve as soon as you click next turn which causes you to never be able to protect it.

Not so sure why this isn't fixed yet.

Simply change the turn times order like this :

You , barbarians, city state , enemy Ai turns, Trade route turns (everybody)

The trade routes move before your turn begins. I don't think it's really the main problem of defending trade routes. It's a matter of remembering how far sea trade routes travel per turn. It's somewhere between 4-6 tiles.

The thing about enemies plundering cargo ships is it varies tremendously based on the map. Playing on a Small Continents style map? Then barbarians keep raiding your ships well into the Modern era and I agree it goes past the point of "fun" into simply annoying. I really wish ships could attack barb camps on the coast like they can cities. It would make Trimemes much better.

isau said:

The thing about enemies plundering cargo ships is it varies tremendously based on the map. Playing on a Small Continents style map? Then barbarians keep raiding your ships well into the Modern era and I agree it goes past the point of "fun" into simply annoying. I really wish ships could attack barb camps on the coast like they can cities. It would make Trimemes much better.

Click to expand...

Simply dissable barbarians the AI uses a lot of its time to send units to deal with barbarian camps which causes agressive AI to not use their units to take over you or other AI.

An escort trade ship command would not work, because unless you have open borders, your escort can't enter rival terrain.

The system feels fine to me. When I have a lot of sea trade routes, I just build a lot of military ships to defend them. Rather than micromanaging a single escort, I place a ship or two at various points along the route (how far apart depends on the route length, my economy, etc.). This sort of zone defense works well enough for barbarians. If I know I'm going to war, I try to find the enemy ships first and keep them away from my routes. I guess an AI could plunder my routes with targeted first strikes (if they are that smart), but it's supposed to be high risk, high reward.

The only problem I see is barbarians plundering routes in AI territory that I can't reach if I don't have open borders. That is easily remedied though and goes away entirely after Astronomy.