International Trade and Resources

(Painfully sorry for another idea thread. My ideas usually end up being too long for the "Not-worth-a-thread" thread though.)

Lolwut, trade?

There is no real international trade in Civilization V like in Civilization IV. This...sucks. It really sucks. In Civilization V, trade is either in the diplomacy screen or by connecting YOUR cities to YOUR capital.

Well, why can't you connect your cities...with your trade partner's capital?

To me, this is a major missed opportunity. Even more of a loss is how certain resources can fit into the grand scheme of things.

Connecting Resources

[I'm going to preface this by saying I like the way roads and railways look in Civilization V]

With that out of the way, the number one problem I ran into when coming up with this idea is how the AI handles it. Trade through harbors/along rivers shouldn't be that big of a problem. The problem is roads and railways. But anyway, here's a quick run-down of the idea.

1.) Connecting luxuries to your cities with roads should provide a gold bonus in the cities.

2.) Connecting your strategic resources with railways should provide a production bonus to your cities.

3.) Luxury/Strategic resources on rivers don't need either if the city is on the river as well. This makes rivers great for trade.

I was thinking +2 gold in all cities connected. +4 if silver and gems. +6 if gold. All this means is that a lot of luxuries, like Ivory and Incense, are only profitable if you build a road and is within two hexes of the city. Otherwise, you're breaking even. Of course, Trade Unions in the Commerce branch will reduce this problem quite a bit.

Railways are an interesting case. Unless you connect all your cities with railways, not all of them will gain the bonus. Also means you're going to have to do some strategic planning to make sure you can actually get a railway to connect cities without being interrupted by a road but that's no problem.I was thinking +2 production for Iron, +4 for coal, +6 for oil, and +8 for uranium.

Connecting Empires

If the capital cities of two civilizations/city-states connect through any mean (harbor, road, railway,river), then they gain the bonuses that only is gaining. Seems pretty simple, no?

I like these ideas. I think that open borders should give you like 2-3 gpt. So it's a trade-off, you can get 50 gold now, or 60-90 gold over the course of 30 turns.

I don't like the idea that you would have to connect your ressources by roads.

I'm going to start by saying I dislike the connecting resources idea, buildings like the mint and monastery already fill the role of providing bonuses to specific resources. However it has sparked off a solution for an idea for international trade I've been working on for a while.

Essentially the system works by changing the merchant specialist from a pure gold generator to a trader. There would be two levels, internal and international.

The market allows an internal trader specialist, an internal trader can go to any connected city which also has a market and trade, creating an amount of gold for his city based on the output of the city he is trading in and also an amount for the city he is trading in based on the output of his home city. Any city with a market can support any number of incoming internal traders but can only have one outgoing trader. Both cities also receive a small bonus to the traders income from the improved resources in each city (luxury, strategic and bonus).

International trade works in a similar fashion. The commerce buildings above market (bank, stock exchange) along with certain other buildings (seaport) allow the city to support a number of incoming international traders. Although limited in number international traders give income to the receiving city based on their home cities gold generation, plus improved resources, plus resources their home city receives from internal traders. An international trader's home city receives a gold bonus based on the gold output of the receiving city, plus improved resources, plus resources the receiving city gets from internal traders, plus resources from the home cities of other international traders in the receiving city.
At the beginning of each round the game will calculate the distribution of traders to receiving cities. Distribution will be done to give the receiving cities the highest income. It should also be noted that to avoid incomes spiralling out of control the portion of the bonus gold based on a city's gold output is based on the previous turns output, minus any gold from the trader in question in either city.

I envisage a panel on the city screen that tells you where the international traders in your city come from and how much gold they are contributing and an info screen that lists the top centres of trade and how much trade income they are making.

Trade routes would be through roads/railroads, harbours and rivers (I would add a jetty building to allow river trade routes).

City-States would be able to participate and compete in international trade but would also play a role in internal trade. If they are allied to a particular civ they would act as one of their allies cities for the purposes of international trade. If they did not have an ally they would be able to trade with whichever city gives them the highest gold from any civ with influence in the friends level. If no civ is their friend then any civ with positive (or zero) influence can host the receiving city.

The advantage of this idea is that it makes trade more of a competition, you have to keep an eye on other players cities to try and get the traders that bring in the most gold. You would try to compete by increasing the number of international traders you can support, opening trade routes to other nations and increasing the gold outputs of your trade centre and the number of resources coming to it from internal trade. In the event of war you can blockade and break your enemies trade routes to divert traders to your cities making trade a reason for conflict (not that the AI needs reasons ATM, but that's a discussion for another thread). By only allowing traders from nations you have granted open borders to it makes such treaties more valuable. A requirement for an international trade route to trade resources and gold could be added (although I personally think this would work better as an option).

Naokaukodem said:

I don't like the idea that you would have to connect your ressources by roads.

Click to expand...

You don't have to connect them for them to be worked and to gain the luxury bonus/strategic deposit. You DO have to connect them to gain the commerce/production bonuses.

@filli_noctus

Interesting idea. Would take heavier hand modding than my idea had in mind but it's an interesting idea nonetheless.

If I understand this idea correctly, if you have three sources of uranium all connected to your cities, each city will receive +24 per turn. That's massive, and very overpowered. I think the concept is reasonably solid, but those numbers would definitely need to be toned down.

Camikaze said:

If I understand this idea correctly, if you have three sources of uranium all connected to your cities, each city will receive +24 per turn. That's massive, and very overpowered. I think the concept is reasonably solid, but those numbers would definitely need to be toned down.

Click to expand...

You're right. I should probably halve all the numbers.

Also, this can apply to bonus resources as well which have the added benefit of allowing low-food cities to grow faster.