Trade routes: cancellation and new trade units

My first suggestion regards cancellation of trade routes. Currently trade routes are locked in for 30 turns at standard speed, which is a hell of a long time. This is both unrealistic and somewhat frustrating, as it makes trade routes very rigid and a fair bit less useful than they could otherwise be. Here is my suggestion:

Trade routes can at any time be cancelled by selecting the appropriate unit and clicking a 'Cancel' button. However, this will not take effect until the unit next reaches its home city. This means that the more flexible trade routes are the ones where the cities are closer together AND where the units can move faster. This does two things:

• Increases the importance of building roads to connect cities, as this will make land routes established between those cities far more flexible, allowing you to reassign the routes with little delay.
• Makes land routes much more useful, as Caravans will travel faster by road than Cargo Ships by sea, and so land routes will be more flexible than sea routes, giving them an edge. At the moment, land routes are really quite terrible - I almost never use them unless I'm playing on a map with no ocean.

To go along with this, I propose two additional trade units, as having just two in the entire game seems somewhat lacking:

Freight Train

Unlocked at Railroad.

Civilian unit. Generates double gold, food and production compared to normal land routes. Can only move along railroads.

This makes land routes even more useful later in the game and gives you an incentive to build railroads between your cities AND to city-states and other civs. Freight Trains are faster than Caravans and Cargo Ships, making them more flexible, as you can reassign them more often. However, if a railroad tile that they use is pillaged, the train will be destroyed, making them slightly more vulnerable. They would be particularly useful for in-empire trade, as most of your railroad connections would be within your own empire, well reflecting their actual use in real life.

Cargo Aircraft

Unlocked at Radar.

Civilian unit. May establish Air trade routes. Can only be based in a city with an Airport.

Air trade routes generate the same gold, food and production as Caravan land routes. However:

• Air routes have a greater range than either land or sea routes.
• They ignore terrain, giving them an even greater theoretical range most of the time (as Caravans and Cargo Ships have to go around obstacles and so forth), as well as letting them reach, say, cities behind mountain ranges or on another continent and landlocked.
• They are extremely fast, able to reach their home city within a turn or two of being cancelled.
• They can only be pillaged by anti-aircraft weapons and fighters, and pillaging them yields no gold.

So to summarise, these suggestions make Caravan more useful, trade routes in general more flexible and useful, add a new trade unit which is particularly good for in-empire trade (Freight Train) and one which is less efficient than the others, but much more flexible and secure, able to reach virtually any city on the map and be near-instantly reassigned (Cargo Aircraft).

Thoughts? Suggestions?

Xenocidius said:

My first suggestion regards cancellation of trade routes. Currently trade routes are locked in for 30 turns at standard speed, which is a hell of a long time. This is both unrealistic and somewhat frustrating, as it makes trade routes very rigid and a fair bit less useful than they could otherwise be. Here is my suggestion:

Trade routes can at any time be cancelled by selecting the appropriate unit and clicking a 'Cancel' button. However, this will not take effect until the unit next reaches its home city. This means that the more flexible trade routes are the ones where the cities are closer together AND where the units can move faster. This does two things:

Click to expand...

I agree with this. In practice, the caravans run to and from the origin and destination several times between the end of the trade cycles. So, why does it have to stick to the same route for the full time.

• Increases the importance of building roads to connect cities, as this will make land routes established between those cities far more flexible, allowing you to reassign the routes with little delay.
• Makes land routes much more useful, as Caravans will travel faster by road than Cargo Ships by sea, and so land routes will be more flexible than sea routes, giving them an edge. At the moment, land routes are really quite terrible - I almost never use them unless I'm playing on a map with no ocean.

Click to expand...

To go along with this, I propose two additional trade units, as having just two in the entire game seems somewhat lacking:

Freight Train

Unlocked at Railroad.

Civilian unit. Generates double gold, food and production compared to normal land routes. Can only move along railroads.

This makes land routes even more useful later in the game and gives you an incentive to build railroads between your cities AND to city-states and other civs. Freight Trains are faster than Caravans and Cargo Ships, making them more flexible, as you can reassign them more often. However, if a railroad tile that they use is pillaged, the train will be destroyed, making them slightly more vulnerable. They would be particularly useful for in-empire trade, as most of your railroad connections would be within your own empire, well reflecting their actual use in real life.

Click to expand...

I think trains should be an upgrade to the caravan.

Cargo Aircraft

Unlocked at Radar.

Civilian unit. May establish Air trade routes. Can only be based in a city with an Airport.

Air trade routes generate the same gold, food and production as Caravan land routes. However:

• Air routes have a greater range than either land or sea routes.
• They ignore terrain, giving them an even greater theoretical range most of the time (as Caravans and Cargo Ships have to go around obstacles and so forth), as well as letting them reach, say, cities behind mountain ranges or on another continent and landlocked.
• They are extremely fast, able to reach their home city within a turn or two of being cancelled.
• They can only be pillaged by anti-aircraft weapons and fighters, and pillaging them yields no gold.

Click to expand...

I think that air routes should be limited to military transportation. In reality, most cargo is moved by sea, followed by land transportation, with just fractions being done by plane. This is primarily due to transportation costs by plane.

So, the solution is to allow cargo ships to travel around the world, which will increase the need for naval protections globally. This will increase the importance of naval units. Aircraft will not have the same interesting components because they will be harder to intercept.

searcheagle said:

I think trains should be an upgrade to the caravan.

Click to expand...

I actually had that in mind originally, but I was hesitant because trains don't make caravans completely obsolete (due to the railroad restriction). I suppose the same can be said of Crossbowmen and Gatling Guns though.

searcheagle said:

I think that air routes should be limited to military transportation. In reality, most cargo is moved by sea, followed by land transportation, with just fractions being done by plane. This is primarily due to transportation costs by plane.

Click to expand...

Well, that's sort of what I had in mind for the Cargo Aircraft: quick, on-demand, versatile and secure shipping suitable for wartime use, but otherwise undesirable. This is why it is only half as efficient as the ship and train. I envisioned scenarios where, say, you'd have a somewhat isolated city under attack by enemy troops, and an air route would let you send for it to build military units, or to stop it starving under blockade (Berlin airlift style!). Alternatively, it would be useful for helping boost newly founded cities that haven't been connected to your railroad network and can't be reached by sea. But yes, generally most/all your trade routes will be by land and sea. It's nice to have options though.

searcheagle said:

So, the solution is to allow cargo ships to travel around the world, which will increase the need for naval protections globally. This will increase the importance of naval units. Aircraft will not have the same interesting components because they will be harder to intercept.

Click to expand...

I don't really like the idea of cargo ships having infinite range - I'd prefer to see lots of transshipping occur instead, so instead of, say, resource-rich Dubai trading directly with booming Shanghai, they would both trade with a small, otherwise insignificant city in a good location - say, Singapore. This could be implemented by giving a gold bonus to trade routes depending on the destination city's income from other trade routes. That way you'd have a number of busy port cities scattered around the globe in notable locations, rather than the existing free-for-all system going on. This would make it important to ensure that the trade routes of all civs are protected, not just those directly involving you, and so you'd see Royal/US Navy type things going on, with one or two civs protecting most of the world's shipping.

I think these are great ideas. I agree with all of it; the increased flexibility of trade route assignation would be very useful, and the later additions of trade unit types would have gameplay advantages and increase immersion. I love it.

searcheagle said:

I think trains should be an upgrade to the caravan.

Click to expand...

I disagree. I think the logical upgrade to a caravan is the truck (a.k.a. the lorry). Caravans can effectively go anywhere, and while the same is not exactly true of trucks, the road system in any country is going to be more extensive and reach more places than the railroads. Trucks remain one of the most important means of transporting freight even today (according to this link, more than two-thirds of U.S. freight was moved by truck last year). Caravans should keep the flexibility of their available routes even once trains become available. Furthermore, railroads have to be built tile by tile, which takes time, and getting them to cities in other civs can sometimes be problematic; Caravans should not be subject to such limitation while the player waits to get a decent railroad network in place. Having a Freight Train unit that must be built separately from Caravans and which can only move along railroads, but which make up for these drawbacks with massively increased speed and gold/food/production yields, makes total sense.