How many trade posts do you build in your cities?

I'm always running short on gold it feels like. These days I've been trying out manual tile assignement and manual specialists. It works quite nicely.

Especially revealing is how if you have nothing worthwhile to build, then you could instead work many farms. Thereby, you would gain massive growth. Thereby, you can work more mines and other tiles faster.

But the problem for me is that I don't improve many trading posts in my cities.
I often pick order ideology, so I choose emphasize mines over hill trading posts.
I build farms in the beginning and mid portions of the game because they're available (unlike trading posts which come from guilds)

What I'm lacking always is GPT, with order wide sprawling empire. There's simply too much building maintenance from all the science buildings etc... And roads too! And units...

I know that the grassland tile can sustain itself, with a trading post improvement. The problem becomes when you have lots of plains land.

OR when you have many hill mines nearby that you want to work in the future after having grown more pops. +5 hammer mines are really nice. (and you get the +1 hammer from order, even to e.g. grassland iron mines)

For social policies I went tradition, patronage, rationalism and order ( I was surrounded by militaristic city states in a corner of the map, those city states were on hills also )

With rationalism, I almost always try to get posts on Jungle, giving food, science, gold all from one tile.

aside from that, posts get built in places where cause the most good. If I have lux tiles yielding good gold, then I am building fewer trade posts. If I have Tithe in the city, fewer posts.

I tend to build them when gold is needed, and on tiles that are good to work anyway: grassland, hills. If the city is huge, then I will build them on lesser tiles (tundra / dessert) because why not, so long as they are being worked.

If its a puppet city, trade posts tend to replace farms and mines because i dont care about the puppet growing and the more buildings it gets, the higher the maintenance so I dont care about crippling its production either.

Since BnW, they're almost exclusively build on my jungle hexes.

This is extremely terrain specific.

Jungle is top priority to trade post.
Second highest trade post priority is flat grassland without fresh water

It's normally best to eventually farm flat plains without fresh water. With emphasis on eventually; it's low priority to improve at all.

I barely build them unless on jungles and I get rationalism. Getting sacred path pantheon means that I get 2 , 2 (3 with commerce finisher or GA, 4 with both), 2 (3 with rationalism) and 1 . Add +1 if the jungle trading post is on a river with hydro dam.

Flat jungle without fresh water. Farms are posted over when the city reaches max useful population, which almost never happens except in the capital.

Only on tundra, since I typically cut down jungles for farms.

Try building caravans earlier, and selling unneeded strategic resources to AI. You can also sell open borders for 2 gpt.

ravenmagus said:

... You can also sell open borders for 2 gpt.

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Nice, I *Always* forget to do this.

Does the AI ever want actually your religion if you founded one yourself?

Let's imagine that they are offering on a continious basis, open borders on their side for you? This happened to me in my last game, Suleiman always wanted to give his open borders to me. But I killed all the AIs for domination victory so yea...

This is what I was wondering about though about the trading posts, are specialists and the extra population simply better choice, than trade posts? This greater population, which becomes online faster thru faster growth, allows more hammers and base beakers.

(this implies that you farm everything - and mine hills for example)

For only filling rationalism tree partially, I suppose you could go left side first, for the +2 beaker from any specialist. Trade posts would be awesome, IF you could afford to fill out the commerce tree more. More often than not, you are spending your culture on rationalism after reneissance, and finally the ideological policies.


For my GPT problems though, I must confess. I always build a kickass military usually. It feels good to have a buffer of reserve units. Old habit, old habit from civ4 games...

Always check the army statistic back in civ4 (OR get caught with your pants down). In civ 5 it's harder to take cities in early game, with surprise rushes except for the composite bow attack strategy.

(if you have reserve units at the ready, it doesn't hurt so much if you lose a few units to AI's surprise attacks from fog of war, or ranged attacks etc...)

I tend to build Trading Posts on every tile that isn't a Farm-friendly River or a resource of some kind.

I go Commerce and shoot for high levels of excess for more frequent 's, which synergize nicely with Commerce and amassed Trading Posts.

The result is based Empire with less self-sufficient cities, but the ability to Building purchase in mass to help a fledgling city.

's are stronger the more gold-producing tiles you have in the Empire.

Of course, with pretty much any strategy you want to focus on growth before going all-in on a strategy.

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If you really want to dominate the City States, go for Piety and nab the city-state gift yield boost reformation, Patronage, and Commerce: personally though, I tend to not bother with them until later on.

Grow your cities first with farms until you have filled out all specialists and working all available tiles, then replace as many improvements with trade posts as possible as long as your city doesnt starve.

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Jungle, Tundra.

Vitruvius : Do you see a science benefit with this strat? At end game, with all specialists fill out, cash is not a problem. So I wonder if you do this for science from trading post ?

Vitruvius said:

Grow your cities first with farms until you have filled out all specialists and working all available tiles, then replace as many improvements with trade posts as possible as long as your city doesnt starve.

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The problem with converting tiles to TPs in mid-to-late game is you're paying unit maintenance on the workers. This is fine if they are workers that you were already planning to keep until railroads - but a full-fledged tile conversion force is going to drain a lot of money before it makes you any. In BNW trading posts lack the positive synergy for wide empires that comes from gradually building them in conquests starting early game.

The only tile where I place a trading posts are:
(1) Flat Open Tundra without freshwater
(2) Jungle Tiles that are not yet chopped down

Since I usually play Inca, everything else is usually filled with farms or terrace farms.
Overall I feel farms are better for tall empires to make money, thanks to gold from city connections. Wide empires might consider Trading Posts once their cities hit the growth cap.

GhostSalsa said:

The problem with converting tiles to TPs in mid-to-late game is you're paying unit maintenance on the workers. This is fine if they are workers that you were already planning to keep until railroads - but a full-fledged tile conversion force is going to drain a lot of money before it makes you any. In BNW trading posts lack the positive synergy for wide empires that comes from gradually building them in conquests starting early game.

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Liberty.

On tradition, I only trade post 2 cities. Basically the workers start working on that in their free time from coal/aluminum/railroads onwards. Really, unless you need to hard build that spaceship, other improvements are kind of useless.

I only use trading posts in very specific scenarios:

- Under jungles, pretty much always.
- If I want to lock a city under certain population, and have lots of grass (specially conquered cities or some cities in a wide empire).
- I may mix in some trading posts if I finish commerce. 3 Gold per TP is to be considered.

Other than that is pretty much farms and ocasional mines. Farms are near always better due to the population also gives gold when is city connected, plus the science. Nothing beats that.

GeoModder said:

Since BnW, they're almost exclusively build on my jungle hexes.

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Same here, although if you happen to have a few puppets and intend to keep them as puppets, they run gold focus so you many want to load them with TP's.

1. Flat jungle tiles
2. Hilly jungle tiles if plenty of production from hills already
3. Some flood plains if lots of flood plains
4. Tundra
5. On pretty much everything around puppeted cities

They are so ugly I cant stand to build them and then have to watch them for the rest of the game.

*sigh* I still remember the vanilla civ5 days, trade posts used to rock in that version.

Wide empire... riverline +1 gold... Big ben and commerce used to be even better than bnw