(Rising Tide) Resources from Trade Routes

Was watching Quill18's LP, and was rather surprised to see a trade route yield Petroleum and Titanium. Is this going to be a regular thing now?

Yes. The coming expansion, Rising Tide, removes strategic resources from diplomacy and makes them tradeable via trade routes instead.

I only ever saw strategic resources coming from the capital in the LPs so far. So it looks like there is some attempt to encourage players to set up trade routes at the very least with other capitals to encourage more international trade routes. I know a lot of players actively avoided setting internationals because it increased opponent's resources. This new addition seems like a way to increase strategic resources availability as I doubt the other side is losing resources in that trade or it would be way too abusive.

The other side Could be losing them if
1. you only get resources from a cooperating/allied player
2. the resources are only traded when you have >0 available
3. there is some bonus trade yield the resource losing side gets

I will never ever understand or like these reversed yields. Even in internal routes, it makes no sense to me... if I make a new city and send a route there from my capital, it is supposed to send supplies, thus accelerating its growth/production [like in CiV], not to take the few goods they have back to the capital.

Maybe it makes sense in the international routes, if my capital is richer than any of their PERHAPS they could benefit more than me... but still, from the gameplay standpoint, why should I send them anything? They surely make a lot of route towards me and benefit from it...

I liked the old way, the sender always gets the profits, and the choice of whom to send routes [forgive my grammar here] would be based on "who gives me better", "what is safest way" and "who is friendly".

Still, I could digest better this new system if I could send multiple routes to a same station, instead of just a single route. Seriously, why Adept Blue won't take more then one route from me?

I don't really have sufficient information to be sure about this, but my initial thought was you still could trade resources via diplomacy, but that was only possible to trade resources with another civ via diplomacy if you had a trade route running to them (either one of their cities or maybe their capital).

So, you might still be able to set up a deal by talking to the leader and getting him to agree/disagree with a trade, like in the older version of the game, but the option would only appear if you had a trade-route linked to them, and then the agreed resource swap occurs via that trade route. If something disrupted that trade route, bye-bye resources.

Am I mistaken here and such resource swaps are automatically set up as part of a trade route without diplomatically confirming it with the other leader? If you can do it automatically on a trade route without their agreement, that would mean (if it functions like the older version of the game where you "lose" access to a resource you give to another player after making the agreement), you could then suck strategic resources out of an empire you want to invade merely by setting up trade routes and choosing the "oil" or "titanium" or "firaxite" option. That would deprive them of their advanced units and satellites, and strikes me as a form of A.I. abuse.

Alternatively, it might be that now when you set up a trade of resources to another faction, you don't lose the resource you give away but "share it" so it is cloned--each of you getting a copy. That would prevent such A.I. abuse against the computer agreeing to such deals.

A fourth alternative-it might be that trade for strategic resources are only available if you have a trade route directly to a different faction's city that has that resource within the boundaries of its worked or controlled hexes/tiles. That would be an interesting complication. If you want oil from your neighbor, you can't just link up to any old city by a trade route to get that option. You would have to scout out a route directly to one of its cities that has oil within its worked tiles. (Which I sort of like in terms of complexity and the need for scouting).

Can any folks out there (like Quill18) who have actually played a build confirm if any of these alternatives are actually the case?

There is no trade menu anymore, so it's rather safe to assume that all direct trading is indeed gone.

And I haven't played Rising Tide myself so these are all assumptions, but I think these Resources will probably - just like everything you do in Covert Ops - just be conjured out of thin air. I highly doubt there will be an actual Resource Transfer where one side loses Materials.

If direct trades are gone that would be interesting. I am use to trading energy per turn for favors and turning that into energy. I also give away all of my resource during early game to get my building up sooner. If you have to trade other civs for strategic resource, securing trade routes will be a bigger deal.

aguliondew said:

If direct trades are gone that would be interesting. I am use to trading energy per turn for favors and turning that into energy. I also give away all of my resource during early game to get my building up sooner. If you have to trade other civs for strategic resource, securing trade routes will be a bigger deal.

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Yeah, I used to do the same strategy in early game, figuring that if I didn't have the Tech tree prerequisites yet to build Affinity units/Satellites, I might as well trade them to the other AIs for energy until such time as I did develop them. That makes me very interested in knowing if you can trade strategic resources through just any old trade route linked to a city or only if you link a trade route to a particular city, or if you have to have a certain level of respect/fear with that faction to open up such trades, etc.

Ryika said:

There is no trade menu anymore, so it's rather safe to assume that all direct trading is indeed gone.

And I haven't played Rising Tide myself so these are all assumptions, but I think these Resources will probably - just like everything you do in Covert Ops - just be conjured out of thin air. I highly doubt there will be an actual Resource Transfer where one side loses Materials.

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Hmm... one of my issue with BE is that I want them to make terrain more relevant which a big plus for luxuries and trading.
So it seems they're really moving away from a map centered strategy game... as far as I saw, the whole diplomacy stuff is also map independent.

BE gameplay was never about the map, so you can't really move away from that. The only important map objects in BE are Affinity Ressources and floodplain / grassland tiles. Even stuff like Titanium, Geothermal and rivers are more on the "nice to have" than "must have" side of things.

Although that's not all that new. Even CIV5 was rather straitforward compared to CIV4 - where the map would actually influence your early gameplay choises. All that changed in BE is that you don't have to adjust your early game techs anymore to unlock luxuries.

Ryika said:

There is no trade menu anymore, so it's rather safe to assume that all direct trading is indeed gone.

And I haven't played Rising Tide myself so these are all assumptions, but I think these Resources will probably - just like everything you do in Covert Ops - just be conjured out of thin air. I highly doubt there will be an actual Resource Transfer where one side loses Materials.

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You could contact those who have had some brief demo experience in it to see whether there is any direct trade mechanism left, but by the looks of things, it is indeed removed, probably as part of their 33% keep/33% modify/33% new rule.

Moreover it makes more sense in terms of trade, but hopefully it also means that if you are the person trading the resource, you get more energy in return.

Halbbruder said:

You could contact those who have had some brief demo experience in it to see whether there is any direct trade mechanism left, but by the looks of things, it is indeed removed, probably as part of their 33% keep/33% modify/33% new rule.

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I am pretty sure the devs have already confirmed that the trade menu is gone from diplomacy and that trading strategic resources has been permanently moved from diplo to trade routes. And we've seen every screen in the diplo system and there is no trade menu. The fact is that trading resources does not make sense in the new diplo system.

Makenshi said:

I will never ever understand or like these reversed yields. Even in internal routes, it makes no sense to me... if I make a new city and send a route there from my capital, it is supposed to send supplies, thus accelerating its growth/production [like in CiV], not to take the few goods they have back to the capital.

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The way internal trade works has irked me for some time but it's become one of the things I've made my peace with. It's not like global warming in civ 4 that worked so maddeningly I learned to mod the source code just to fix it.
Still, I'd like it if they fixed the illogic of an icebourne city providing so much output to better cities.

Makenshi said:

Maybe it makes sense in the international routes, if my capital is richer than any of their PERHAPS they could benefit more than me... but still, from the gameplay standpoint, why should I send them anything? They surely make a lot of route towards me and benefit from it...

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International trade I am totally fine with. It's supposed to be a rubber band mechanic to allow lower output cities to feed off of better cities in other colonies.
Why should you send them anything? Don't! Use your routes internally.
Will the AI make a route towards you and benefit from it? Yes! The same routes you turned down for being give aways look very good to the AI and they'll make those routes. However I think the AI is predisposed towards internal routes which is why you aren't seeing your cities become frequent trade destinations like you would expect with this system. Internal routes are 100% a benefit to your own colony anyway. And in one game I played where I made extensive use of external routes I found my cities to be underdeveloped due to the lack of internal routes, and that lack of development is why the external routes were profitable for me. So those factors fed back into each other and that game ended badly for me.
So the moral was to use more internals to grow cities capable of producing a lot of energy and science rather than get it all from someone else.

But who knows how different trade will work out now.

The big problem with external trade routes is that the numbers are calculated per city, so the "rubberbanding" doesn't really work. Even if you're extremely far ahead, if you have a tiny city and vision on their capital, you'll get a ton of science and energy.

If they used global values as the main factor in the calculation of who gets what and then added only some modifiers for the average city size of both cities included (so the Player that is ahead can actually still get a good yield when it connects to one of your big cities, which should encourage him to do that and passively help you rubberband for his own gain), then that would work a lot better.

And I still think internal Trade Routes should mostly yield food, not production. An amount depending on the total food production (NOT overflow!) and somewhat evenly split between both cities. That way well developed cities can get outposts to grow, while the capital (or other good cities) can also continue growing instead of stagnating somewhere between 10-20 population. The "Build Wonders in 5-6 turns!"-nonsense would be gone as well - trade routes should support the city development and not REPLACE it.

GAGA Extrem said:

BE gameplay was never about the map, so you can't really move away from that. The only important map objects in BE are Affinity Ressources and floodplain / grassland tiles. Even stuff like Titanium, Geothermal and rivers are more on the "nice to have" than "must have" side of things.

Although that's not all that new. Even CIV5 was rather straitforward compared to CIV4 - where the map would actually influence your early gameplay choises. All that changed in BE is that you don't have to adjust your early game techs anymore to unlock luxuries.

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And this is kind of sad.

In the most recent Firaxis LP there were some pretty weird resource yields from TRs. From the looks of it Pete was getting 1 of every strategic resource from one of his routes. I'm guessing that means this mechanic isn't fully finished yet.

My guess would be that the resource yields would be based on which improved resources a city has within workable distance, similar to resource variety in civ 5, but that is pure speculation.

GAGA Extrem said:

BE gameplay was never about the map, so you can't really move away from that.

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Well, Rising Tide does seem to put much more emphasis on the map. Exploration is now more important with the new artifact system. There are resources and pods on the oceans that makes sea exploration more important. And there are the new marvel quests which also require exploration.

Yes, but that only touches exploration, not really the empire managing/building aspect. Better than nothing, sure, but only one part of the problem.