World market

Instead of setting up trade talks with a specific person you could just but something out on the open market with a set price that people would have to pay to get some.

For example if I have extra iron I could just put it out on the market for 20 gpt. Anyone who wanted it would just start paying me 20gpt, and they would have iron. This way embargoes would be very important because they would be the only way that you could stop someone from buying your goods.

That's an innovative idea! This way you didn't need to go through all your opponents and see if they would like it. It's simple and effective, IMHO.

like in Hearts of Iron, Great Idea.

Like it but seems like it takes away some power.
Definitely they should not be able to just start buying it because sometimes you dont want to make offers to all other civs, you might not watn to help out rivals. On the same note sometimes you might just want to make others pay more since they have more money.
Other than that I like the idea.

Why is it that I can not gain an advantage of knowing a civ that others don't by brokering commodities. For instance, if civ A has lots of spices and nothing else and civ C has lots of iron but would like spices, I should be able to purchase extra spice and iron and sell them to A and C (for a healthy profit, of course).

I like it

Another suggestion would be to force the caravans to actually move. The tech of both parties involved (if it is a trade), the sea lanes, maps, etc. could all play a factor. The caravans start moving from the source to the recipient's capitol. Along the way, tarrifs could be demanded from civs that the caravans are moving through (or barbarians, pirates and bandits) to allow the flow of goods. Whenever a caravan arrives at the destination, the civ has the commodity.

Once the resource is being obtained the caravans would automatically move to their destination. A civ could garrison caravans by attaching military units, but the computer would automatically move all merchant caravans.

In addition, this could allow stockpiling of certain resources. I read in other threads something that I whole-heartedly agree with: one source of oil in Texas does not supply the USA. Thus, each source could have a certain effect of the civ.

For simplicity sake, non-strategic resources should supply the recipient each time they make it to the capitol (i.e. every turn that spices, furs or silks arrive, you merchants are able to sell them giving you happy smiles).

This would allow the much added benefit of attacking caravan routes with privateers and soldiers, either to disrupt an enemy or to profit from the resource yourself. Of course, interupting a supply route would piss off both nations involved in the route.

This could allow for lots of fun negotiations with other civs and a much, much greater role for barbarians (who, btw, should not be able to just pop up anywhere! they must have some source, like a bunch of unhappy dissidents who decide to leave one of your cities and form a gang.)

I like the tariffs idea. I'm not sure about actually moving the carivans it might become incredibly annoying by the modern age.

@rcoutme: caravans and freights were in Civ2, trade-routes in CTP. They sound like a good idea, but only add micromanagement. I absolutely hated it in CTP to always renew my trade-routes after some pesky pirate went in that disrupted it. It was interesting the first two times it happened, then it became tedious. No thanks.

The idea about civs getting benefits from trade routes going through their lands is good though. They did that in GalCiv. For every turn that a freighter was in your area, you would get some money. The freighters worked automatically, by the way. Whenever they got destroyed, another would take its place automatically, which was nice. In CTP you had to manually renew the routes

The idea was an automatic shipping system. Icons would represent where the caravans were, but the computer would move the whole deal. A civ could simply assign units to caravan guarding if they chose, these units would, in effect, disappear until the caravans they guarded arrived.

I agree that CTP's system did not work. Neither did Civ2 since once a trade route was established the only way to break it was to destroy one of the cities. The tedium would be taken out of the system by having the caravans generated automatically, each turn. The computer would do all of the tedium work. The only micromanagement that would be needed would be to try to prevent the occasional interuption or to protect vs pirates, etc.

The caravan movement should be text based.

EX: Sire, our caravan loading our spice trade from the Chinese has arrived in Hamburg.
-or-
EX: Sire! The caravan loading our spice trade from the Chinese has been sacked by hostile Jute barbarians!

Aldous has the idea that I had in mind. Thanks A XI

This would propably have an Impact on other Actions...

I like to be sure that my spices arrive so that i don`t have to adjust the luxury % every 2 turns.

I agree that the interuption of a trade route might cause unhappiness, however, that really is the point anyways, isn't it? Let's make trade a little more dicey, especially in the AA and MA. Pirates and raiders had to be going after something, and I don't think it was food parcels.

I like rcoutme's idea about moving caravans. This would also make it so that instead of needing roads to form a trade route, they would just make it so that your caravan could get to the other civ faster.