Anyone else find automated trade routes unnecessary?

aelf

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It sounds like a useful feature, but so far I fail to see how it would be effective. Unless you are producing at an insane rate or have cities that are very far from each other, your wagons aren't going to transport goods at their full capacity in each trip. For the price of less flexibility in how you want to use your wagons, you get this inefficiency. The micro of controlling your wagons manually isn't all that bad compared to the micro in Civ4. You can afford to only have a few wagons if you manage them well, and I don't think your colony produces more than several main goods for export to warrant many more.

I guess it depends on how many cities you have. But what's the point of having many cities anyway? It adds to micro without really contributing to victory. Unless you just love to have a sprawling colony, a type of satisfaction that can be derived from other games including Civ4, why would you do it? I much prefer to run a small and efficient colony.

So, with all the talk about automating trade routes, how many people actually use them?
 
The automated routs are really useful, and in certain situations micro managing your waggons would be an amazing pain in the arse

For example, imagine you had a colony with 2 prime tobaccos and you build a cigar factory in there and put 3 master tobbaconists in it. With a master tobbaco grower on each of your prime tobacco you would find that your factory is running short by perhaps 5 tobacco per turn. Now think perhaps you have a colony thats specialised in cloth production, but that colony has been built on a grassland square, its producing 3 tobacco a turn. You can set a waggon to automatically take tobacco from that colony and dump it into your cigar factory, it doesnt matter that its not taking a full load every time, what matters is, that for the price of building a waggon you are eliminating the wastage factor in your tobacco producing colony - imagine you only had 1 prime tobacco but 4 other colonys producing tobacco from their center square...

There are any number of similar examples, but the real use of an automated rout is to bring a small steady supply of whatever good it happens to be to the place that you want it to be and not to shift full loads every time
A single waggon can be set up to take the unused surplus from 3 or more colonys and concentrate it in one place where it can be put to good use
 
I use automated routes all the time. I know that they can be inefficient, but wagons are so cheap by mid-game that I don't mind building twice as many as I would if I micromanaged them instead. I automate all of them, except one or two that I will use to deliver food, tools, and lumber as needed, and maybe one or two others for trading with the natives. But my whole manufacturing chain is usually managed with automated trade routes. The biggest problem with automation is handling overstocked warehouses, but I usually find that is a symptom of me not taking advantage of my resources with the right buildings and right specialists as effectively as I could.

I love building an empire with a bustling economy. In my last game, I had 10-12 colonies and I was filling up a Galleon with the full range of finished goods from my capital at least every other turn. That was a satisfying feeling. All I needed to do is put the right specialists in the right colonies, manage my import/export settings properly, and the automated trade routes take care of everything else. That game would've taken twice as long if I tried to tweak each trade route individually for maybe a 10-20% gain in efficiency. I'm willing to build a few extra wagons to make up the difference.
 
I have seven automated trade routes running at the moment. Two to bring all food surplus to a central colony to convert into colonists, one to pick up sugar from several colonies to deliver to the distilleries that need it and another to collect the rum and deliver to my export port, ditto for tobacco/cigars, and another to collect ore. Each wagon is named for what it is doing. The individual routes may not be very efficient but wagons are cheap to produce with no maintenance so why not use them.

The only problem comes when the REF arrive and turns off the auto routes.
 
I see automated trade routes as biggest improvement over Col1. It reduced micromanagement in my games by at least 60-70%. That's also one of main reasons why I prefer Civ4Col over Col1 (despire some flaws in the remake).

What is important is good planning for them.
For example if you have factory city that eats 15 sugar, plan so that amount of imported sugar from other cities is around 15.

Also it's good to have a backup wagon train or two for special deliveries. Like when one resource starts piling up unexpectedly, or when you need to move those tools and guns.
 
Don't forget one wagon can be automated to do many trade routes. In a game I just played I only needed 3 wagons automated to manage 10+ trade routes handling sugar/tobacco/silver/rum from 8 colonies. To be honest I didn't even need 3, I just wanted my trade goods flowing into my shipping port as rapidly as possible.
 
For example, imagine you had a colony with 2 prime tobaccos and you build a cigar factory in there and put 3 master tobbaconists in it. With a master tobbaco grower on each of your prime tobacco you would find that your factory is running short by perhaps 5 tobacco per turn. Now think perhaps you have a colony thats specialised in cloth production, but that colony has been built on a grassland square, its producing 3 tobacco a turn. You can set a waggon to automatically take tobacco from that colony and dump it into your cigar factory, it doesnt matter that its not taking a full load every time, what matters is, that for the price of building a waggon you are eliminating the wastage factor in your tobacco producing colony - imagine you only had 1 prime tobacco but 4 other colonys producing tobacco from their center square...

There are any number of similar examples, but the real use of an automated rout is to bring a small steady supply of whatever good it happens to be to the place that you want it to be and not to shift full loads every time
A single waggon can be set up to take the unused surplus from 3 or more colonys and concentrate it in one place where it can be put to good use

If you move a wagon-load of tobacco to the cigar factory each time, you need to make way fewer trips. With this method, I have survived well with 2 or 3 wagons transporting all manner of goods at different intervals (flexible use) to my trading cities, with other wagons just sitting around carrying extra tools, guns and horses.

I think I play a rather tight game where I don't build things that I don't really need. My cities can build up points instead, which allows to me to grab FFs before rivals do (especially the political ones, since I don't start with liberty bells till I'm almost ready to declare independence). So far I haven't found much spare time to be building extra wagons just for automated trade routes.
 
Automated trade routs are useful, but they have serious flaws. One of the worst is that you must set Import and Export but can not control direction.

Consider:
My port city is manufacturing and/or importing tools and guns. I want to ship them inland to colonies that are Importing tools/guns. If I set tools/guns to Export in my port city and automate my merchantmen, they haul the tools/guns to Europe. If I don't set tools/guns to Export in my port city, they will not flow inland.

We need a third option: 1)Import 2)Export to Colonies 3)Export to Europe
 
Automated trade routs are useful, but they have serious flaws. One of the worst is that you must set Import and Export but can not control direction.

Consider:
My port city is manufacturing and/or importing tools and guns. I want to ship them inland to colonies that are Importing tools/guns. If I set tools/guns to Export in my port city and automate my merchantmen, they haul the tools/guns to Europe. If I don't set tools/guns to Export in my port city, they will not flow inland.

We need a third option: 1)Import 2)Export to Colonies 3)Export to Europe
If you didn't set the merchantmen to send your tools and guns to Europe, they won't do it. They don't just pick these things on their own. Similarly, you'd have to set the trade route for the port city to the inland city for the Wagon Train that's supposed to be carrying these goods too.
 
I find that in the games I play, it's not so bad to just move them manually. I have only played normal speed games however, where after maybe ten loads of a particular good you are declaring independance.
 
My game they've become very useful. Especially if you spread things out.

I ended up having my main port city be my main cloth city, so it built the lumber mill, as well as all the way up to the cloth factory.

However, my raw materials cities were other ones that I found inland, so I set up my wagons to basically funnel the cotton (and tobacco) to my producing cities, which until late weren't getting the raw materials. Since the inland cities weren't big producers, I didn't tend to build warehouses there. And let me say that a city fills up quick making 15+cotton a turn. Plus the time it takes to transport it all around, and manually fill up my wagons, it just wasn't worth it. So I automated a bunch of wagons to set all the routes up, and had my smooth-flowing economy running.

I had to be a bit careful, since at one point I had another city as my cigar-producing city, so I set it to import tobacco (as well as export 200, since I didn't have a warehouse expansion there and didn't want it to be completely overfull). Unfortunately, when I funneled all my raw materials to my production city, then funneled tobacco from there, my wagon basically went back and forth carrying 200 tobacco, since I had lots of excess. I had to re-rout them to bring the tobacco directly from the raw producers.

Although fun stuff - how much have people stocked in a warehouse? I had a bunch of cotton planters, and even with 3 weavers in a factory, I'm into my war of independance with over 900 cotton in the warehouse expansion in one city. Now, I think I decided that I had enough cotton, so all those cotton planters went off to war. If only I could have built an extra wall around the city with cotton (not to mention 400+ tobacco, 200+ ore, 400+ cigars and 500+ cloth).
 
Ive never used automatic trade routes, its too easy use the load/unload buttons on the UI. I find there is usually too many variables to using something like this, its feels as wrong as automating workers in cIV.
 
Ive never used automatic trade routes, its too easy use the load/unload buttons on the UI. I find there is usually too many variables to using something like this, its feels as wrong as automating workers in cIV.

I agree. The more cities you get, the worse the algorithm get. There is no centralized thinking in this algorithm. I played a game where I ended founding a bit more than 100 colonies and it was a complete disaster: Most of the wagons ended empty or circling around towns idling.

I hope the next patch will include a better Trade Route Management interface, just like Jeckel's one.

Really? How do you tell a merchantman which goods it is allowed to carry to Europe?
Not checked but I guess any merchantman which is auto-trading will only load up goods which are set to be exported from coastal cities.
There currently is no way to have ships move goods intra-colonies with autotrade (They always end up trying to sell them in Europe in my experience).
 
Really? How do you tell a merchantman which goods it is allowed to carry to Europe?
Well, unless we're talking about two different things, when you click the button to automate a transport, a popup appears that asks you to pick a trade route which consists of a good, a source city, and a destination city... a transport will only trade that good from that source city to that destination city.
 
Well, unless we're talking about two different things, when you click the button to automate a transport, a popup appears that asks you to pick a trade route which consists of a good, a source city, and a destination city... a transport will only trade that good from that source city to that destination city.

I have never seen that. There is a button with a cube and arrows that tells the merchantman or wagon to automate trade. It has never asked me for that information. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.
 
I have never seen that. There is a button with a cube and arrows that tells the merchantman or wagon to automate trade. It has never asked me for that information. Maybe I'm doing it wrong.

There should another button next to the button you're describing which won't automate trade but which will let you choose between available trade routes (the ones given your exports and imports parameters in your various cities). This interface sucks tho, because it's not resizable hence in languages w/ long word (like French where Ore is "minerai de fer") you won't be able to read the actual Trade route Destination most often. Also, CIV4 creates N*M trade routes based on the N imports and M exports which makes it very very long to read...
 
Really? How do you tell a merchantman which goods it is allowed to carry to Europe?

Just to clarify. There are TWO types of transport automation. There's total automatic, and another where you can identify exactly which trade routes you want it to service. I can't remember the exact interface name but the shortcut key with a transport selected is <r>. The latter is extremely useful, and you still have total control of what's going where.

In addition the domestic advisor also has a tab that shows a matrix of the trade routes and which transports are automated on them.

For sea units, keep in mind that automation is automatically cancelled if you put a unit in the boat (which is probably a good idea).
 
not to turn this into a griping session about automated trade routes, but my biggest issue with is that although I have my import colonies set to a max 200 (keep 200) for import/export, it will dump the entire wagon load of the good into the city causing overages. Of course, the wagon's left by then, so I can't re-load it to stop the spillage.
 
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