Commercial Hubs/Harbors nerfed.

[darkace77450]

From the patch notes:

Commercial Hub and Harbor both provide +1 Trade Route capacity, but only the first one applies (used to stack for +2 capacity total).

While this is technically a nerf to both districts, I see it impacting harbors a lot harder than it will Commercial Hubs. Without an accompanying boost to coastal tiles/improvements, I'm afraid settling near the coast just became even less desirable than it already was. Discuss.

 

[Kodimus]

Agreed, and since Harbor gameplay is a core part of Victoria/England's kit, it just made an already weak civ a little weaker. In almost every case I will now build a Commercial Hub rather than a Harbor, even for cities settled adjacent to coast.

 

[UWHabs]

Yeah, it definitely feels like it should hit harbors harder than commerce hubs. Although I guess we might have to have a look overall, with all buildings
Harbor: 3 food, 3 gold, 2 housing, 1 gold/1 cog per adjacency
CH: 15 gold, plus adjacency

So say the Harbor gets +2, and the commerce hub gets +3, you're basically trading 13 gold for 3 food, 2 cogs, and 2 housing. Which is probably close to fair.

EXCEPT:
-Merchants are way more valuable than admirals
-Commerce hubs get a boost from commercial city-states, whereas Harbors don't get any bonuses.
-Harbors do tend to take up a "useless" tile, so they have that going for them.

Unless if you really need the housing, or you really need to build ships from the city, as long as you have any commercial city-states, it's a no-brainer for me which I prefer.

 

[drubell]

At a certain point (15ish traders) I stop building traders anyway because the amount of clicks to micromanage traders gets annoying and time-consuming.

 

[psychoneirik]

Well, you might be right, but they also made circumnavigation easier and nerfed embarked units, so maybe Great Admirals will be more important now.

 

[isau]

Ouch. That's a serious blow to Harbors. Personally I think each CD should count for 1/2 trade route, and each Harbor for 1 trade route. But you can only get of the two bonuses per city. So if you have 20 cities, you can have up to 20 Trade Routes (if you have a Harbor in every one), or 10 if you build CDs in every one and ignored Harbors.

 

[isau]

Ugh so not only did they change this, they apparently changed the way the MODIFIER_PLAYER_DISTRICTS_ADJUST_TRADE_ROUTE_CAPACITY modifier works entirely. Basically, it doesn't. They appear to have now hardwired trade routes to Commercial Zones and Harbors and mods that adjust which districts provide Trade Routes no longer function. It simply ignores the modifier entirely.

No word yet on whether this means they accidentally broke whichever City State provides trade routes for each Encampment or whether that was grandfathered in somehow. But this is definitely now busted in my Combined Tweaks mod, so time to redesign Russia and Arabia again.

 

[bbbt]

I would've liked them to nerf trade routes more by forcing them to be 'spread out more':

Something like a city center gives 1 slot for an incoming trade route and 1 slot for an outgoing trade route. Commerical and Harbor each add 1 more (and the palace adds one for the capital). So it's not all your internal trade routes going to one high-producing city.

 

[isau]

Good news--I was wrong about the modifier being broken. What they actually did was delete a row off the Districts table (TradeRouteCapacity), which will hose your mod if you referenced it. My mod was crashing so it looked like this was coded behind the scenes. Once I did more digging I could see that Trade Routes are now controlled by a modifier on the DistrictModifiers table instead. So I suppose at least the good news is if you hate the new trade route rules, its easy to undo them.

 

[Kyro]

They just nerfed Australia before it even came out. Coastal cities are already very weak and instead of fixing that they chose to nerf trade routes which is no where near as overpowered as warmongering. Marvelous. Ocean tiles being useless coastal cities will be a pure liability given there's nothing a land based city within reach of the ocean can't do better.

 

[ShinigamiKenji]

Coastal cities and Harbors still have Frigates/Battleships going for them. Though yeah, CH became the undisputable king of districts.

Edit:

Now that I think about it, I hardly need CH and Harbours in one city. Most of the time they only need one of them and the victory district, until the game is almost work.

Encampments got to second place among districts, with IZs and Campi now.

 

[player1 fanatic]

I would still build Harbords in all my near water cities. What this change for me is that CH is less important for those cities, if I'm already good with gold.

 

[bladex]

waste of time even building harbors now...

 

[Victoria]

{##%#}}{{}#%%%% ;()£<<>~, {}{\^*€<#~~ !!!!!!

 

[upi00r]

Does it affect Polish Cloth Hall (Sukiennice) bonus somehow?

 

[Magil]

Good news--I was wrong about the modifier being broken. What they actually did was delete a row off the Districts table (TradeRouteCapacity), which will hose your mod if you referenced it. My mod was crashing so it looked like this was coded behind the scenes. Once I did more digging I could see that Trade Routes are now controlled by a modifier on the DistrictModifiers table instead. So I suppose at least the good news is if you hate the new trade route rules, its easy to undo them.

Wouldn't the only thing you need to do is remove <SubjectRequirementSetId>HARBOR_TRADE_ROUTE_CAPACITY_REQUIREMENTS</SubjectRequirementSetId> from Districts.xml? That's the part of the code that basically seems to say "Harbors only give a trade route if the city doesn't have a Commercial Hub".

 

[isau]

Wouldn't the only thing you need to do is remove <SubjectRequirementSetId>HARBOR_TRADE_ROUTE_CAPACITY_REQUIREMENTS</SubjectRequirementSetId> from Districts.xml? That's the part of the code that basically seems to say "Harbors only give a trade route if the city doesn't have a Commercial Hub".

Yep.

 

[NukeAJS]

Harbors should always be half as cheap as all other districts anyways. The Royal Dockyard should be just a 1/4 of the cost of a normal district.

This should simply reflect the reality -- harbors aren't very good so they're cheaper. Lighthouses can give a nice early housing bonus, but it's only plus one. Encampments+barracks do the same thing but add production (more useful) rather than food and gold (situational) in addition to making it a lot harder to take a city. Encampments are almost a no-brainer in border cities where diplomatic relations are bad. They're also marginally useful in cities where you plan to build IDs -- focusing on production.

The only real advantage of harbors is being able to build ships in a city that isn't on the coast and being able to connect trade routes to that city over the sea. The navy game, at the moment, is usually not so important. The trade route connection part -- it's certainly useful if you have lots of overseas colonies; however, founding a city on the coast and capping its growth at 4 pop (so it uses a single amenity) gets the same job done, doesn't "take away" a district slot from the city you want to grow and allows two districts in the 4 pop city.

Either that or they need to give the harbor a native +gold bonus (+2?) in addition to the +1 from sea resources, make lighthouses, shipyards, and dockyards all better -- perhaps double their yields and give the lighthouse +2 housing or give all of the buildings +1 housing. AND though admirals are certainly useful, maybe revisit what some of them do?

 

[TheArchduke]

Facepalm.

Water cities were useless before now, even more so now.

They need someone who knows how to play the game in that testing group of theirs, judging from the twitch stream the devs seriously do not know how their own game works, but then again they seldom do.

 

[gettingfat]

If they want to nerf CD they just need to limit the number of trade routes initiated from each city, so it will be impossible to use a city with great Zimbabwe for 30 routes. The most critical strength of CD is the flexibility and versatility of trade routes. Just by making the trade route use less flexible is a sufficient nerf imho.

The harbor should be left untouched and may even need a slight boost like adding a policy to build harbors and harbor's buildings with 30% discount like that one for encampment.

I agree with the above post the devs know nothing about their own game.