Hakan-i Cihan
Emperor
I do agree with you here. I like that with the introduction of trade routes most of the gold you collect comes from trade routes and city connections. But if the trade posts are removed and with this the number of improvements gets reduced, than the choice which improvement to build is kind a obvious and takes away some joy in and usefulness of micromanaging.I don't care much if trading posts are removed, but if they are, they better replace them with something. If there's no choice between what to build on tiles, it'll take a lot of strategy away from the game and from controlling your workers.
I do think that a replacing improvement yielding gold needs to be introduced. Here comes a [village --> town] system in my mind. A system as in civ IV (cottage --> hamlet --> village --> town ) is a bit too "time-stretched". But this improvement you can't spam on all the tiles by discouraging it with negative modifiers and limiting the amount within a city radius around 4-6 per city. Once you unlock this improvement with the required technology (best one of ancient or classical era techs) you only can build 1-2 of these. The limit increases with certain techs, as an increase with each era would increase the limit too much. As for the negative modifier I had in mind that villages/towns that have one or more adjacent villages/towns or a city will yield 1 less gold. This will also let the player spread out villages/towns in a “realistic way”. Here I am already proposing that a village will have at least a 2 gold yield and town 3. This will make them yield more than TP's but this wouldn’t be game breaking since you have a cap on it.
Also with this improvement I would love a change in a different aspect as well. Now all the population clutters into the city tile. And there is no limit for population. In civ 3 if your city wasn’t adjacent to a river then you needed an aqueduct for population higher than 7 and you always needed a hospital for population higher than 15. Having a limit of 10 population that a city can “house” and that each village would increase this with 4 and a town with 6. And when you have the maximum amount of town the cap on population is removed. This concept will make the placement of these villages/towns strategic as you need to defend these tiles from being raided. Otherwise raids of these tiles would reduce your population.
I also have two other propositions for these villages/towns. When you place a village/town on a tile the cultural borders will grow in that direction more easily than others. This way you can steer cultural borders in a way besides tile buying. The other idea is when a city has sea (resource) tiles and isn’t coastal you should be able to build workboats if the city has a village/town adjacent to a coast tile.
Well this is just the basic idea of how I think a replacement of a TP improvements needs to be done with additional abilities. This idea still will have some flaws, as for one what happens when a village/town tiles swaps to another city, but I do think that this can be solved in a proper way too.