Am I crazy thinking trade routes to your own cities are the best?

[aimlessgun]

Sea routes that is. Typically you'll get about twice as much gold as you'd get hammers or food. 10 hammers or 10 food seems way better to me than 20 gold in most situations. The science is pretty miniscule, either 1 or zero beakers most of the time.

Are sea routes to other civs only good for tourism bonus or am I severely undervaluing gold?

 

[direblade99]

On lower difficulties you should use food routes for most of the game until the end, on high ones the gold is important to stop AI aggression and they also can get you like 5 bpt at a time when you're generating 15.

 

[aimlessgun]

Yeah wondering for Deity. So far in BNW I seem to be getting a huge amount of gold income though. More than enough for the occasional war bribe plus buying a couple CS and rushing the occasional important building.

Definitely in the very early game the science is significant and you do need the gold, but pretty soon you're up over 100 bpt and gpt and it doesnt seem as appealing.

 

[Loucypher]

Early game, you'll want those trade routes to the opponents. The beakers, the gold, it's all handy to buff up your early empire. But come late medieval/early rennaisance, you start raking in gold through other means and you can work on exploding your own cities growth by inner-city trade routes instead. Only if you're really focussing on culture + tourism do foreign trade routes > local ones in the late game.

 

[phillipwyllie]

I as a 3 city player always send my first 6 routes internally regardless of my chosen VC, even on Deity(which I don't really play). Science is the key to all VC and that requires growth. If you are lagging behind early game use the fact that techs already known are cheaper to research and any beaker overflow is multiplied. If you are running out of gold then you have too many units, not enough markets/banks/stock exchanges, or built your roads too soon. Also each strategic resource can be sold for 2gpt a piece.

My tuppence: grow early, reap the rewards later.

 

[Erneiz Hyde]

Early game, you'll want those trade routes to the opponents. The beakers, the gold, it's all handy to buff up your early empire. But come late medieval/early rennaisance, you start raking in gold through other means and you can work on exploding your own cities growth by inner-city trade routes instead. Only if you're really focussing on culture + tourism do foreign trade routes > local ones in the late game.

What "other means" exactly? In my experience gold output is directly proportional to your trade route incomes. Any other source is meager on comparison and will mostly be drained by maintenance.

 

[Browd]

Other means? How about City Connection income (pre-BNW trade routes), which can be quite substantial as the game progresses, particularly if you use food trade routes to explode your cities' populations.

 

[joncnunn]

Playing 4 city tall: My 3 non capitals indeed each have a cargo ship running to my capital. In early & mid game all food, but sometimes in late game I switch some or all over to hammer.

The rest of my cargo ships though are external trade routes for gold.

 

[Camikaze]

It does strike me as being dependent on difficulty level quite a bit, because the beakers make a difference. On lower levels that's not what trade routes are about at all, but the higher you go, the more you'll be getting, and the more you'll need it. Of course, food will boost your science no matter what difficulty you're playing on, but the marginal benefit of an international trade route would seem to increase with difficulty level.

If you play a game starting in a late era, the food & production routes outshine the gold trade routes much more than they seem to do in a regular game - you can get national wonders pumped out in very few turns and mega-cities created without much of a gold problem, while the AI lags behind with their empire development.

 

[budweiser]

On the highest levels (really all levels) what matters is the city spacing and locations. A low yield external is probably not as good as a food internal. The deal is for 30 turns and that means X food times 30 which can help the second city grown a lot which will improve internal trade via road and science via pop.

You can get the second city to 6 faster and get a library going faster.

Even if its an enemy cap 8 tiles away, do you want to trade with them or take them out? Setting up a route like that will lead to friendship and pretty soon you cant afford to attack at all because you promised to be friends and your window is gone.

 

[Teproc]

I think they're very well balanced actually. Well, on Deity. On lower levels, internal trade routes are generally better, but on Deity the beakers mean that ot's a tough choice every time for me, and depends a lot on my situation/strategy.

I guess this is not helping a lot, except that I would say it's tough to have a general rule. I do tend to send my very first caravan to a nearby AI if I can, and then use my second for food. After that, it changes a lot depending on what I need at that point.

 

[Inhalaattori]

Well I play on Diety and for the first 100-150 turns I usually have external trade routes. When Im starting to catch up Ai Civs on science I start to change them to internal. Usually food to Capital or cities with guilds.

 

[aimlessgun]

Interesting. It does sound like they're fairly well balanced

I started a Venice game after posting this, and due to a jungly calendar start I fell behind on tech early with a very slow NC, and external routes were totally key to catching up. Though by midgame since I'm Venice I have enough routes to hit internal and external all at once ^ ^

 

[Kouvb593kdnuewnd]

Well lets Think about it:

Food routes are very good for low pop cities because low pop means cheap to grow but not good for large cities that one pop may cost like 200 food, so the best useage of this type of route is on cities just founded to kick start them, however you should check the happines first Before useing these routes.

Production, very usefull to also kickstart new cities to get up the needed Buildings very quickly.
Its every usefull to then it comes to Wonders, Projects and such that you can't get by using gold.

Internal trade routes:
These strenght is very depentent on the cities on the maps, got get most out of these you should create a so called city of gold, a city that focus on having as much gold per turn as possible because the more gold your city produce the more gold these type of trade routes give.
They also get stronger if you got less Techs then the other civ so if you beeline you will likley get more out of these.
The extra gold can be used for alot of things such as:
Bribing civs and CS, rush Buildings and units, RAs and purchase tiles.

 

[Tyrus]

I use food routes a lot early on, and production routes later in the game. I use gold routes if I am playing a Civ with a trade route UA. I often send a caravan to a city-state for influence then ally right afterwards.

The question I have, though, is whether immediately kickstarting a new city with a food route is a bad idea. You only have the first ring of tiles to work, and exploding your pop in that city might not be as useful as, say, sending that food to the medium-sized city that has access to a lot of great unworked tiles, like Luxuries. I think if you were to send something to the tiny city, it should be production, to get the Granary and Library up.

 

[Erneiz Hyde]

Other means? How about City Connection income (pre-BNW trade routes), which can be quite substantial as the game progresses, particularly if you use food trade routes to explode your cities' populations.

I can concede that using 2-3 internal trade routes is really beneficial, but I'm really not convinced in devoting all of my trade routes to them. I also concede I only play Immortal and have yet to achieve a sub 300 victory so maybe my opinion is invalid, but going Freedom, I often have 3-4 cities with 35 pop each using just one or two internal trade routes. And IIRC the city connection income is around 100 gpt, and at this point most new citizens only have ocean or other crap tiles to work on or even unemployment with all the specialists filled so sometimes it feels like a waste to grow further (I know science is king, but it feels like there are more efficient ways to increase them at this point, RAs maybe, and that requires gold). 3 external trade routes can easily yield over 100 raw gpt, 6 of them can yield over 200, with the remaining two for internal routes, and with city connection that's about 300 gpt. So I guess my question is how tall must one be to achieve that number solely from city connections?

 

[TeriXeri]

In my last domination game as russia (large/king/standard/standard/frontier(2 large continents) I had no coastal cities at all until like mid-game, only like 1 AI capital was at coast on the same continent and it was in hands of Japan with at the time a massive army, and used 4 caravans to boost up one of my new cities (first food later full on hammers, as it was in a full forest/hill coast), to get a navy and some wonders (Prora/opera house) up and running.

With ships you can do even more crazy boosts as long as you keep your routes free from hostiles (I tend to play with raging barbs lately).

Some gold routes are still nice to have however, late game to keep up religious pressure and/or tech.

 

[chazzycat]

no, I generally prefer food trade routes in the first half of the game. Just watch out for happiness issues....food trade routes while growth is halted would be a huge waste, so you want to try to avoid that if possible.

growth has diminishing returns though, so at some point it usually makes sense to switch over to external routes.

 

[aimlessgun]

One thing im discovering in my Venice game is that hammer routes to puppeted cities can be really nice, since they tend to have terrible production with their gold focus and often subpar hammer land. Pretty nice that my far flung puppeted city states built airports super fast so I can airlift my armies all over

 

[manu-fan]

I really have a lot to learn then, because all my routes are with City States for the gold. I find it essential early on. I don't want to trade with other Civs, because I'm going to wipe them out. I guess I should take a look at internal routes though.