Anyone else think trade routes are a bit too good?

[elprofesor]

You already have a reason to send routes to other players. Science and gold. The yield isn't bad.

Indeed, but an internal trade route is getting twice as much, because you are on both ends of the route, and it doesn't benefit an opposing leader, and it's safer because it will only travel through your own territory (yes you can get the fence for that, but it takes a while).

Same for Stations. For example, there's that station that gives extra production. Why would you do a trade route with it, when doing a trade route with your own cities gives just as much production to two cities, and you get extra food to boot! Etc.

If you compare with BNW, internal trade routes only gave either food or production, and only to one of the two cities. They're roughly four times as strong here, and they aren't even limited nation-wide. No idea why they decided such a strong buff was needed.

 

[TheGrumpyBuddha]

I find it unbelievable that they havent changed that Auto plant quest. Why you would not take the extra trade route? +1 energy is pretty meaningless. Even if it would be +2 energy it would usually be much better to take extra trade route.

Or +5. Or +10. An external trade route will almost certainly get you 5-10 gold and 5-10 science.

 

[Acken]

Indeed, but an internal trade route is getting twice as much, because you are on both ends of the route, and it doesn't benefit an opposing leader, and it's safer because it will only travel through your own territory (yes you can get the fence for that, but it takes a while).

Same for Stations. For example, there's that station that gives extra production. Why would you do a trade route with it, when doing a trade route with your own cities gives just as much production to two cities, and you get extra food to boot! Etc.

If you compare with BNW, internal trade routes only gave either food or production, and only to one of the two cities. They're roughly four times as strong here, and they aren't even limited nation-wide. No idea why they decided such a strong buff was needed.

There's a limit to how useful production can get. External trade is a better source of science than additional production. In that sense external trade is good.

I agree that there is no contest in the early game. But once you can get 10sci 10gold out of a route or a total of say 14prod 4food it's not as clear as you make it. You dont get 10prod 10food both ways.

 

[Haggbart]

There's a limit to how useful production can get. External trade is a better source of science than additional production. In that sense external trade is good.

I agree that there is no contest in the early game. But once you can get 10sci 10gold out of a route or a total of say 14prod 4food it's not as clear as you make it.

Yes both internal and external routes are too good.

And why are stations even there? There is a virtue that gives them a buff, but except from that they are so much worse from other trade routes.

Reducing the number of routes to 1, fix the autoplant quest and reduce yields on internal routes by 33% and international routes by 20%, while buffing the stations a little bit, should take care of the problems.

 

[Jimbo30]

The station buff virtue is superb actually, I ran that one all game and it's made a huge difference. Outwith that you'd never trade with stations though, that's pretty much apparent.

Production is way off in the game and it makes me wonder if they've buffed ITR's so much to compensate. Looking at some of the building costs, you'd rarely get much built without the routes.

This is obsoleting so many of the terrain improvements, especially those that negatively affect health. The entire production mechanic of the game needs a balance pass, buildings need to be dropped hugely in cost to compensate.

 

[GhostSalsa]

The station buff virtue is superb actually, I ran that one all game and it's made a huge difference. Outwith that you'd never trade with stations though, that's pretty much apparent.

It's about the same as one of CiV's +1gold per building policies, which got you 30-50 gpt in late game, or even more if you had done a lot of conquest. In BE it seems you usually have 2 stations you can trade with (36 ept from the policy) or 3 for 54ept, the difference being that you can run this virtue at full capacity much earlier.

My point being that it's just another "gold/energy for what you should already be doing" policy/virtue and shouldn't be used as a reason not to buff base station TR yields - which are too weak without the virtue, as you say.

Production is way off in the game and it makes me wonder if they've buffed ITR's so much to compensate. Looking at some of the building costs, you'd rarely get much built without the routes.

This is obsoleting so many of the terrain improvements, especially those that negatively affect health. The entire production mechanic of the game needs a balance pass, buildings need to be dropped hugely in cost to compensate.

Yes, exactly what I was saying way back on like page 3 of this thread. If iTRs are this critical to city development, then they should just be taken out and building costs and food-to-next-pop costs reduced instead, because the intermediary step (the TR) isn't a meaningful choice anyway. It's just boring and bland.

 

[solinda]

Trade Routes need fixing. They must be capped to limit ICS, especially if they double a cities early output. The AI clearly does not use them to the extent humans players do. Trade routes are prioritized in the AI scripting, however, AI does not use internal routes to grow new cities as effectively as a human can. (see x4 game scripting problems with resource movement encouraging human ICS).

This trade routes issue has destroyed my enjoyment of the game. Fast grow infinite city spam, is probably the biggest reason Apollo seems trivial (aside from OP spy agencies and zero AI aggression). All they had to do was keep the Civ 5 system, instead they took ten steps back. Currently the game is easier than the 2nd highest Alpha Centuari difficulty, which, while having no ICS controls, at least had cheaty AI(s) that spammed ridiculous numbers of units and built city defenses.

The AI problems are vast. People, who aren't optimizing builds or even using the game-breaking tile improvements and satellites; can wreck Apollo difficulty by just building trade routes, a spy agency and farming aliens with purity.

The real fix is to:
1) Is is to remove internal trade route bonuses and cap trade routes per CIV (just have movement of resources like in CIV 5 -- yeah that's still going to allow you to beat up on AI)

That said Everyone needs to try:
1) Raging Aliens option
2) Staggered AI start off
3) Trade nerf Mod
4) AI aggressive Mod

I'm going to try an Apollo playthrough using those settings before recommending further changes. In all likelihood internal trade routes need to be removed from the game (or changed to CIV 5 - resource movement only).

 

[Stalker0]

I'm going to once again pitch the "Weaker Trade Routes" mod on the steam workshop.

I tried it out, and now will not go back.

Its

1) 1 TR per city
2) -25% yields to routes (except stations)
3) No autoplant +1 route.

What an amazing difference! Gameplay is more fun, choices more interesting, tedium severely cut back.

The interesting thing is...I am not missing the yields from the routes. I was worried that my economy would be wrecked without the food and hammers, but I am doing fine. Yes the game is slower, but not so much that its unplayable. And I think it actually helps the AIs a bit more, so they are a little more competitive.


Give it a shot, its the simplest thing in the world to make the gameplay immediately better.

 

[Jimbo30]

There are a couple of trade route weakening mods out there. I'm currently trying out "Trade Routes Rebalanced", it reduces routes to 1 (one extra in the capital) and there's a couple more small "quality of life" things in it, ie easier to find the same route as before.

 

[Acken]

If you're going to mod your game you might as well give a look to the BeBa mod since TR isn't the only broken mechanic. For example this mod also delays higher affinities and make specialists more interesting.

 

[crabe]

Here is what a lot of people are missing: Tall play was never viable before Civ V. Wide was always better, and it nearly always devolved into ICS. And ICS is, ultimately, very boring. If ICS is always the best strategy, there's no reason not to do it.

Civ V, even BNW, was never about making wide play unviable. Yes, there were penalties, but the point of all those mechanics, like national wonders, and strong percentage boosts from things like factories and the hermitage, was to make small and tall play viable in a way that it never was before. Wide play remained very viable, especially for domination, but it was no longer automatically better to have another city than to not have another city. I view this as the major achievement of Civ V. At the same time it's clear that many people felt constrained by it and wanted greater rewards for going wide. By the way, I am mostly a wide-with-liberty player in Civ V, but I hate ICS.

Per-city trade routes as powerful as they are SEEM to mean that it is always better to have more cities, as opposed to more population in a single city. The countervailing mechanics, like health, are not nearly as strong in this game, and don't seem to reward the tall player. If tall cannot compete with wide, there is a game balance problem that will ultimately reduce the fun of the game.

 

[ThePowerofTower]

Per-city trade routes as powerful as they are SEEM to mean that it is always better to have more cities, as opposed to more population in a single city. The countervailing mechanics, like health, are not nearly as strong in this game, and don't seem to reward the tall player. If tall cannot compete with wide, there is a game balance problem that will ultimately reduce the fun of the game.

This.

In particular, I played a game where I sprung up to a decent 11 cities, going Supremacy, and external trade routes were a myth. I don't like the idea that settling a new city should be a long-term investment, so I enjoy sending routes to new cities. So, my cities would slowly chug down a bit in growth and production until my newest city would have 100-something hammers and would be the destination for my new wonder, in spite of having a fifth of the population of my other cities. You can see, by this, that trade routes are more powerful than cities! I practically build things using merchant confederations.

I like the idea that new cities don't have to be a huge sink of time before they're worth something, because then it's only really worth it to settle in the early game. But this feels a little crazy.

 

[Mustakrakish]

"This fall... More than just clicking next turn... Now you reassign a trade route and only then click next turn... Prepare for..."

Sis Meier's Civilization: Beyond Trade Routes

 

[Knut_Are_M]

Personally i find there are just too many trade routes.
I would prefer it if it was 1 per city, and that internal trade routes was 50% weaker.
Also the auto plant quest would need to change to for exsample +20% trade route yield or +3 gold per auto plant.

Manageing 3 trade routes per city With that amount of yield is just not fun,
Internal trade routes are usually 1,5-2 times as good as station trade and sort of nullifies stations as an important part of the game.

also if you nerf trade routes you need to Counter Balance mid and late game building/unit/Wonder cost.

 

[Cymsdale]

It might also help to make internal trade routes only work in one direction. City A helps City B, instead of benefiting on both ends.

 

[Mustakrakish]

When they introduced trade routes in BNW, it was awesome, it was a fresh look at trade routes compared to civ IV. But it seems to me that along the way they got confused as to why they were such a nice change.

See, my view is that this semi physical (semi existant on the map) trade routes system introduced in BNW isn't good because you need to do unnecessary micromanagement. But the fact that trade can be managed and have a physical path, which can be disrupted. NOT the unnecessary micro that has zero reason to exist.

It should be heavily automated. From the very beginning it should be "create a trade mission" (not convoy or vessel, minor detail, nevermind), which has a physical representation on the map to be disrupted (but I have some thoughts on that lower*). Then you should be able to automate it, with different choises of focus, like "best routes", "safest", "internal" etc. And then they should run and run and run, until you for one or another reason want to assign / reassign a specific mission. They can still have mandatory number of turns to run before allowing to change.

* Here's an idea... Instead of having a truck or boat running back and forth that can be caught by luck and destroyed, which let's face it is a bit of a weird decision, since you get constant income every turn anyway (for good reason)... instead let it be a simple path (which is already there) without that boat or truck. And instead of plundering that truck, the misdoer leeks that same gpt (science, food and production converted to gold) as long as it stands on the path "disrupting" trade, instead of completely killing it.

 

[Haggbart]

When they introduced trade routes in BNW, it was awesome, it was a fresh look at trade routes compared to civ IV. But it seems to me that along the way they got confused as to why they were such a nice change.

See, my view is that this semi physical (semi existant on the map) trade routes system introduced in BNW isn't good because you need to do unnecessary micromanagement. But the fact that trade can be managed and have a physical path, which can be disrupted. NOT the unnecessary micro that has zero reason to exist.

It should be heavily automated. From the very beginning it should be "create a trade mission" (not convoy or vessel, minor detail, nevermind), which has a physical representation on the map to be disrupted (but I have some thoughts on that lower*). Then you should be able to automate it, with different choises of focus, like "best routes", "safest", "internal" etc. And then they should run and run and run, until you for one or another reason want to assign / reassign a specific mission. They can still have mandatory number of turns to run before allowing to change.

* Here's an idea... Instead of having a truck or boat running back and forth that can be caught by luck and destroyed, which let's face it is a bit of a weird decision, since you get constant income every turn anyway (for good reason)... instead let it be a simple path (which is already there) without that boat or truck. And instead of plundering that truck, the misdoer leeks that same gpt (science, food and production converted to gold) as long as it stands on the path "disrupting" trade, instead of completely killing it.

The problem is not so much the micromanagment itself as the number of routes to micromanage. A reduction to 1 route/city would help a lot, also add some changes to the UI, like put the previous route first on the list, and sort by gold/science/prod/culture yield.

I see the choices of internal/external/stations as potentially interesting, but the amout of routes and the meager yields of stations ruin it in its current state.

 

[Mustakrakish]

The problem is not so much the micromanagment itself as the number of routes to micromanage. A reduction to 1 route/city would help a lot, also add some changes to the UI, like put the previous route first on the list, and sort by gold/science/prod/culture yield.

But there's simply no reason for it to be, it's completely unnecessary. I say if someone wants to do it manually everytime, let him! But don't force it. That's what my suggestion is all about.
I go over the board with this example, but it's like asking me whether I want this unit to continue being fortified, every turn.

Now my suggestions are all about technical solutions, I didn't talk about there being too much trade routes, being op, in the first place, because I think it would be stating the obvious by now. It's an established fact.

EDIT:

Oh BTW, just finished a game. 29 turns of "next turn" until contact victory. No one moved a muscle. 8 cities, 3 trade routes per city. During those 29 turns I had to reassign trade routes 31 times, with only 4 out of 29 turns, micro free.

 

[Gort]

I say if someone wants to do it manually everytime, let him! But don't force it.

I disagree with this statement. You should not have to choose between playing the game optimally and having fun. Playing the game optimally should be fun.

 

[Cymsdale]

I disagree with this statement. You should not have to choose between playing the game optimally and having fun. Playing the game optimally should be fun.

Agree 100%

I think limiting the # of routes to 1 per city would make the reassignment very easy to swallow.