Hi all. First of all let me thank Albie for the work and effort and all involved in this.
I wanted to talk about the trade routes (TR) issue and try to sum it up.
TR in CIV BE are different from BNW in that the are not limited by CIV but are rather limited by cities. So the more cities you have the more TR you'll have. These TR are maybe available earlier than BNW and have a relatively high yield in comparison with the city's own yields.
All this is fine as that seems to be the philosophy or approach that was taken in CIV BE (maybe to encourage expanding with cities, who knows).
There is of course a risk involved with them which is that they can be plundered by wandering aliens, or by AI enemies (passively when war is declared you lose the TR with that said CV, and actively if they get in the path of your TR with a military unit).
This is to say that TR were supposed to be a High reward/High risk system in theory but here is where the trouble starts: High risk is well not so high because:
1) The Aliens while being a very serious menace to TR as were barbarians in BNW, suddenly cease to become one once you get the Ultrasonic Fence quest that gives immunity to all TR from Aliens for the rest of the game.
2) The A.I is not especially aggressive and as far as I have seen they rarely declare war on the human for the most part of the early and mid game and as such less worry about disrupting TR.
Attending to these two issues IMO will make TR a lot more balanced in the sense that they will work as intended in BE.
Suggested fixes:
For issue (1) we can:
-Remove the Quest Altogether (the part that protects TR, I am in favor of this for the time being as it is the less intrusive solution)
-Make the protection city specific (although again building the UF in every city will bring us back to the same issue unless we make the building more expensive idk)
-Change the quest to only protect Trade convoys or Trade vessels (it can also be the choice to make in the quest)
For issue (2) we can:
-Increase the AI aggressivity
-Have the AI factor in the potential gain they get from auto-plundering our TR with them if they declare WAR on us as opposed to them becoming docile because of the positive modifier that TR create with them.
-Make TR only able to cross through the territory of a CIV with which we have Open Borders*
*The result of this will be that we will only be able to trade with the CIVS that like us or trust us or to whom we need to pay the price for opening their land for our TR, this will also create a lot of interesting gameplay implications as well, for example it will limit the number of available TR, it will make Open Borders important as opposed to close to useless in some cases, it will prevent us from making aggressive civs less aggressive simply by sending TR to them, and even if we are a warmonger that everyone hates and refuses to open borders to we can always DEMAND open borders like current bullying major powers do or we can always trade with the good old stations
God I think I am in love with this last suggestion now..
Note: I am in the feeling that some of the complaints from TR being OP come from the fact that when we become overwhelmed with how much time we need to spend on reassigning them one may start to think "WTH how many TR do I have?? this is too much" a fix for this be it a better UI with auto assignmenet (just like what we used to have with
remember in CIV V? ) will remedy this but in the mean time please do not derail your judgement because of it, and just like Tomice said in the lines of lets try to embrace the new Gameplay Philosophy and fix it to work as intended!
Maybe you're right, it's just hard to believe!
