Discussion: how should trade routes work?

This is likely not the right thread for the discussion but nevertheless.

What do you expect to happen with coffee in Kodiak? You did not set a maximum limit (the other field to the right with 0) so once you dip below 75% (7 in this case I believe), import triggers and can bring as much coffee to Kodiak as is available for export in a single transaction. And now you are over the "keep minimum" of 10 so import is turned off. The standard feeder function. What do you want to do otherwise?

For the other case, have you surely set some other colony to import horses / stone? And have you assigned transports to the respective routes assuming you handle the automation by assigning transport units to routes manually?

 

it seems that the old topic had a link to this topic, so here I wrote)

I figured out the coffee myself by trial and error) thanks

I export stone and horses, not import. I created routes for an automated trading network. but this, for some reason, did not work. but when I manually created a route for exporting stone and horses (for some reason these routes were not there, when I started to find out what the problem was), everything started to work. so I would like to find out, maybe I did something wrong ?

 

Seconded. However, instead of simply hiding cities, I'd prefer to revamp the import/export screen entirely.

I find the most efficient way to set up transport networks is to have cities feed into a nearby transport hub, which gathers similar goods and relays them to the next town in a line heading east to the ports for export. Keeping transports on short linear routes also prevents them making very suboptimal choices about where to go next if they have multiple input/output cities.

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Under the current system of selecting a city to import and/or export, and then choosing from a list of all possible from/to cities, the length of that list grows and rapidly becomes unwieldy.
For example, a network with 3 cities feeding into a transport route to a final destination would look like:
A exports Hemp
B exports Hemp
C imports/exports Hemp
D imports/exports Hemp
E imports/exports Hemp
F imports Hemp

This will result in transports having to choose from the following routes:
A-C, A-D, A-E, A-F
B-C, B-D, B-E, B-F
C-D, C-E, C-F
D-C, D-E, D-F
E-C, E-D, E-F

Only one good in 6 cities resulted in 17 entries. Considering all the available goods being imported/exported through dozens of cities on larger maps, and you have a problem.

I'd like to see this changed so that we define transport routes with a specific from/to when created.
For the cities from the above example, the route selection screen becomes:
A to C Hemp
B to C Hemp
C to D Hemp
D to E Hemp
E to F Hemp

Only 5 entries instead of 17. While the current method will grow exponentially with each new city added, this method only adds 1 line per city.

The current functionality could still be maintained by allowing 'ALL' as a start/end point. This would work exactly like the current method does, creating entries in the transport screen for any cities with a matching from/to ALL for a good.

Doing it this way doesn't require trying to figure out all the possible edge cases to fully automate transport logic, it just requires the player to set up a series of simple routes.

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Currently the city export screen only shows any good which has a surplus produced at that city. This is great for not having to scroll through non-applicable goods. However, this hides goods which are only temporarily in negative values, as well as ones that actually have a surplus because of imports. To make setting up trade routes easier, it would be nice if it showed all goods produced in that city, no matter what the current gain/loss is.

Additionally, the export screen should also show all goods being imported into the city. That would make it easy to set up exports for a relay city without having to check existing routes to see exactly what is going into it.

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As a further shortcut, the route selection screen could default to sorting by city name, with all the routes from that city indented under it in an expanable list, and expand/collapse all buttons at the top. Clicking a checkbox next to each city name would select all the routes from that city.

Having a button to sort by good type would present the list as good names instead, with an expandable list under each one showing all the routes involving that good. Clicking the good name would select all those routes.

 

quoting myself from here: https://forums.civfanatics.com/threads/release-candidate-2-8-2-0-testers-needed.665065/