Eventual trade route change

Reducing it to one TR per city would solve a lot of problems, even without other tweaks. It would still be the case that the first thing you'd want to do when building a new city is get a trade route going. I actually have no problem with that -- it makes sense to me. And I like quickly growing cities.

The system breaks with 2 and 3 trade routes, though, as you get both a quickly growing city AND an external trade route or two, for + gold and + science. It means that every single new city can both support itself and get +10, +15 science, which is huge, and makes you a chump for not ICS'ing.
 
I don't know why people is so butt hurt over trade routes, except for the management issue of them, the UI is horrible.

Something is off with science, that's the real problem, if you're using all trade routes internally you should be hurting insanely in science, why is this not showing up as AI advantage?
 
Miravlix said:
I don't know why people is so butt hurt over trade routes, except for the management issue of them, the UI is horrible.

Something is off with science, that's the real problem, if you're using all trade routes internally you should be hurting insanely in science, why is this not showing up as AI advantage?
Click to expand...

I think "butt hurt" is an unproductive term for what we're discussing here. Trade routes are just too powerful, and anyone who has been around the Civ games for a time realizes that there will be a change coming. What that change will be is the general purpose of this thread.

As for the science hit, I believe people are using one of the three routes internally and the other two are pulling in science. The AI is spending routes internally also which means they're on the same playing field.
 
1 per city seems like it'll be the most obvious thing, and maybe that will also help in that you'll have to choose between solely boosting yourself internally OR getting the gold and science.

For the Autoplant quest, I do love the idea of it choosing between boosting food, or boosting production slightly, preferably from a reduced base. And for Polystralia, while I don't see anything wrong with having the +2 in capital, maybe that could be something along the lines of +1 TR per 10 citizens?

I like the Headquarters providing an extra route too, 2 there and 1 per satellite could be decently balanced enough. Maybe that could be the Autoplant quest after all? +1 TR for Headquarters, or +2E/P per plant.
 
Miravlix said:
I don't know why people is so butt hurt over trade routes, except for the management issue of them, the UI is horrible.

Something is off with science, that's the real problem, if you're using all trade routes internally you should be hurting insanely in science, why is this not showing up as AI advantage?
Click to expand...

Trade routes are incredibly powerful. The most effective strategy right now is to spam cities, disregard health, and get trade routes up and running. A mix of internal and external preferably so you will get (especially early game) an imbalanced science boost, and way too many hammers. This just snowballs out of order when you spam up to 10 cities and have 30 trade routes, each city just feeding off one another. Apollo difficulty is really easy because of this reason.
 
Feyd Rautha said:
That, I think, is the other side of the coin. These penalties are far too soft. I would also propose changes to the health/unhealth system also. I don't think you should be able to build new colonists if your are unhealthy for example.
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I personally hate "you can't do stuff" penalties. I prefer extreme inefficiency, as that means a person can still do stuff depending on their difficulty level.

Unhealth should also prevent growth at increasingly steep grades. At 10 unhealth you should be at 0% growth due to deaths superseding births. Alternatively, it could be -1 food per local unhealth. You could establish a safe city or core of cities, but annexed cities and outposts would collapse under the weight of the system.
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Why not put two things into balance? Have Unhealth severely cripple trade route yields on your side. That way, health matters more, and the more cities you have, the less valuable each trade route becomes because of increasing penalties. I don't think any other changes would be needed.
 
ZHONN said:
I don't really mind the trade route mechanics per se. The game is clearly built for them. I'd love to see somebody play well against Apollo AI without trade routes and no domination or spy coup tactics or such. If they're changed, tech and building costs have to be adjusted as well in my opinion.

What I do hate about the trade routes, is managing them. At least so far 60-80 trade routes have been a clickfest nightmare. I don't know if removing renewal of routes is the option, as as of the moment the yields can change very drastically.
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The AI also have access to trade routes (but doesn't prioritize them quite as much as human players), and there is a mod that limit you to 1 trade route/city. It makes the game somewhat harder on apollo, but not so much.
 
I have played BeyondBalance with only 1 TR/city. It slows down the pacing quite a bit, but still suffers from the problem that you can pile everything into your capital to create a super city that in return increases TR yields because it can grow and improve so quickly.

So I think reducing the number of TR is only the first step - the second step should be to actually calculate the yields in a way that the high-yield city provides a big yield for the small one - and not the other way around just because you send the TR from the small city.
 
Internal routes to get worse over time when food/prod difference between origin and destination cities gets smaller. Of course then you will priotitize exteral trade routes which are also insane.

Another thing about internal routes is that they give bigger bonus to destination city.
It should always be city with lower output instead, otherwise you can spam some small cities snd just use their routes to sipon all extra food/prod to the capitol or such.
 
Vo01985 said:
Trade routes are incredibly powerful. The most effective strategy right now is to spam cities, disregard health, and get trade routes up and running. A mix of internal and external preferably so you will get (especially early game) an imbalanced science boost, and way too many hammers. This just snowballs out of order when you spam up to 10 cities and have 30 trade routes, each city just feeding off one another. Apollo difficulty is really easy because of this reason.
Click to expand...

You don't even need the external routes if you have good internal routes. Each route should provide at least +12 net food and +12 prod to your empire. That means many more improvements and much faster growth... which will mean higher science.
 
sprang said:
You don't even need the external routes if you have good internal routes. Each route should provide at least +12 net food and +12 prod to your empire. That means many more improvements and much faster growth... which will mean higher science.
Click to expand...

I found this to be true so far. I always fill up my internal routes first, and external later. However, the improvement to protect your trade routes doesn't apply to shipping routes, only land routes. I've had so many trade ships killed by those damned sea thingies I just quit making them.
 
I don't really like the concept of trade route per city, it promotes ICS. BNW did a much better job at that.
 
I agree with many of the proposal for trading, particularly limiting the number of trade routes to a cap for the entire cilvisation, say ten. This is agnostic to tall or wide Civs, rather than encouraging city spam, as has been stated by many here.

I should just state that I don't mind the management of trade routes and think they add a lot to the game, but I agree they are too powerful as it stands and need reducing in strength.

But could I also propose a few additions (I don't know if Civ5 already has these as I've not played it):
1) Given that routes are capped at say 10 per civ, create a new National Wonder, say 'Trade Nexus' that grants 3 or 4 additional trade routes to the one city in which it is built. This is only possible after researching an expensive tech, but turns that one city in your empire into a true hub for trade. With 4 added routes, it's nice to have, but not essential and its more a mid-game building.

2) Remove the ability to render your trade caravans immune from alien attack, but have such attacks reduce the returns rather than kill the convoy outright (some of the convoy get killed but the route remains) - this forces you to protect your trade convoys with military on the route, but not to be constantly rebuilding trade units to replace dead ones. You might make longer routes more profitable to make them worth your while. For sea trade this reduced return would only make sense if the unit was a fleet not a single vessel(!)

3) Add an option to diplomacy to cease trading with a given civilisation. This not only severs your trade with them, it prevents them from setting up routes to you (which you currently have no power to prevent unless you're at war). You can then stop helping the guy whose pulling away from you in affinity, without attacking him. Removing the trade embargo could be an item of negotiation in deal-making.

4) Extending (3) further, another option to diplomacy would then be to request a leader to cease trading with a third party, creating an international trade embargo. Civs with which you are in alliance might be obliged to embargo anyone you embargo, but there might also be get-out clauses that can be established, if this would be too punitive for the other guy.
 
Here is how I would change trade routes.

1: One trade route per city.
2: Shift the yield balance for internal trade to favoring the sender like international (can still pump a single city just not as strongly now).
3: Dramatically reduce yield balances across the board. 3 to 5 total yield on a baseline route.
4: Increase trade yields for each specialist you have in the home city by the specialist's resource. 1 and 1 for internal (specialist becomes effectively +3 to home city and +1 to trade city). 3 incoming 1 outgoing for international (specialist becomes effectively +5 to home city). Specialist base yields may need to be changed to balance this last point but working tiles can easily yield 4 or more resources and doesn't come with a health penalty like specialists do.

Trade routes are no longer instantly overpowered just by existing but have the potential to become strong. Specialists now matter. So a big city with a lot of specialists offers more to trade than a small city. It covers 3 things that are frequently brought up that could use improvement in BE. OP Trade routes, Specialists being weak and a lack of good reason to push for increased city size.
 
Trade route per city MUST DIE.

Why did they change the BNW trade routes to this idiotic ICS spam fest.. I hate it.

This will kill my will to play CivBE very fast if I am forced to play wide just to be competitive.
 
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