[R&F] Having trouble getting the Rome gold trading bonus

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King
Joined
Mar 12, 2008
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950
Despite having like 5 or 6 cities, I found that i am only getting the gold bonus once because the trade routes go direct to the target city instead of THROUGH other cities.

E.G. City A -> City B -> City C does not happen, because the game makes City A -> City C directly. The traders wont go through City B to get to City C, they will use a road like 2 hexes away and go straight to City C, ignoring City B in the process.

Is there a way to make the traders go through my other cities to get the gold bonus?
 
Not that I've ever found. It makes the roads super weird.

This is all because traders take the shortest route rather than the fastest one (ie, fewest total movement cost). The fastest one would lead to much more natural dynamics IMO. While you're at it, I'd also change traders to have a maximum number of moves between origin and destination rather than a maximum number of tiles. Would be fun if getting traders to cross a river or jungle was more difficult. Might also make engineers actually useful.
 
When you have the trader selected, all possible routes are highlighted. Just choose one that goes through one of your cities.If none, move the trader tot another city and check again. Unless you have only one city, it should be possible to get a route. If that doesn't work, send it on a route and build a city that it could move through.
 
I play Rome almost exclusively, and the best rules of thumb to maximize your gold bonus from trade routes are as follows:

1. Send your first trade route to a far flung, foreign destination and then settle on the road which is created

OR

2. ICS and settle your own cities at minimum distance always. Good things happen with the roads when you do this. I can't prove it in general, but this is my experience over many, many games.
 
The problem is you cant always build in a straight line, especially when rome needs access to fresh water for baths.

When you have the trader selected, all possible routes are highlighted. Just choose one that goes through one of your cities.If none, move the trader tot another city and check again. Unless you have only one city, it should be possible to get a route. If that doesn't work, send it on a route and build a city that it could move through.

I can get a route, but the route takes the shortest route instead of through all cities on the way.

See the OP for an example.
 
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I played exclusively with Rome on Vanilla for a long time and got my first R&F win at Rome as well. I always make a caravan my first build in my second city and then send it to Rome. As I build more cities, I focus on trading between my own cities as Rome, except in cases where there's a CS mission or some other strategy issue that makes a foreign trade route important. One reason for this is that, when playing as Rome, I'm either at war, about to go to war, or about to be attacked by ever nearby Civ with which I could typically build a route. No point in building a route that will get plundered. Also, as someone else noted, you can see all of the possible trade routes and identify those that will pass through cities.

I do have a related question however. When selecting a trade city, you are shown an amount you would profit per turn for each route, in gold, food and other items. Does this list include bonuses?
 
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