How to use trade

[Wojciech Rodzik]

Hi,

I moved to King difficulty recently. Form things I read here you guys use mostly internal trade routes....

Why?

For me it is a bad deal - requires bulidings (like granary\workshop) to move food\production around... And it is not generating anything, just moving it. If you play tradition\tall: 4 cities max, highly specialised - that might make a sense to me, as one small city can generate tons of food and bring it to capital.....

But this gets you like one defunct city, and capital which will starve if trade will dry up...

I usually trade with AI until I can get some bulbs, then during midgame as I am ahead of them move most of my trade to CS. If I go CV I will move some trade back late game....

This gives me A LOT of money to finance my empire, but I would like to know your strategies.

 

[Pembroke]

And it is not generating anything, just moving it.

Nope, it's additional food. Not deducted from the source city but appears by "magic" on top of everything else.

Especially if you combine the food caravans with Tradition you can grow a monster capital quite early. Also useful when growing new cities quickly. Growth compounds exponentially all kinds of things so the earlier you get it the more it's worth in the long run. By switching the routes around as needed you can squeeze out the optimum growth from your cities.

 

[Furret]

Yeah, I used to think the same way until I learned that the food/production is magically created.

I rarely use the caravans (unless I'm trying to rush a wonder not in my capital), but caravans can be amazing for getting a city off the ground quickly (wide empire) or exploding your (tall empire).

I'm a real sucker for , so I probably don't use the food caravans as often as I should, but the difference between a 3 trade route with a city state or a 4 route to the right city shouldn't be ignored.

 

[Wojciech Rodzik]

Quick additional question:

Since how many cities you say that empire is "wide"?

I usually go for 8 - strongly restraining myself (and only planting them close to luxuries)

 

[Alziel]

I don't think anybody's saying that using internal trade routes is the best strategy to follow all the time - like anything else in the game a specific strategy is only as good as the situation you find yourself in.

Internal trade routes tend to be more useful as a rule as the difficulty level increases. This is because on higher difficulty levels the AI will have more money allowing you to gain better gold deals through straight trade whereas you are behind on growth, science and productivity - so internal trade routes can help you to catch up.

International trade routes can become more valuable if you have a city with 3 or more luxury resources which also happens to be on a river - or if you play as Morocco, Venice, Portugal, Arabia or other civs with UAs or UBs that boost trade routes.

Also, if you want to field a decent army early on and need money for maintenance the extra gold from trade routes can prove useful.

Generally speaking, internal trade routes are nearly always better early game to get your fledgling cities booming quickly whereas international trade routes are better later when they are worth more gold, science and religious pressure and there is less risk of Barbarian pillaging.

But like anything else in the game, situation dictates strategy and keeping your options open when you start a new game is always good advice.

 

[Quineloe]

There's a few downsides to external trade routes.

more likely to get pillaged by barbarians
you're more likely to become dependant on the income - if you lose them, you're in the red.

internal trade routes have the upside that if you go into the negative income for whatever reason, you can just switch them to external until you've stabilized. If all your trade routes already generate money and you're still in negative income, there's not much you can do and if you lose even one of them, it's a disaster.

if you hit a new city with a +8 and a +8 each, that city will grow very fast and produce the first few buildings also very fast. Given you only have 3-4 in a freshly founded city, you've tripled the production here.

Later, once you get more advanced cost-cutting advancements for instant buys, it's more efficient to just buy the first 5 buildings, but +8 is available with sailing already

 

[katfish]

Internal trade routes tend to be more useful as a rule as the difficulty level increases.

No. At least until you finish tradition and start catching up.

 

[Quineloe]

Another thing you really should consider is what you are actually doing with your extra gold.

Especially early game, a regular sea trade route will rarely go above 10 gpt. A worshop hammer traderoute increases production by 8 hammers.

Now, 1 hammer is worth what, 5 gold on instant buy?
So saving up a lot of money, only to use that money to instant buy buildings and units is actually a huge waste. If you were to straight build them with internal trade routes, you'd get a lot more done because of the extra hammers over extra gold.

Once you have big ben, commerce policy and what else there is to lower your instant buy costs while your sea trade routes easily make 20gp, this of course reverses. But until then, hammer trade routes seem to be the way to go to get things up.

 

[Uncle_Joe]

Another thing you really should consider is what you are actually doing with your extra gold.

Especially early game, a regular sea trade route will rarely go above 10 gpt. A worshop hammer traderoute increases production by 8 hammers.

Now, 1 hammer is worth what, 5 gold on instant buy?
So saving up a lot of money, only to use that money to instant buy buildings and units is actually a huge waste. If you were to straight build them with internal trade routes, you'd get a lot more done because of the extra hammers over extra gold.

Once you have big ben, commerce policy and what else there is to lower your instant buy costs while your sea trade routes easily make 20gp, this of course reverses. But until then, hammer trade routes seem to be the way to go to get things up.

True, but money gives a lot more versatility. So it shouldn't be as efficient at 'production' (ie, building purchases) as actually sending hammers via a trade route.

Having money in the bank allows you more options to react to the unexpected or to focus on something out of the blue. If you get attacked, having money is great for upgrading/buying units in a threatened area. It also let's you solve a potential happiness issue by buying a CS or a luxury. It lets you potentially get a RA with a friendly Civ for tech boosting etc etc.

So while an internal trade route is clearly superior for building things, gold make a nice versatile 'insurance policy'.

That said, clearly there are situations where each is preferable but I think it would be hard to make a blanket statement that one or the other is 'better' overall.

 

[Aaron90495]

Generally, yes, internal TR's are better early game. However, on Immortal/Deity, I'll sometimes ignore internal TR's while I finish Tradition; external TR's early in the game provide tons of science on higher difficulties, so I'll often use them to catch up scientifically, then turn my TR's inwards for a while.

 

[Lord Yanaek]

On Deity, and early external TR will often give you 4-5 / turn. Definitely not something you want to give up easily. On immortal it's less, but still useful.