Overseas trade routes

[midget_roxx]

I'm playing a game on continents and I'm having an issue with getting the delicious overseas trade routes. It's around 1920AD, I've got astronomy and open border agreements with overseas nations. I've got state property as my market trade civic and the other nations are state property, mercentalism or evironmentalism however I have no overseas trade routes

My relations with them aren't the best (around 0 to -2) but I didn't think this would be an issue in having the trade routes. I've got the little trade icon next to the civs and I don't know what could be wrong

 

[lymond]

Well, you won't get trade routes from Civs in Merc - that is one of the main features of the civic other than the free specialists. As for any other AIs over there, make sure you have open borders or not at war.

 

[midget_roxx]

Hmm it seems the issue was merc. However not all cities were trading overseas and I'm assuming because there are only so many trade routes that the cities can't all trade overseas and have to trade amongst each other

 

[TheWilltoAct]

You assume correctly, often your smaller cities will receive domestic routes instead of more lucrative foreign ones.

 

[Robert Mokler]

I've done some testing in multiplayer, and it appears that trading resources with a foreign civ seems to increase the likelihood that the two civs will get trade routes with each other. I traded away all my useless extra cow and sheep resources to civs on other continents and it worked out good for everyone. It also gives you something to do with your extra resources that everyone already has access to - especially the ones that don't get used by corporations. This will only work in multiplayer though: the AI will have none of it...