Question about trade route mechanics

[Civsassin]

When exporting trade goods, if you enter an amount in the governor screen, it is the amount of goods retained in the exporting colony's inventory. I want to trade goods, but I want to cap how much is kept in the importing colony's inventory. Is there any way to do that?

This is what I am trying to accomplish. I want to export tools, guns, and horses, but I don't want to send so much that I begin losing them from the excess. This way, I can make sure each of my colonies has them to complete builds and make sure that when I try to convert a colonist to a soldier or dragoon, I can do so and not have wasted resources.

 

[dewbak75]

When exporting trade goods, if you enter an amount in the governor screen, it is the amount of goods retained in the exporting colony's inventory. I want to trade goods, but I want to cap how much is kept in the importing colony's inventory. Is there any way to do that?

This is what I am trying to accomplish. I want to export tools, guns, and horses, but I don't want to send so much that I begin losing them from the excess. This way, I can make sure each of my colonies has them to complete builds and make sure that when I try to convert a colonist to a soldier or dragoon, I can do so and not have wasted resources.

The automatic way to do this is to turn on Export for every city you plan to Import those goods to, and then set the amount you want to keep. That way whenever the wagon train or ship drops off some of those goods, it immediately takes back enough that the importing city doesn't go over the limit you specify. So if you have a settlement with a warehouse, you could set it to import and export tools, guns and horses, and set the value to 200. Then if a wagon train comes in with 100 tools, and your settlement already has 150, it'll load that 100 in, then immediately put 50 back on the wagon train.

The big thing you have to worry about with this is that if you produce so many of a good that all the settlements which import it are at their limits, the wagon train will be wandering around with the excess load until you get some out of one of your warehouses. So if you're doing this with guns, make sure you're arming up your citizens and keeping room for more shipments.

 

[Civsassin]

Thanks dewbak75. That makes perfect sense.

 

[MightyGooga]

Sorry for the newbie question, but How can i start a trade route? I tried every button in the game but wasnt able to start the damn thing. Is it easy? Wwhat am I missing here?

 

[Refar]

You need to set your citie-governors to import/export stuff first. Do this in the settlement screen (there are 3 buttons near the area where the building in progress is shown, one of them will switch to thr trade governor).

Once you have one city exporting a good, and another requiring that same good, the game will generate a trade route for you (Which will do nothing yet).
Once you got Trade routes "declared" this way, you can assign Wagons to them (a new unit action button wioll show up on Wagons)

 

[MightyGooga]

Wow! Very Easy! Many Thanks Rafar !!!

 

[UWHabs]

You also have to be careful, since in my recent game, I had my tobacco/cigar city set to import/export tobacco (and export cigars). I had that wagon shuttle to and from my port city, which stored all my goods (so I was sitting at about 550 tobacco in there for a while). Anyways, the wagon basically was wandering around for a few turns with 200 tobacco sitting in it, since it filled up on tobacco in my port city, went to the cigar town, saw that it was at its max of tobacco I specified, then just turned around. I had to re-route my supply chain to switch my other towns to drop off their tobacco directly to that town, then have its "exporting" wagon remove the excess tobacco and cigars.

That is, until I had to re-route my wagons to the portugese town that I captured that already had finished its cigar factory...