Trade and Happiness

[ichris22]

Seeing the recent post about unhappiness made me remember something I had thought about in the past. There is no place in the world that produces absolutely everything. In the abstracted concepts of Civ 5, this is represented as culture, gold, food, etc. Just as places in the real world make up their deficits with trade, the same should also be true in Civ 5. Related, there really shouldn’t be a distinction between internal and external trade routes. The following is a quick list of the key features of an idea I’ve had about trade and how it should be tied to happiness.

• Most buildings should be specialized, only being able to be built in cities with certain features. Think stables (need pastures)
• That creates a deficit of certain yields depending on a city’s natural features
• Trade routes should give all the different yields except faith based on the yields of the target city
• This should be the way cities make up for a lack of certain yields causing unhappiness. For example, your city needs culture so you trade with a city that produces a lot of culture
• QOL for trade: Trade routes should be cancellable at any point
• Internal trade routes should not function differently than international trade routes as goods do move around internally
• All of this encourages diversity in trade and which cities have caravans
• Luxury goods should no longer be traded in leader interactions, strategic goods still are
• Luxury goods can be traded with trade routes to a city that has that good
• For we love the king day, luxury goods no longer counted empire wide but city based
• Again, encouraging diversity in trade

The luxury goods ideas do bring up one issue of being able to trade them with a nation that doesn’t like you. I think a good solution would be to be able to place embargoes on individual nations through the leader interactions, similar to denouncing, that blocks all trade routes to that nation.

 

[Anarcomu]

My big concern here is : would this system be micro intensive ?
I don't want to spend time on a system which have obvious choices, or takes too many clicks, or have an alternative possible system which is less micro intensive.
Not saying that your idea is bad, but we should be careful about adding mechanics.

 

[ichris22]

My big concern here is : would this system be micro intensive ?
I don't want to spend time on a system which have obvious choices, or takes too many clicks, or have an alternative possible system which is less micro intensive.
Not saying that your idea is bad, but we should be careful about adding mechanics.

Well there wouldn't be any additional actions to take. It would be exactly the same as establishing trade routes now, just what the trade routes themselves do is different. Technically, you probably could micro manage your trade routes if they were made cancellable but I don't think the yield numbers on trade routes would be changing so radically from turn to turn that it would make sense.

 

[hokath]

It's a very cool idea for trade route yields to be based on the difference between yield outputs of cities.
You would, I guess, need a lot more trade units running to make this work for multiple Cities.

 

[Anarcomu]

You would, I guess, need a lot more trade units running to make this work for multiple Cities

This is where I find a limitation : In Civ beyond earth, there is a lot more trade units tan in civ 5, and it makes the trade aspect a lot more tedious.
I'm fine with the actual system personally.

 

[ichris22]

It's a very cool idea for trade route yields to be based on the difference between yield outputs of cities.
You would, I guess, need a lot more trade units running to make this work for multiple Cities.

I imagine you probably would need a few more, but honestly I wouldn't go so far as to say a lot more. The way I imagine the building restrictions working cities would end up with one or two minor yield deficits and one major yield deficit. Then you would set up a trade route targeting that one major deficit and probably cover the other minor shortcomings. Example: city A needs a lot more culture and a little more food and science. A trade route with city B, a culture hub, gives +8 culture and +2-4 for other yields.

 

[rkkn]

could be a nerf to wide (which might be needed) if trade routes become a bigger way to deal with happiness