Trade Route Balance Discussion

[chicorbeef]

Harbours actually give additional Tourism on sea TR completion, btw. You can stack that with the Caravansary buff IIIRC. And Harbours are more generally useful/built more often than Caravansaries, at least in my games. I often find that defending sea routes is actually easier, more or less. And while you absolutely should have a few land routes to pass over villages, the bonuses don't stack and so you don't need exclusively land to benefit from that.

I don't feel the need to go and buff International TRs more, sea or land. They're quite balanced and sea TRs have the inherent value of reaching far-away lucrative targets that land routes don't.

 

[pineappledan]

Harbours actually give additional Tourism on sea TR completion, btw. You can stack that with the Caravansary buff IIIRC. And Harbours are more generally useful/built more often than Caravansaries, at least in my games. I often find that defending sea routes is actually easier, more or less. And while you absolutely should have a few land routes to pass over villages, the bonuses don't stack and so you don't need exclusively land to benefit from that.

I don't feel the need to go and buff International TRs more, sea or land. They're quite balanced and sea TRs have the inherent value of reaching far-away lucrative targets that land routes don't.

In general the last few patches made the / generation from TRs too important, but I think that it's not just that / was too high; was also too low. My general impression is that, while -25% / from TRs is warranted for the next patch, I think that +10-15% would be smart as well. As an example, Illteroi ran an AI game with Venice recently and demonstrated that the raw from Venice's total income from 2x TRs wasn't even keeping up with total building/unit maintenance.

I don't much care how more gold is added. I think increasing the bonus on Harbors wouldn't go amiss, at the very least put it up to +3 to match Caravansary. We could also look at enhancing resource diversity a little bit. I landed on the Sea TR modifier, however, because it's an easy number change in the CoreDefines, and bumping it from 25 to 40-50 would offset some of the more obvious downsides to sea TRs over land TRs.

Tourism bursts, religious pressure, tourism % modifiers, diplo/Influence bonuses, etc. have been taking a back seat for a long time now. I think they could stand to be a bit more of a factor than they are, but reducing / might be all that's needed.
Call me crazy, but I think that income should be the largest factor in where you send your TRs

 

[CrazyG]

Maybe the river bonus should just be smaller. Its a feature of the game that isn't widely known.

 

[pineappledan]

Maybe just dropping it from 25 to 15?

 

[Stalker0]

Maybe just dropping it from 25 to 15?

Or remove it. Of all the reasons I pick cities to go on rivers, this never factors in

 

[tu_79]

Or remove it. Of all the reasons I pick cities to go on rivers, this never factors in

Agree. It's obscure and increases complexity where it is not needed.

 

[Bubbleblower]

What are the rules on trade routes? What is the logic behind trade routes not completing after establishing them?
I just quit my very first CBP game with the Ottomans, because in hindsight my strategy was wrong, but there was no way I could possibly know that.
IMO every time the game is counter intuitive it should be in the description, so we don't need to trial and error and google for answers.

 

[tu_79]

What are the rules on trade routes? What is the logic behind trade routes not completing after establishing them?
I just quit my very first CBP game with the Ottomans, because in hindsight my strategy was wrong, but there was no way I could possibly know that.
IMO every time the game is counter intuitive it should be in the description, so we don't need to trial and error and google for answers.

That would be ideal, yes, but you may agree that most moded games require a wiki visit. Anyways, we try hard to make all relevant info available at sight.

Trade routes complete when they arrive to destination and return safely. There's a tooltip just where you set destination, saying how long it would take to complete the trade route. If your trade route is pillaged, it cannot complete the trip.

Also, you can use filters in trade routes mod for VP. It's very useful.

 

[pineappledan]

Something came up in Quick Questions, Quick Answers that should be moved here if further discussion is warranted:

Food to food, production to production.

The +production to Internal Trade Routes from Workshops/Factories only applies to Production Internal TRs.
Likewise, the +food to Internal Trade Routes from Markets/Agribusinesses only applies to Food Internal TRs.

I was not aware of this fact previously. This change to constant per-turn yields replaced a system which gave instant / on completion of Internal TRs regardless of what type of ITR it was. The change to this new system is more of a nerf than I thought, and it makes the + food to ITRs almost worthless in the late game. I tend to favor Production routes at all game eras, but use the occasional TR to prop up or grow an otherwise strong secondary city that doesn't have access to good food tiles, but I have never used a single ITR after Industrial Era. It also makes the related buildings, especially Markets and Agribusiness, far less valuable than I thought they were

 

[BiteInTheMark]

Something came up in Quick Questions, Quick Answers that should be moved here if further discussion is warranted:

The +production to Internal Trade Routes from Workshops/Factories only applies to Production Internal TRs.
Likewise, the +food to Internal Trade Routes from Markets/Agribusinesses only applies to Food Internal TRs.

I was not aware of this fact previously. This change to constant per-turn yields replaced a system which gave instant / on completion of Internal TRs regardless of what type of ITR it was. The change to this new system is more of a nerf than I thought, and it makes the + food to ITRs almost worthless in the late game. I tend to favor Production routes at all game eras, but use the occasional TR to prop up or grow an otherwise strong secondary city that doesn't have access to good food tiles, but I have never used a single ITR after Industrial Era. It also makes the related buildings, especially Markets and Agribusiness, far less valuable than I thought they were

To be realistic, the amount of instant yields from buildings for ITR were ridicoulus. Even with fealty buffing my ITR, the instant yields were in most cases bigger than the yields you gained by the trade route itself. And the yields from the other type not even counted (also gaining hammers by a food trade route).
But now, a 40 food ITR have to compete with 441212 ETR to an allied CS (out of my current game).
The current additional yields from buildings are irrelevant and I think, nobody is really noticing any difference.

If you want to make buildings as ITR booster relevant and interesting, you need to go for something like this:
Caravansery:
+2 yields for ITR starting from this city, increased to +4 if this and target city has a caravansery
Custom House:
+3 yields for ITR starting from this city, increased to +6 if this and target city has a custom house
Factory:
+4 yields for ITR starting from this city, increased to +8 if this and target city has a factory
Agribusiness:
+6 yields for ITR starting from this city

Taking buildings which are not automatically constructed anyway in each city opens a new field of decision making. Also increasing the yields, if the target city has the same building changes the decision making what to build next too.

 

[Stalker0]

I don't think that you can really look at Food ITRs in the late game...they are not balanceable because food is a worthless yield at that point. Your cities are going to be the size they are going to be at that point, growth has limited use.

So the real question is....do Prod ITRs hold up against ETRs in the late game? In general, I think ETRs are better, but I will still use Prod ITRs on occasion...and if the ITR gets buff through things like Fealty or Religion I think they can be very competitive.

 

[pineappledan]

@Stalker0, did you actually read either of our posts?

everyone agrees that ITRs are crap. That’s why the market and Agribusiness bonuses are crap. They are crap bonuses boosting a crap trade route, crappily. With agribusiness, it has the added crap of coming and a crap time when people are sick of ITR’s crap.

The crappiest part is that these crap bonuses don’t even do what they say they do, because none of their buildings’ help texts indicate that the bonus applies to only 1 kind of ITR

the problem is that if bonuses are only for TRs and bonuses are only for TRs, then the bonuses are low-value fluff and the bonuses are so bad they’re insulting. +4 to TRs ONLY in late industrial, when only a nincompoop would use TRs, is at best a noob-trap.

I’m arguing that the bonus yields to ITRs shouldn’t discriminate between ITR types.

• That’s not what they say they do.
• It makes them really weak and even more situational than they already are.
• It makes a food bonus totally irrelevant after Renaissance
• It denies their possible utility for modders to add stuff like /// to ITRs.

 

[Stalker0]

@Stalker0, did you actually read either of our posts?

everyone agrees that ITRs are crap. That’s why the market and Agribusiness bonuses are crap.

The market bonus is fine, because it comes at a time when Food ITRs are still quite useful. And frankly, the market is a great building even without that bonus. Now the Agribusiness, the ITR bonus is not the reason its garbage....its just garbage

 

[pineappledan]

That’s why I said bonus. It’s a bad bonus on an otherwise very good building. At least it’s a weak, expiring bonus on market. on agribusiness it’s not even a bonus. At that point for TRs has come 2 eras too late to even be considered a bonus.

 

[Stalker0]

That’s why I said bonus. It’s a bad bonus on an otherwise very good building.

The market bonus is not bad. The food bonus is a good bonus for my city that does ITRs. For other cities, the market stands on its own just fine. I am not seeing the balance issue with that. Agribusiness is a completely different story.

 

[pineappledan]

In classical-medieval, a +2 bonus is +10-20% on any given TR. that’s great. As soon as you get a stone works or workshop in your origin city, however, that bonus evaporates.

TRs are superior. if a bonus only affects food TRs then it has a shelf life of however long it takes to switch over to production TRs. I think that is dumb, and I don’t know how many more times I have to reword this before you realize that you are simply not addressing what I am actually talking about. I would like you to try to argue the topic at hand.

I have no interest in discussing the relative power of these Buildings. I am not discussing the relative power of ITRs vs ETRs. I am not really discussing balance at all. I have a problem with how a set of bonuses on these buildings are communicated, that they are overly-specific and non-overlapping, that one of them effectively expires as a consequence of being so narrowly defined, and how these bonuses replaced a less specific, better communicated, and more fun mechanic (instant yields on ITR End). If I am discussing balance, I'm discussing temporal balance between the current system and what we gave up for it.

 

[pineappledan]

@BiteInTheMark, I agree that a system that gave yields for X building in both the origin and destination city would be an improvement. That would really encourage players to "thicken" their infrastructure. I think that if it were implemented, the earliest bonus would have to be in classical, or else the base yields of an eraly TR will get swamped easily by the building bonuses. Ancient/early classical ITRs are often 8-10 yields, after all.
It could read as "+X for every Internal Trade Route To or From this City."
My main concern is still that ITR yields from buildings shouldn't depend on the type of ITR. Yields given only to TRs aren't a fun bonus in that system.

 

[CrazyG]

@Stalker0, did you actually read either of our posts?

everyone agrees that ITRs are crap.

I don't agree. Food trade routes are useful, I use a couple in almost every game.

For comparison, I regularly have games where I don't use a single ETR to other major civs, and if I do its usually because of tourism.

 

[pineappledan]

Would you agree that the bonus / to ITRs from buildings should give the bonus to both types of ITR?

 

[CrazyG]

Would you agree that the bonus / to ITRs from buildings should give the bonus to both types of ITR?

I'm not sure exactly what you mean. My last game I think my internal routes were something like 45 food or 40 hammers towards the end. If you want to change that to like 40 food and 5 hammers, or 30 hammers with 10 food, I can't say I agree. I don't see why a mix of the two yields is better, am I missing something?

On agribusinesses, does it need a trade route thing at all? Like two years ago we had a niche but useful version of the building that gave farms a huge buff, it wasn't amazing but it was worthwhile sometimes. It has now been reworked like a dozen times only to become even less useful with each iteration, giving us the current version, whose only purpose appears to be to help the human players (who know not to build it) by removing horses, gold, and production from the AI.