Trade route strategies

[GAGA Extrem]

So Agricultural Development has an impact on Trade routes. I am currently playing an ARC game and it seems that by setting it in my capital I boosted all trade routes there by +10/+5 food. So if you don't have anything important to build just convert food - it's like a global Hanging Mega Gardens.

Probably also means that production improvements are the way to go for the capital, since each production there is a fraction of a food for the whole empire.

 

[Roxlimn]

If you make Production improvement in the capital, it'll kill any hammer going to moderately productive cities. That said, strong food/hammer hub with little or no other tile outputs and a satellite ring of variable output cities is a strong play if you can get both food and hammer outputs high enough.

 

[omniclast]

I have been mostly using ETRs, until last night when I actually got Agricultural Development. Wow, does that make a difference. Now I feel like a sucker for building so many farms to grow my cities. Those could have been academies...

 

[sylvanllewelyn]

I love SimTower, it's a classic. But it's unfortunate that the interface does not hint new players about the importance of elevator management.

Similarly, trade management seems very important in CivBE. Maybe the cues are there but I didn't notice them, until occasionally I saw very high yields.

I *think* it's there to bring back city specialisation that people loved in Civ4 and was absent in Civ5. Except the transfer of food and production made it easier than in Civ4, where non-production cities had difficulty building national wonders (exclude tile sharing, that's HoF-level stuff).

This thread is an absolute eye-opener. My builder victories are close to 200 turns, but I can never break the 200-barrier. Maybe trade route management will give me that extra push.

If I understand this thread correctly, this should work:
- Wave 0: spam farms in capital, add biowells as needed later.
- Wave 1: capital sends convoy to 2 coastal production cities (2TR). Production cities trade external (4TR), gain science to clear worker and improvement techs. Coastal, because trade.
- Wave 2: capital sends to 3 specialist cities (3TR). 3 specialist cities each send to 3 production cities (9TR). 3 production cities send one each to capital (3TR) and the rest external (6TR). Production cities need more production to complete all the production-enhancing buildings. The victory tile improvement takes ages and wonders are nice.
- Wave 3 endgame: capital sends to 3 production cities, enable the latter to work a couple more production tiles (3TR). 3 production cities each send to 3 specialist city (9TR) to help out with other production. Like, mindstems(harmony), units(supremacy), workers for magrails(purity), or orbital lasers(contact; are you really counting on gunners to hold out versus CNDRs?)

 

[bhavv]

I like to send one route per city back to the capital, all capitals outgoing routes to stations, other city routes to other civs if possible.

 

[Roxlimn]

I have been mostly using ETRs, until last night when I actually got Agricultural Development. Wow, does that make a difference. Now I feel like a sucker for building so many farms to grow my cities. Those could have been academies...

Yep. Normally, you'd only need one or two farm centers to fuel the growth of your entire colony. Farms in peripheral locations are only necessary to bring their food surplus to neutral as they grow, in order to maximize growth and so they don't starve if you happen to need to direct that route elsewhere.

You'll still need to make a few things here and there in the hub city, though. Unless you're just buying it outright. That kind of works, too. You'd need a dedicated Generator City or two to make the Energy, I suppose.