Trade routes visible on map

[Fullerene]

I've been thinking this system where trade routes would be 'physical' things that goes through map tiles:

• Trade route goes from city to city
• It takes (usually) the shortest path
• Tiles have 'movement' cost for trade routes, for example river: 0.1, coast 0.2,road 0.5 flat land 1.0 etc.
• Tile that has trade route gets +1 commerce yield. Cumulative if more trade routes go though tile. Possibly max trade route commerce bonus limit. It would be good idea to build city where trade routes are likely to cross.
• Trade route can go from home city to visible city on map with open borders. You want to always search for better trade routes.
• Trade route doesn't go though unrevealed tile or through hostile territory.
• Enemy unit on trade route can steal some of revenues each turn.

For the performance reasons, maybe the number of trade routes would be limited per nation, adjusted by tech, civics etc.

The reason I'd like this system is that it would give more strategic value to locations like straits, major rivers, mountain passes, and so on. Something that civ games seem to be lacking.

Any comments?

 

[plasmacannon]

Sounds like a good idea.

Right, Trade Routes wouldn't go thru mountain tiles themselves, but would thru Mountain Passes.
Yea, if we could see 3 Trade Routes thru a tile, vs. 1 thru a different tile, it would create an incentive to place a city on that tile of known Trade Routes.

A toggle to turn on and off Trade Route visibility would be nice.
The city planning overlay, the Alt-X, where we can plan where our cities might go, would be a nice place to see where those Trade Routes change to.

I'm not sure where you are going with the movement part. That wouldn't be necessary, as the Trade Routes would shift every time a new city is placed.

 

[Fullerene]

Sounds like a good idea.
I'm not sure where you are going with the movement part. That wouldn't be necessary, as the Trade Routes would shift every time a new city is placed.

Actually I think I would implement trade routes as more stable objects that wouldnt shift every turn or so. Maybe they could be set up with caravans?

With the movement points I meant the trade route takes shortest path to the destination city. So it might be clever to build roads and channels and rails to direct the trade through your cities.

This mod would require lot of tweaking and re-balancing into base game.