Trade Routes

[Upright]

I play on Nobel level, and to suit my own game play choose Custom Continents, 4 other AI's each on their own continent.

My question concerns Overseas Trade Routes. I make an effort to maximise the number of Trade Routes each city has, but am often frustrated that they don't trade with overseas cities when I discover them. I understand I need Astronomy & open borders, but what else is required as many of my cities stick to trading within my own borders?

 

[Ghpstage]

I think posting a save may help you to explain your question a bit more.

One thing does come to mind about how foreign and domestic trade routes differ that may cause this kind of confusion though.

With domestic routes all of your cities can 'target' a single domestic city for a trade route, i.e. York, Hastings and Nottingham can all have a trade route to London.
With foreign routes your entire empire can only have 1 route to a foreign city so, using York, Hastings and Nottingham again, if York gets the route to Cairo then the others can't.

What this means is that if you and an AI you have Open Borders with both have 4 cities and have legit trade routes then you will only get 4 foreign routes regardless if each city has 1 possible trade route or 8, and if you had 10 cities and the AI has 4 then you get 4 routes and the AI can get 10 (if it has enough trade route slots).

 

[Upright]

Here is a save which hopefully shows what I mean.

Braga has overseas trade routes, but none of my others do, that I can see.

 

[Ghpstage]

Mystery solved

You have 5 foreign routes in all, 1 from India that only has 1 city, 4 from Mayans who only have 4 and both the Americans and Khmer are running the Mercantilism civic which prevents foreign trade routes.
You'll just have to wait till they swap to Free Market before you can get all those routes, you could speed it up by giving them economics if you really want to.

 

[Upright]

Many thanks

 

[DNK]

Since topic has been answered, here's a new Q not worthy of its own thread imo:

You've got pleased/friendly allies with large trade income (50GPT+) who aren't anywhere near your power/score. Is it a good idea to gift them every resource you can (after getting all their GPT) in order to enlarge their cities you're trading with to increase that income even more?

 

[Upright]

In my experience, which I admit is hardly expert, but the 'pleased/friendly' status is almost meaningless.

I've had games where I've had such status with other civ's only for them to declare war on me the next turn.

The only reason to look at the status is to find out which civ's are willing to trade resources etc.

Also I'm loathed to give Techs away to any civ who may pass it on to close rivals.

Which is probably why I play on Nobel

 

[coanda]

Pleased/Friendly makes a huge difference.

Getting enemy civs to Pleased lets you breathe a big sigh of relief. About 8 leaders have a 20% chance to plot war against you at Pleased, and another ~20 have a 10% chance, but about half the leaders in the game literally will not plot war against you if they're Pleased with you (there are a few ways they can end up declaring war on you at Pleased anyways, but those are less common than simply plotting and declaring). Also, it greatly increases the odds that there is another civ they are less happy with, and even if they're willing to plot war at Pleased they'll usually prefer to attack that other civ instead. And, of course, it unlocks a lot of trading options.

Friendly makes it relatively straightforward to bribe most leaders into declaring war on a third party if you're afraid someone is running away in tech. It means they'll trade "monopoly" techs with you, which is huge. And it means they won't stop tech-trading with you because of WFYABTA (happens when you've already gotten a lot of techs recently in trades). Also, I think there's only 1-2 leaders in the game who will declare on you at Friendly.

It also can help out in a lot of little ways with diplomacy in the AP and the UN, of course.

In general, one of the real keys to moving up in difficulty is learning to actively work at tech-trading and at diplomacy in general.

 

[Ghpstage]

Since topic has been answered, here's a new Q not worthy of its own thread imo:

You've got pleased/friendly allies with large trade income (50GPT+) who aren't anywhere near your power/score. Is it a good idea to gift them every resource you can (after getting all their GPT) in order to enlarge their cities you're trading with to increase that income even more?

Base trade value only increases 0.1 for every pop over 10, its very likely that any increase will be rounded down and disappear altogether. As such giving resources away to grow AI cities isn't likely to prove profitable and will almost certainly not be as profitable as selling them for GPT or hording them for corp bonuses. Besides for it to make the most difference you would need to pick an AI much larger than yourself, which would make them a serious competitor even if they were behind.