Trading post (+1 with road)

[theis81]

To me it doesn't make sence having a city surrounded by trading post but no infrastructure to support them.

With trading post being moved away from trapping to a later tech, they should make it a basic value of +1 gold. Trading posts on a road should give an extra +1 gold.

Gameplay would be affected in a good way.
1) The TP ICS spam would not result in a redicouless amount of gold.
2) Choosing between two different paths of equal length between two cities would require a strategic choice.

This would not lead to road spam, simply because you need to work the tile for the extra +1 gold so only if you worked the tile the road costs would be covered.

 

[Strategia]

The whole point of ICS is to build many cities close together, so all the tiles will be workable. This'd just mean that ICS empires will be able to spam roads literally everywhere with absolutely no downside - after all, the +1 gold from the trading posts is before city modifiers from Markets and the like, so building roads on every trading post would actually increase Gold revenue, spectacularly so if you have enough of them.

I dislike ICS as well, but tbh, I don't know if it's at all possible to make it a non-viable strategy unless some underlying mechanics are changed (like Happiness, corruption/maintenance, and health). Unless that's done, I think trying to make tall empires more viable might work better than trying to undercut wide ones. At least in this manner.

 

[claestw]

If roads improve trading post gold yield by 1, then it follows that anywhere you have a worked trading post, you want to lay down a road as well.

You see, if laying down the road has no other extra yield benefits, then the +1-1 cancels out and you have a tile providing a movement benefit that you otherwise will not have---a net gain. If laying down the road has more yield benefits after the road cost, then there's absolutely no reason not to do it.

The result is that you have a lot of extra roads built on top of trading posts simply because those trading posts are worked. Resulting in little pieces of unconnected roads scattered all around your empire.

Let's look at it from another angle. You have a tile and you need to decide how to improve it. When you desperately need food, you will farm it. When you don't need food, you will trading post spam a gold city, and farm flatlands for production cities because you want to keep growing the city to get all the production tiles worked, while at the same time support your engineers that give much more benefit than one extra trading post.

So in a gold city where you aim to have all trading posts worked, you will end up having road spam around that city. In a production city that needs growth, you won't have trading posts anyway.

Now what if we force players to always consider putting trading posts on roaded tiles because they'll provide the most benefit, and not worthwhile if not roaded?

Then you will want to maximize that benefit by moving your roads to minimize the opportunity cost of that benefit. A road that would normally go through a river grassland will instead take a detour onto dessert or tundra because you want to farm that river grassland, and the roaded trading post will make that low-yield tile worthwhile. So you end up having a very convoluted road network that is counter-intuitive, tedious to optimize (more micro-management and calculations) and act as a further obstacle to AI performance because AIs won't be able to properly manage its tile use.