Two things about trade routes

[lauchunho]

- How food and hammers "income" are calculated for each trade route? A trade route can only generate gold initially and after adopting civics like barter or trade, it can generate some food and hammers but those numbers are not the same as the commerce income number generated by the same trade route. So how are they calculated?

- With sufficiently large map (e.g. huge), a capital can easily generate over 10 food per trade route. With population as a positive modifier, if the trade bonus of increase in 1 population size can generate 3 more food in total for all trade routes (let say 1 population rise can generate 0.3 food unit more), then the growth itself is perpetual?

 

[Koshling]

- How food and hammers "income" are calculated for each trade route? A trade route can only generate gold initially and after adopting civics like barter or trade, it can generate some food and hammers but those numbers are not the same as the commerce income number generated by the same trade route. So how are they calculated?

- With sufficiently large map (e.g. huge), a capital can easily generate over 10 food per trade route. With population as a positive modifier, if the trade bonus of increase in 1 population size can generate 3 more food in total for all trade routes (let say 1 population rise can generate 0.3 food unit more), then the growth itself is perpetual?

The hover text should tell you roughly. Basically there is a base commerce the route generates (which depends on the nature of the cities involved), which is modified by the city's net trade modifier (from buildings, civics, whatever) and then converted to commerce/production/food according to rates defined by you current civics.

I think it has been rebalanced recently on the SVN version - at least when I updated a few days ago my large cities went from a 40+ food surplus to a deficit, but my research and gold output went up considerably - the reason was basically that food from trade had dropped a lot, but commerce increased. I am unsure what exactly was changed (probably some civics)

 

[ls612]

I think that rebalancing was in preparation for AIAndy's new Trade mechanics, which will drastically alter things if I'm reading it correctly. The long and the short of it is that Trade is going to be changed quite a bit during this cycle.