What am i not getting about connections/hub towns ?

[Hemperor_CH]

So i wanted to turn Luoyang into a hub town to get some more Influence. There are clearly roads between every settlement and at least Roma, Changan and Lianzhou are within 7 tiles.

The game states that every connected Settlement gives +2 Influence points. So I should get at least 6 Influence points if not 10, it's wholly unclear if ostia or huaiyang would count or whether they're outside trade range or only indirectly connected. If only the game/civilopedia would givesome decent feedback/Information on this at all. However I only get 4 Points increase which utterly baffles me.

I've banged my head against this for over an hour now, trying to figure it out, changing towns to cities expanding borders nothing does anything it just always sits at +4. I KNOW those 3 surrounding are connected because they do get food from Luoyang once converted, and when i turn Liangzhou into a city it too gets more food. So what exactly am i missing/not getting here?
Loving the gamer so far but the amount of information the games gives my is utterly abysmal.

 

[keytie]

I had the same thing happening to me. I'm not sure what the reason is but my guess would be that it actually gives you 2 influence per city and not per settlement and the tooltip is just wrong. To be honest, 2 influence per settlement seems way to strong to me anyways.

 

[Hemperor_CH]

No. As I said I tried converting Liangzhou to a city. It gets a third of luoyangs food but the +4 remains

 

[beezany]

i am also seeing unexplainable results from the hub town. i used the game's getConnectedCities() API to get the exact list of connections for my towns. (You can see the same information using the TCS Improved Plot Tooltip mod.) some of my towns get +2 per connection, but most do not. for example:

• Sparda gets +10 from 9 connections (Burdigala, Troy, Roma, Hagmatana, Ostia, Patavium, Salamanca, Toledo, Bactria)
• Hagmatana gets +18 from 10 settlements (Burdigala, Troy, Roma, Sparda, Ostia, Patavium, Salamanca, Toledo, Pārsa, Bactria)

these two towns have almost exactly the same list of connections. the only significant difference is that Pārsa is connected to Hagmatana but not Sparda. i can't figure out which settlements aren't being counted or why. Salamanca and Toledo are towns connected only by sea, Burdigala and Bactria are towns connected by road, and the other five are cities connected by road.

because Sparda is only connected to 4 cities, it must be getting at least part of its bonus from the town connections.

 

[beezany]

i filed a support ticket with a link to this forum post and a save file matching my comment above. hope it gets traction!

 

[Feyd Rautha]

There's a second ability of the trader I discovered by accident. When you're in a town, you can "create a connection" on the ability next to "establish trade route". That is what I had to do in my last game to get the gains

 

[Vennlig]

I have also got myself quite confused about how road connections work. I feel sometimes that the visuals the game shows don't match the roads that are actually there in the "simulation"?

 

[keytie]

There's a second ability of the trader I discovered by accident. When you're in a town, you can "create a connection" on the ability next to "establish trade route". That is what I had to do in my last game to get the gains

I think that ability just builds a road, no?

 

[chazzycat]

Yes, the direct road from one town to one city is what makes it work. I have done it a few times using merchants and it always forms the connection and food flows properly.

 

[Melkus]

In this case I would actually have estimated a +4, though the exact definition of "direct connection" ist still unclear (especially for coastal cities). I think the game assumes that you have to go from Luoyang to Liangzhou through Chang'an, even if it doesn't look like it on the map.

The more confusing question to me is: how does the game decide where to make an automatic connection to when founding (well, or taking over) a town? Sometimes it just doesn't make a road where I would expect one.
I would guess it chooses the nearest city?

 

[Feyd Rautha]

I think that ability just builds a road, no?

It does, but that means the city is connected to the city in question. This is important because I just confirmed a change in +2 culture when doing this in a recent turn. If you create a lot of linear settlements though you can also avoid this trader ability because it can weaken the impact of a big farming town only being connected to one city.

 

[chazzycat]

I gotta say this is driving me a little crazy. I have been trying to achieve the rather modest goal of connecting all 6 of my antiquity towns as feeder towns to the capital, and as of yet have not been able to accomplish this. Even when all 6 towns are in a perfect ring around my capital, at least 1 town just stubbornly refuses to connect.

I get that you're supposed to use merchants to create a road manually if the road doesn't form automatically. That's fine. But half the time, my merchant just says "no". The game doesn't think there are any further valid connections to be made so the option is ghosted out. The town remains unconnected to my capital with nothing to be done about it. And yes they are within 10 tile range.

 

[ProMeTheus112]

It's possible, if the road goes through tiles that aren't in your territory it won't count as a connection in exploration age. Idk I had that happen one time and fixed it by making the road be in my territory. Then again on your picture the road never connects without going out of territory to any settlement so i dont know.

 

[beezany]

i was investigating for the support ticket i mentioned above, and i found this save where my towns weren't specialized yet. it's a great example because you can see all of the connections to Sparda and Hagmatana at the same time. each town has a water connection to Roma and a road connection to 5 other settlements (including each other). that's exactly 6 connections each, and the game's getConnectedCities API confirms it. if i specialize the towns at this point, Hagmatana gets the expected +12 bonus, but Sparda only gets +10.

previously, i thought that towns started out with the correct bonus but then got stuck there as they grew. however, Sparda's Hub Town bonus looks wrong from the beginning. i also looked through my saves to see when the bonuses change, because at the end of this age, Sparda still has +10 but Hagmatana's bonus rises to +18 (out of +20 expected). i found that Hagmatana jumped from +12 to +18 on the turn when i conquered neighboring Pārsa. so there are some circumstances that will update the Hub Town bonus, but overall it seems buggy.