While playing around with the Roving clans, trying to build up a strategy focused on trade routes, I ran into weird behaviour.



In the attached save, 5/6 of my outgoing routes are directed to the most distant city of the red AI player (wild walker), but they produce 0 dust and science each. The routes are covered with paved roads and I've a peace treaty with the AI. Is it a bug or some game mechnanic I'm missing here?



Additionally, I've a commerce and research treaty with the blue AI, and one of my routes is going to his territory (and producing income). Why the rest are not going there too, even though I assume they should be more profitable? They went there earlier in the game, actually, but suddenly switched to the red AI's territory.



I noticed the trade route icon is golden instead of white in the list. What does the color mean? (there's no tooltip).



My apologies in advance if the issue is not a bug with the algorithm, but just my ignorance

Prime_Amoeba wrote:
While playing around with the Roving clans, trying to build up a strategy focused on trade routes, I ran into weird behaviour.



In the attached save, 5/6 of my outgoing routes are directed to the most distant city of the red AI player (wild walker), but they produce 0 dust and science each. The routes are covered with paved roads and I've a peace treaty with the AI. Is it a bug or some game mechnanic I'm missing here?



Additionally, I've a commerce and research treaty with the blue AI, and one of my routes is going to his territory (and producing income). Why the rest are not going there too, even though I assume they should be more profitable? They went there earlier in the game, actually, but suddenly switched to the red AI's territory.



I noticed the trade route icon is golden instead of white in the list. What does the color mean? (there's no tooltip).



My apologies in advance if the issue is not a bug with the algorithm, but just my ignorance

Thanks for the save Ameoba - I'm not seeing any issue on 1.4.4 or in our development environment, everything seems fine (minimum 22 dust/science for each trade route). The trade routes that the game generates will always maximise your gains, so alternative trade routes wouldn't be more profitable, non



The income generated by trade routes depend on their length and on the populations of the destination city.

And thank you for the answer! I tried loading the save in 1.4.4 and got no problems either. Weird, maybe the algorithm re-calculated the routes when loading the game again, unless you applied a ninja fix with the 1.4.4 patch. I've noticed the kind of randomly wonky behaviour I wrote about before - some icons of trade routes suddenly turning golden yellow instead of white and producing no income. No cities under siege or whatsoever.



I'm aware of the rules, though not of the precise algorithm. No idea what the golden icon could mean though?

Prime_Amoeba wrote:
No idea what the golden icon could mean though?

Hmm, yes it should be white in the list of trade routes - could you send a screenshot so we can see exactly where the issue is?