I'm playing my first game as the Roving Clans. I want to make commercial agreements with a neighbor, who keeps insisting it's impossible, even if I sweeten the deal. Let's see if I have my bases covered:



1) I need to research the level II tech that unlocks roads.

2) I need to build the road improvement (whatever it's called) in my cities.

3) I need to research the level II tech that allows for peace treaties.

4) The other civ needs all that stuff as well.



(pretty sure about all that so far, so here's the part I'm not so sure about)



5) Since cities start with only 1 trade route allowed, that route will be taken up by own neighboring cities. I have to research even higher level techs to increase the number of routes available.

6) The AI has to do #5 as well.



Is that all right? Or should routes with other factions receive preference over internal routes?

Hi Steve,



You're on the right track.



Both parties need #1 (Imperial Highways) and #2 (Right of Way). Only one party needs to have the Peace tech (Diplomat's Manse) and they must offer an agreement to the other which must be accepted. If there is a road connection, then you will see trade routes.



You can also get sea trade routes if Each Party has the Cargo Docks tech and has them built in cities.



Routes with other factions are not better that domestic ones.



IMO, you should build the roads for the speed bonus and the internal trade routes as a nice bonus. Other than that, Trade Routes are not valuable enough today to warrant changing your strategy to form them with foreigners. Sea trade routes are not worth the effort at all.



Amplitude has stated that they want to make these more valuable in the future.

Thanks for the reply. That's really disappointing. Any 4X game should approach the game of why civilizations should favor peace over war or vice-versa. Trade is the main positive incentive to remain at peace.



It sound like if you have only 1 trade route, you will almost certainly be using it on an internal trade route (unless you've done something crazy like allow another civ to divide your empire), and thus not need these agreements. Even with 2 routes, you'd only have one left over if a region was stuck on the fringe end of your empire.

I agree, IMO there are too many barriers to entry with trade routes and they were a bit over-designed. I suspect Amplitude wanted to do more with them but ran out of cycles.



I dug up some old suggestions:

1. Remove limits on # of trade routes. Instead, trade routes are naturally limited to a radius (this is already measured in game) around a city. All cities within that radius are eligible get trade routes. Techs like Caravanserai that previously added routes would extend the range.



2. Trade routes automatically set up between foreign cities if there is Peace (or Cold War in case of Black Marketeer skill). There is no requirement for Roads or other city improvements. Sea Routes require "Sea Travel" but no buildings. These "basic" routes are modest but still have a tangible benefit. Probably at the level routes are today.



3. Building Right of Way/Cargo Docks significantly increases the value of the routes for the players that have built them in their regions. Maybe if both players build the value goes up even more. For example (numbers are just examples, not suggestions):

Unimproved land trade route: X Dust/Turn

Trade route with Right of way on one side: 2X Dust/Turn for side with Right of Way, X Dust/Turn for other

Trade route with Right of way on both sides: 3X Dust/Turn



4. Make foreign routes more valuable than internal. Maybe remove all Science bonuses from internal routes and give more Dust for foreign.



5. Make Sea Routes more valuable as, unlike roads, there is no side benefit.

Well, they could just move trade routes down to level I, or leave it at level II but combine it with some other benefit (like reduced unhappiness from expansion, which seems like a perfectly logical benefit to derive from connecting your cities with a network of roads).



I definitely think it's a mistake to keep players stuck at one trade route until level III. That's way too late.

Actually trade routes are recalculated every turn and will change as roads are built further away from you. Later in the game, if other factions near you have roads in all their regions, your trade routes will go further in and bring you back more dust and science. There's also a surprise "secondary trade route" income that is referenced nowhere but in the trade route window and I only discovered it by accident. Hilariously I made this discovery while writing a guide on trade routes on Steam.



The guide is here, incidentally.



I believe commercial and research agreements don't actually work, by the way. If anybody has any evidence that they do, please let me know. But I've gotten agreements and saw no increases to dust or science gains. The fact that the modifiers still aren't listed in the trade route page doesn't help.



Edit: I should add that you can actually get huge, remarkable amounts of dust and science as the Roving Clans by late game. The deal though is the city trade route limit requires you to build wide -- you have to have lots of cities. Also, you really need to do their faction quests to get two trade-related techs and buy heroes as governors in your cities.

Larcent wrote:
Actually trade routes are recalculated every turn and will change as roads are built further away from you. Later in the game, if other factions near you have roads in all their regions, your trade routes will go further in and bring you back more dust and science. There's also a surprise "secondary trade route" income that is referenced nowhere but in the trade route window and I only discovered it by accident. Hilariously I made this discovery while writing a guide on trade routes on Steam.



The guide is here, incidentally.



I believe commercial and research agreements don't actually work, by the way. If anybody has any evidence that they do, please let me know. But I've gotten agreements and saw no increases to dust or science gains. The fact that the modifiers still aren't listed in the trade route page doesn't help.



Edit: I should add that you can actually get huge, remarkable amounts of dust and science as the Roving Clans by late game. The deal though is the city trade route limit requires you to build wide -- you have to have lots of cities. Also, you really need to do their faction quests to get two trade-related techs and buy heroes as governors in your cities.

Yeah, I got the trade tents. They're nice. Should I bother with building the cargo things for my two island regions?



Also, do you ever get more heroes for your faction (besides buying them in the marketplace the same way anybody could)? I'm surprised that's not a quest reward.

Larcent wrote:
I believe commercial and research agreements don't actually work, by the way. If anybody has any evidence that they do, please let me know. But I've gotten agreements and saw no increases to dust or science gains. The fact that the modifiers still aren't listed in the trade route page doesn't help.

I could have sworn my dust & science trade went up after agreements. Maybe I was hallucinating. I'll have to test this in my next game.

There are many bonuses to trading. Without them trading is not worth it. Rather go and conquer that enemy. And yes there is some diplomatic options to help your trade routes with foreigners.

I'm not a big fan of how the roads work currently - it's a tad counter intuitive.



Once you build them in one region, the roads spread to all surrounding regions - but you can't trade with those yet since you need one at both ends. Roads should be an automatic empire wide upgrade and trade post buildings should only serve to add trade routes from/to that city (In fact I'd go as far as saying you don't need a trade route slot in both cities - just one)

Mansen wrote:
I'm not a big fan of how the roads work currently - it's a tad counter intuitive.

Yeah it shows you ghosts of where those roads would go (if they other region built Right of Way), but they are difficult to distinguish from "real" roads unless you mouse over.

There's a difference? I didn't even notice.

steveg700 wrote:
Yeah, I got the trade tents. They're nice. Should I bother with building the cargo things for my two island regions?



Also, do you ever get more heroes for your faction (besides buying them in the marketplace the same way anybody could)? I'm surprised that's not a quest reward.

You should build cargo docks if you can't make trade routes with roads. I don't know what kind of map you're using. If you have islands and then a big continent, if you have a coastal city on the continent, you can build docks, and then the island region can send routes through the docks and then pick up the roads on the continent and go further.



You don't get any more heroes. You do get a really, really good building for trade routes and a new diplomatic ability to punish other people's trade routes.