Trade routes

Can't beat the AI? Is it too tame? Discuss the best strategies!
Ignatus
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Re: Trade routes

Post by Ignatus »

jpsm wrote:I received now a message "We're LOW on funds". I predicted that something on this line would happen because I only understood how to do the technology race stuff but still didn't get how to make a solid cash flow from trade. Some city sold the lab and other the bank. I knew that after the initial 50000 be consumed it would generate this kind of problem.
Other strange thing is that city improvements with upkeep 0 such as marketplaces are being sold too and city improvements with upkeep 1 despite Adam Smith wonder such as libraries and harbors are being sold too...
Yes, all buildings that are not small or great wonders are at risk if your funds are insufficient (only units will not be disbanded in this cass if they are not upkept with gold). You'd better sell a building yourself the previous turn then leave it on the random selection... And don't forget to adjust your tax slider, normally low of funds dituation should be avoided. You better slow down your science, you can steal or trade techs from the AIs.
Dino the Dinosore
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Re: Trade routes

Post by Dino the Dinosore »

Other problem that I have is that because a ship (military unit) can't enter a frontier (even in water) of a nation in peace, armistice, or cease-fire without declaring war first I can only maintain internal trade and trade with enemy nations, all foreign trade is trade with one enemy nation because the other I can't circumnavigate their shores before declare war first. How to establish a trade route with a friendly nation through sea?
This problem is because ships (like transports, in most rulesets) that can carry units (like diplos and caravans) and have Attack: 0 should also have the flag that says it's a non-military unit and can enter peaceful borders. But in some rulesets that flag is missing - e.g. The Galleon in the "classic" ruleset. I think that's a bug in the ruleset, and that there should always be a non-military ship that can carry units available so you can send caravans overseas to friendly nations. When you look up a unit in the Help Browser, it will tell you if it's a non-military unit.

You could edit the ruleset file to fix this, or even make your own custom rulesets, but I wouldn't recommend that to beginners.
nef
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Re: Trade routes

Post by nef »

A number of these questions are answered in the help (Help > Economy > Trade). Have you read it? But to add some additional points:

A. How/why did you have so much gold and then run out of it? Mistakes by beginners (incl. yours truly) is to (i) build too many "improvements", and (ii) not move to more productive governments in a timely manner. These two are related.

B. You should be able to manage without trade routes, but they do make it easier. For example in the commercial Civ I game each of the three possible routes could generate similar trade to the city by itself, but don't rely on this to always be the case.

C. Trade routes cost caravans. You may find an alternative strategy of using them for building wonders (or some mix of the two). You choice would depend on particulars of the game at hand.

D. There are a lot of variations between rulesets. The help text is not so useful in this regard. You could learn from experience (which really is not so bad), or you could look at the options listed in the ruleset's game.ruleset section [trade]

E. For those rulesets that give science (and gold) or even those that just give gold for the non recurrent (i.e. one-time) revenue one can consider the technique developed by the Civ II "Early Landers". This is to take advantage of the fact that if (i) all trade slots are being used, and (ii) the recurrent revenue is greater than one of the existing routes then a new route is established by cancelling the weakest old route. This will give you a new one-time bonus and will free up a slot from the losing city giving you the opportunity for another sequence of trade route replacements. The Early Lander strategy was to plan these out in meticulous detail. The other part of this strategy was to use the super science ciy (SSC), where one has just one large city with lots of trade tiles and the important trade/science wonders. Other cities were "helpers" creating caravans which would be rehomed in the SSC before being sent to their destination. But NOTE: there are various options in game.ruleset that can affect all these features. In the case of the civ1 ruleset (which I am using exclusively at the moment) I use this technique to the extent possible which varies greatly from one game to the next. Also note that the one-time revenue is based on distance and the domestic trade of each of the two cities
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