Anyway, my question is, when I trade with other civilizations, I get a lot of benefit from this, but so are the other civilizations??? Is that a bad thing, helping out your opponents like this?

The other civilization will get a trade route, just like you. What you get but the AI civilization does not get is the money and science bonus for the trade route. In my opinion these are the most important benefits of trade.

If you are worried about helping the AI civilizations too much then only deliver caravans to one of their cities. That way any civilization will have no more than three trade routes with your civilization.

If you get obsessed with tipping every goodie hut on the planet you will end up with cities scattered all over the world. Then you could trade between your own cities. You will get a greater bonus if the source and destination for a caravan are on different continents.

Personally I wouldn't worry about helping the AI. The bonus that you get for delivering a caravan of needed goods to an AI city on a different continent than the source is extremely valuable. The bonus can easily be worth several turns worth of science that ALL your cities can produce.

Also, why is it sometime a city runs out of trading goods and I'm only left with food -- I don't think it's a good idea to ship food to another civilization And what does the parenthesis enclosing the goods mean? That the good isn't in demand as much or the city has run out of resources to produce this?

Each trade route benefits two cities: the source of the caravan and the destination. If a city already has the benefit of three routes (It doesn't matter if the city was the source or the destination of the route), and a fourth route is completed. Then, among the four routes the one with the lowest trade will be discarded. But just for that city.

If you want to check that it works this way in your next game deliver the first caravan from four of your cities to the same city. Each of your four cities will have a trade route but the destination city will only have three listed routes.

A city can only produce three nonfood commodities. Suppose a city can produce silk and you build a silk caravan. That caravan represents all the silk that city produces so you can no longer produce that commodity for trade. From time to time the commodities a city produces change. When it does you can then produce other commodities. Sometimes it will happen that even after producing a commodity the city can still produce more caravans of that commodity. This last event seems to happen most often with hides.

While you may wish to send a food caravan to one of your own cities, for example your science city, I can't think of a good reason to send a food caravan to an AI city.

Food caravans are most often used for helping to build wonders, although as a beginner I frequently erroneously built food caravans because I thought I had food shortages in some cities (it was poor worker/city square management instead).

I sometimes build a food caravan when I have nothing else I want to build urgently, as "storage" for the next wonder. In the meantime, I send them off wandering around the other civs to do some reconnaisance, find out where the cities are etc.

quote: Originally posted by jpk on 07-31-2000 08:30 AM Aislyn: The other civilization will get a trade route, just like you. What you get but the AI civilization does not get is the money and science bonus for the trade route. In my opinion these are the most important benefits of trade.

In the Ancient Scrolls Of Wisdom thereīs a formula to calculate the gold benefit from a trade route. How big is the sci bonus when establishing a trade route?
Btw, I think that in the earlier middle part of the game, just having switched to rep, the pemanent benefit of trading routes is also quite important. Extra trade is helping a lot keeping these cities happy in this period. Later on, it isnīt much less important, if you consider that three good trade routes produce about 45+ extra beakers.