If your city has silk coal iron etc, I would like to see the city harvest these resources each turn. They can either go into a huge stockpile or be used by another city in your empire, Or you can set the price for your goods and try to sell them to others. Now if you want to build a temple you can either buy it or you can take 10 stone blocks and 3 lumber out of your reserves. Same if you want to build a archer, take out 1 grain and 1 iron. Besides the building of cities I would like to see the building of storage yards or granaries etc. This would give other players the opportunity to pillage & plunder your reserves. This wouldn’t eliminate caravans as caravans would be goods like gems beads and goods that merchants normally trade.

This kind of model in my mind would create large pressure to expand and to get as many resources as you can. Not only that it should pretty much eliminate all that annoying micromanaging. People would take there turns a lot faster and the games would go a lot faster. More effort could be spent on strategic planning.

One another note, one of the most disappointing things I have found is that lots of people die due to barbs or a lucky chariot at the start of the game. I would like to see the introduction of a new unit called the palace guards or something like that. This unit will start out with a defensive strength of 2. This unit can not move out of the city, and can not attack outside the city, it is just a defensive unit and it should disappear with the discouvery of any new government type, (maybe you can keep it in monarchy)

Anyways I would like to hear from firaxis if I am even CLOSE on my guess on the trade system? Also if we had some idea of the trade system it would give the civ2 community a chance to have some input on its development, which would make the game better in the end.

As it stands right now i think the units in the cap get a defensive bonus if you have less then 5 cities.

In my opinion, if Civ3 is going to have many trade goods, the absolute best way to handle them is have them collected from each city every turn and then place into a civilization wide `warehouse'. From the warehouse you could grab a big glob of gems or wheat icons and toss them out for trade with the price you are willing to accept. You could also set what you were willing to buy and in what price range (i.e. 4-6 gold per iron point). When you had set the screen the way you liked the computer would then carry out those orders every turn.

Then, if you were building a unit that needed say, aluminum, that resource would be drawn from your national reserve.

If trade in Civ3 means micromanaging zillions of slow moving caravans from city to city and carefully figuring out where to send each particular good on the world map I probably won't bother trading much.

Having trade take place at a high level between nations rather then -cities- will not only add atmosphere and realism to the game but will allow for neat stuff like price fixing and monopolies.

I bet that Firaxis will have a model somewhat along the lines I'm thinking about. (Or at least I hope so).

I agree that it should be relatively easy to manage, but trade should be a pretty important part of the game, particularly as the game progresses.

- Trade is actually at the city level, bu delt with at the national level.

- A city improvement (lets call it bazaar, because marketplace is taken) would be required for a trade route to run through a city.

- If a city produces a comodity (iron, timber ... whatever) in surplus, than it is put into the national reserve with a 10% efficiency penalty.

- A bazaar allows the player to create an internal trade route to the capital, reducing this penalty to nothing.

- Another improvement (granary/warehouse) can shift the location of the 'national reserve' to a city other than the capital.

- Internal trade routes (routes that lie completely within your borders) only take one turn to take effect regardeless of the Age.

- Multiple national reserves can be created.

- A city can trade with an external city if it doesn't have a bazaar, but only at a 75% penalty.

- Bazaar's reduce this penalty to 5%.

- When two civ's want to trade they go to the trade screen select the trade route that is going to carry the goods and select the terms of trade, i.e. goods money etc.

- A trade route can be created at any time by going to the trade screen and simply clicking create trade route and selecting the path of the route. If it ens or starts at a city without a bazaar, than it gets a 75 % penalty. All trade routes have a 10% penalty for every gap of 10 squares they have without passing through a city.

- External trade routes can take a number of turns to take effect, depending on your tech level.

I have probably forgotten a lot of the stuff I am thinking but this is only a skeleton model anyway, feel free to add.

------------------
- Biddles

Biddles, I think you're on the right track. Trade is still quite important, but because you don't have to actually set up routes internally, only for external routes, you cut down on micromanagement. Not sure about the penalty though. Shouldn't overseas routes be more profitable?

Were you saying that the penalty for external routes was in time, and not money? Originally I thought you were suggesting that you only get 75% gold as you would by trading internally.

I agree that initially setting up a route should cost you, but so far this has been reflected in the production costs of the caravan. Are you suggesting that there be a gold cost as well, or instead of this?

Star Trek birth of the federation and MOO2 take a interesting approach to trade. Once a city reaches a certain size it has avaible to it a trade route. Then when it reaches the next milestone it gets another trade route, and you just select a destination city you want to trade with.

Now the thing about moo2 is trade routes when first established have a negitive gold cost. This reflects the cost of setting up the trade route. As time goes on the trade route becomes profitable. Then the bigger the destination city etc, the better the trade route is. In summery the further you are from the capitol the higher the setup costs of a trade route should be. Another nice thing about MOO2 is that you can create science trade routes between other civilizations. They start out as a negitive cash route then they produce science after a while.

AS SOON as you go to war ALL TRADE ROUTES ARE CANCELED with the enemy civ.

(Another unit would have to be created to help build wonders)

2. For external trade routes I was taking the time delay as a given. But maybe this should only be in the initial trade route setup period (So as the trade route is being established it can't be used for however many years, depending on how long it is).
As for the penalty, this was only to take effect if the route began or ended in a city that didn't have a 'bazaar', (A city that is totally unprepared for such large trade). In this case you only get 25% of the goods being traded (hey, you would have to be insane to do this, but if you really needed iron...). If both cities have a bazaar than this penalty does not apply.

3. Yes there should be an ongoing gold cost per turn, although this would be very small. This would automatically upgrade trade routes from caravan to truck etc. This would be made back 10 fold if you are trading for gold not goods for goods.

markusf: Agreed as soon as you go to war all trade routes are destroyed.

Colonization had a privateer unit which could plunder enemy ships. I think that any unit should be able to plunder a trade route but at great diplomatic cost (no-one would trade with you). I also believe there should be 'barbarian' units that the pc controls that pirate.

------------------
- Biddles