Build a big pile of trade starbases and wind the path around them...

I like the idea, but it needs some tweaking.

1. Redirecting a trade route reduces the amount of money it provides. Merchants want to take the shortest route, it reduces overhead. Diverting it too far would make them very unhappy. Perhaps allow the route to be lengthened only by up to 25% of its shortest distance length before you start taking money penalties, and past 100% the merchants refuse to take that route.

2. Allow only a certain number of waypoints, perhaps two or three.

This would mean you could divert a route away from the edges of enemy territory, but you can't run your ships in a huge arc around the outside of the map, or in a big spiral/zig zag pattern to make them go back and forth through your economy bases. Or, if protecting your freighters bothers you that much, you could just become a galactic privateer. . .

I like the idea.

I don't understand the reasoning behind the system where a long trade route is more profitable than a short one. While I can understand that for gameplay this encourages consideration of longer, more dangerous routes, but realistically how does one's cargo become more valuable as you haul it through space?

Yes. In fact, America gets most of it's everything from china, but it's far worse than anything we could have made by ourselves here.   

There's an illusion of quality.

How about simply having the trade route be the same route as the original trading vessel took to reach the planet? You can force a ship to use a more indirect route by manually setting some intermediate destinations that don't go to a planet and letting the ship go there first. The micromanagement aspect to do this is probably enough to ensure that it's not abused.

Alternately, just give the player the ability to set 3 way points on a route already in existence and ignore the possibility that users will game the distance values. What you will earn for any individual trade route is pretty minimal anyways. Besides, the further out the route, the harder it is for the player to protect that route, so it's not all to your benefit.

Or, leave the "most direct route" method in play, but add a bonus to trade (well, the taxes on it you get) if that trade route must cross a hostile empire. "Ah, you want Alkasan cigars? Well, the trade routes cross the Boskonian empire with whom we're at war, so that will be 4 times the cost." Your trade revenue now gets 400% more in taxes, as long as the routes last. That would make up for risk and provide incentive to set up armed escorts.

I do like the idea of having more control over the routes.

Someone already mentioned what I think my econ prof called "comparative advantage" (we can make and ship it more cheaply than you can make it at home).

But there's also the notion of "inelastic demand," e.g. US consumer demand for gasoline. So far, we've seen great whinging about the rising price but little change in consumption patterns.

The GCII trade system doesn't get specific, so I've always assumed that whatever commodities are fueling the route are some bundle of comparative advantage goods and maybe some inelastic demand stuff like ritual items or addictive drugs (or both in one, like tobacco).

Re the tweak notions, I like the idea of *optional* waypoints on trade routes with a simple limit like maybe one per level of your Logistics tech. That would prevent huge loops around trade base clusters and keep the UI simple.

Re balance, I like the idea of keeping the value based on the shortest possible route regardless of the actual route. IIRC, this would reduce your weekly income a bit, putting a time-value-of-money cost on customizing routes.

Hmmm....

If the routes longer, its more profitable, but the merchants don't like it, so its also less profitable, which leaves it just as profitable as the shortest route possible. Here's the Idea...

So lets say a route is twice as long as the SRP (shortest route possible), well lets say the profit would be 10bc instead of 6bc, but because of the merchants not liking it, your route will only go up in value (10bc) every four weeks, instead of every week.

So I'm going to assume that the SRP is 100 parsecs long and the new one is 200 pc long.
Now if I crunch these numbers...

the old one would be worth 600bc when it got there.
the new one would be worth 500bc when it gets there, but it will take twice as long to reach it's destination, wont get shot at, and could go past a few more trade starbases.

And about lenghthening and waypoint maximums. No limit on waypoints, but definetly put a maximum to lenghthening, like 200% or something, and then add about 100% percent for each extra planet (If freighters can go to more than one planet).

They might need to change up the trade managment screen a little (especially if they decide to let a freighter go to several planets)...

1) Like the lines representing trade routes on the mini-map thing should show alterations in the path.

2) And the data thing would have to show all the planets it travels to.

3) And The trade you get from each planet.

4) And (If the freighter go's to several planets) if you declare war (or vice versa) on someone, there should be a button to make the freghter stop going to the enemies planets, but still go to freindly planets, like a "kill sub-route" or something.

Also, if you make it go to several planets, the freighter should have to return home before going to the next planet, because it already sold all its goods from you.

One more Idea...
To stop abuse on trade routes by winding them around trade starbases.
You can only place one waypoint in the influence area of a single econ starbase.
And the path of a single freighter can only pass through a single econ starbases influence area once.

Just some Ideas.