A couple of points I would like to make:

Whatever was being produced ont hat planet should still be available for trade, right? (assume that you don't damage any improvments or planet quality). Just the owner changed.

Not neccesarily. I'll give an example, where I'm from (Arizona), there are a number of really good Mexican food places. They hire Mexicans to do the work, and the food is amazing. Right now however I'm out of state going to college. Here they have Americans cooking the Mexican food. The result? It's ok, but not nearly as good.

The point I'm trying to make is that if you have two groups, one who has grown up in the culture of the good being produced and one who hasn't, even if they follow the same format the results can vary widely.

Perhaps people don't want the trade good becuase the people who you conquered the planet from just did it better.

Conquering the other civilization will actually put you at a disdvantage, because you just lost all you're trade income with them.

That's the point, it is to make an economic empire viable. Plus, it's fairly realistic since not very many countires will trade with each other during times of war.

I havn't tried the DA Beta yet (waiting for a release fate before I pre-order), but I have heard that they adjusted the way trade was handled. Does it suit your liking more, or are you basing your post ont eh new system?

Basically trading in this game is a device. Of course it doesn't work exactly like it does in the real world, but last time I checked, I didn't see many Drengin bagging my groceries either. Historically you are right that trade has been about raw materials, but remember that trade was only a portion of merchantilism. The entire purpose of trade was to increase strength of ones economy. In this game, trade serves the same function: strengthen economies. Since many people find the economy sliders in this game half magically already, I can see why it was decided to just have trade routes bring in money instead of production or research points.

Additionally, this is a strategy game. You are supposed to have to plan out routes, where star bases go and anticipate how the game will develop. Be taking away those penalties for changing a trade route you are basically undoing a vital part of the game. Its like asking for a do over if you lost a fleet battle or to un-declare war on some one if the war is going poorly.

The real point of having trade routes in this game is to serve as a counter-balance to going to war. It makes you think about who you will attack and how it will affect your empire. You've mentioned yourself that thats what it has been forcing you to do, so I would say it is doing a pretty decent job!

Right. That's why you either move trade-routes before you declare war on another civilization, or you don't declare war on them. Trade is a reason to have peaceful relations.

I don't really know where your coming from, because i've never been in a situation where trade was such a huge part of my income. Infact, I usually use trade as a supplement and a diplomacy tool. I rarely devote the resources required to build the starbases that would make Trade a substantial part of my income.

Well I suppose you could do that and not be "dependent" on trade, but it seems like you are missing out on a huge chunk of income that way, and theres really no other way to replace it. When you build multiple econ starbases around the trade routes, and install trade modules, you can get mad income (it was around 600 bc/month in the last situation for me).

The thing is, I really don't seen an alternative way to replace that income. Taxes are dependent on population, and the population growth is slow, fixed and theres really no way of increasing it given a particular civ(except for for that galactic achievement?) You can increase the cap by building farms and researching farming techs, but that doesn't help growth. You also have to build entertainment to make sure the population morale doesn't plummet. Also by building farms and morale boosters, you lose out on production/research.

I am trying to build a strategy game right now, putting you in control of a major nation during WWII. I'm thinking of throwing out the concept of "money" altogether, because on a national scale it makes little sense. People don't want money, but the things money can buy. You can have all the "money" in the world and won't mean a thing if you don't have access to the raw materials that are in demand. (e.g. Germany had tons of gold after their major conquests - fat lot of good in did them because they coudln't do anything with it) And in most trade agreements nations (at least in that era) didn't trade goods for money, but goods for goods. Because you have no idea of what the dollar or the reichsmark is going to be six months from now.

I'm not criticizing the system on "realism" which makes little sense for a space based strategy game , but I think a good system might be to have planets have particular resources and then you trade based on those resources. Resources would be necessary for producing certain thigns. You could also trade for manufactured goods. And have no limit on trade routes - the limit would be the amount of resource you produce. It wouldn't necessarily have to be that complex - you could just have say a half dozen raw resources. This would also open up interesting strategic options where you curtail a certain civs military production by cutting off their access to critical raw materials. You could also be able to trade with yourself - say have some planet specialize on farming and then have another be a "hive" world that is totally dependent on outside food sources.

Because in order to direct a trade route to a specific planet, we need to build the freighter on that planet which is ridiculus.

Can you build a freighter on another world, then land it on the planet you want to start the route from, then re-launch it from there to start the route(like you can do with troop transports)? If not, then that is silly...it would totally undermine the idea of having specialized planets (the Federation had Utopia Planetia, or whatever their shipyards were called). Not even earthbound cities are forced to build their own tractor trailers ,freight ships and trains in the city of origin in order to initiate a trade route with anouther city....youd think the "future" worlds would be at least as competent.


The reason I dont know the answer to that though, is because for many of the reasons that have been listed in the thread Ive found *initiating* trade in the game to be a waste of time and resources and I dont even bother with it...considering all the other civs will do it for me. I *seem* to benefit just as much, or well enough, from all the routes they start up with me ...and they trade more prolifically than I ever would, without me having to build any ships. If I research trade earlier than the rest of the galaxy as a stepping stone to another tech, Ill even sell the technology to everyone just to get them starting trade routes(as well as something else to build other than military ships).

Hopefully in DA trade will be improved so I can start worrying about it again. I wouldnt mind seeing some sort of simple commodoties system in a future expansion that could make active trading its own metagame.