Suggestion - be able to set trade route path

Only problem would be to keep it from being abused as profits rise with every turn of travel.

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

Just keep the trade route bonus for distance what it would be as if it was the "shortest path possible". If you make it longer to keep it out of enemy territory, so be it, you wouldnt get a bonus for it being longer, it would just be a bit more safe.

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. . .

It did bother me when the shortest route possible happened to pass up my econ starbase completly. The shortest possible route might just be the most inconveinient route possible too.  

I have an Idea.

Why not just have a branch of the tech tree that allows you to lenghthen the shortest route possible by (a number)%. Then anything longer than your lenghthening ability would have a trade revenue penalty on it.
Or the tech branch could give you extra waypoints.

Either way would be fine.

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?

(Lets say a person lived in the U.S.) Why would they prefer water from Poland or Canada when there is water near them?
There's an illusion of quality. Oh, i'm not saying that they are of the same quality. I don't know, honestly. But advertising causes people to think that water from a mountain spring is better than ground water. There is also a sense that it can be considered more exotic.

On the topic of trade routes, I don't think they are important enough to worry about. If you really just need the money, you can trade with someone else (economic star bases in Drengin or Neutral areas don't sound the safest). If you're doing it for diplomacy, i'd think it's worth the risk of losing the trade routes. You can just rebuild them after the war?

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.

There's also more profit, or it wouldn't happen.... especially the China-America example.

The real reason why Americans buy Chinese products is because China produces and ships them for cheaper than American companies can manufacture them at home and still make acceptable profit margins. People go to a shop and see a T.V. for 25% cheaper.... a lot of people will buy it. Thus, the local industry becomes redundant as it is all "outsourced".

Anyway, that's not the reason why I think the trade lanes work the way they do.... think to the times of say Marco Polo where goods and trade items from further away were simply more exotic. Goods that grew naturally in certain areas or were manufactured in a specific way were valued more and more the further afield their sale location was from their point of origin. This is the model happening in the game..... the Torians who inhabit space on the other side of the Galaxy have wierd and wonderful items that your people pay a lot of cash for, and vice-versa!

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.

Adding on to the whole custom trade routes idea: what if you could have one trade ship go to multiple planets? When you launch a trade ship, instead of the standard movement command, it had a trade-specialized menu or some other sort of system where you could select the planets you wanted it to go to (only one from each race), and it would take the shortest routes from one planet to the next. The more planets you visit, the more profitable the trade route. To limit this you could put a cap on the revenue, but this cap would be relieved when you researched trade technologies, perhaps providing more advanced trade modules that you could put on the traders.

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.

So something like:

Trade Route A is 30 parsecs long at shortest lengthand provides 10 bc per week on average, total value of 300.

Player decides he doesn't like the way trade Route A is going and decides to divert it and make it 60 parsecs long with a single waypoint. The game takes the original value (300) divides it by 60. The route now provides only 5 bc a month.

The only problem is that I still think there needs to be a maximum value on how much you can lengthen a route, because trade routes rise in value as time goes on: I'm imagining players taking a long, valuable trade route and diverting it back and forth between two economic starbases to milk it for all it's worth. . . shades of Blaster Launchers in X-Com, making the Blaster Bomb do a little death spiral upwards before dive-bombing the Sectopod.

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.