So after playing with the current trade system for a while I've had some thoughts about how to balance and improve trade in the game (some points have come up in other threads but wanted to make a consolidated post). I think most of these are changes that would add more challenge to trade and make it feel more integral to both province development and empire-building:
1. Remove the import limit: Right now the biggest bottleneck to trade being a more important part of the game is that the vast majority of provinces can only import a handful of goods; On the surface this would seem to lend more weight to the decision about what to import, but the practical effect ends up being that the *overall* impact of trade is so minor that it doesn't merit much thought as to which goods to select (particularly since only a limited selection of options are available at any given time.) In any case, a hard limit like this feels both arbitrary and unrealistic. That said, it wouldn't do to simply scrap the limit either, as this would make trade routes completely overpowered.
I think a more elegant solution would be to balance the system by mirroring the tradeoffs associated with import and export in real life: Basically, each import route would cost the province gold to maintain, while each export route would net an equivalent profit; The result would be that an internal trade route would be breakeven in monetary terms, but would provide a net benefit to province development; While an external trade route would either generate revenue or cost money depending on the overall balance of imports and exports. I think this would give the player a great deal of flexibility in structuring their economy, with a tradeoff between reaping the benefits of your empire's goods production internally, or selling them abroad for cash. Similarly, it would allow strategic targeted use of a negative trade balance, for example to rapidly develop a frontier province, or to feed a mega-metropolis with multiple food import routes. If it seems like this would be too open to exploits, you could either keep a much looser hard limit (perhaps tied to a the number of market improvements in the province) or have multiple imports of the same good provide gradually diminshing returns.
Obviously this might require some numerical tweaking of trade good bonuses and route costs, but overall I think it would make trade much more enjoyable and relevant.
2. QOL improvments: Along with the structural changes in #1, I think there are some QOL improvements that would make trade a lot easier to manage. The main element of these would be to provide trade controls at the province level that would alleviate the need to constantly reinstate defunct trade routes and field incoming trade requests (while these can be turned off at the global level, it's often necessary to keep them on manual to avoid overselling a particular province's surplus that you want to keep - Latium grain being a prime example.)
How this would look in practice: For each individual province, you would be able to set a target amount of each trade good; Goods produced locally would become available for export once they exceeded the target. For imports, setting a target would automatically set up routes (prioritizing domestic options first, and then by distance) as surpluses became available; The option would also exist to set up either type of route manually. You could also have a global version of this, which would set a default target for all provinces, but these would be overridden by individual province settings. (As a side note -- a nice complement to this setup would be a map mode showing where there are deficits and/or surpluses of trade goods.) Having these options would give the player much more fine-grained control over trade policy, but would also remove the need for constant maintenance by automating the actual selection of trade endpoints.
3.Routes on the map: This last part is much more a stretch goal, as I understand it would require much more work to integrate, but I think it's worth talking about. A big element that I feel is lacking from trade is the presence of physical trade routes on the map (I actually have a similar complaint about trade in Stellaris). This is very well implemented in EU4; And while the trade system is quite different in that game, it does capture the many dynamics around physically controlling and protecting trade quite well. I believe those dynamics should be just as important in Imperator (as they were historically).
How to put this into practice is a much trickier question, of course; Given that the geography is fixed, I believe you could could create a new static trade map layer, in which each province would be a node and they would be connected by a web of fixed paths. As routes are created they would follow the shortest path along the web to their destination. The value of any given leg on the web would be the total of trade route value passing through it, and you could use this information to interdict or protect the most valuable routes and chokepoints. This would add a whole new dimension to military strategy, make pirates a much more significant threat, and give much more weight to naval superiority. Clearly this would require a much bigger investment to implement than my first two suggestions but I believe it would really take the game to a whole new level of strategic depth!
1. Remove the import limit: Right now the biggest bottleneck to trade being a more important part of the game is that the vast majority of provinces can only import a handful of goods; On the surface this would seem to lend more weight to the decision about what to import, but the practical effect ends up being that the *overall* impact of trade is so minor that it doesn't merit much thought as to which goods to select (particularly since only a limited selection of options are available at any given time.) In any case, a hard limit like this feels both arbitrary and unrealistic. That said, it wouldn't do to simply scrap the limit either, as this would make trade routes completely overpowered.
I think a more elegant solution would be to balance the system by mirroring the tradeoffs associated with import and export in real life: Basically, each import route would cost the province gold to maintain, while each export route would net an equivalent profit; The result would be that an internal trade route would be breakeven in monetary terms, but would provide a net benefit to province development; While an external trade route would either generate revenue or cost money depending on the overall balance of imports and exports. I think this would give the player a great deal of flexibility in structuring their economy, with a tradeoff between reaping the benefits of your empire's goods production internally, or selling them abroad for cash. Similarly, it would allow strategic targeted use of a negative trade balance, for example to rapidly develop a frontier province, or to feed a mega-metropolis with multiple food import routes. If it seems like this would be too open to exploits, you could either keep a much looser hard limit (perhaps tied to a the number of market improvements in the province) or have multiple imports of the same good provide gradually diminshing returns.
Obviously this might require some numerical tweaking of trade good bonuses and route costs, but overall I think it would make trade much more enjoyable and relevant.
2. QOL improvments: Along with the structural changes in #1, I think there are some QOL improvements that would make trade a lot easier to manage. The main element of these would be to provide trade controls at the province level that would alleviate the need to constantly reinstate defunct trade routes and field incoming trade requests (while these can be turned off at the global level, it's often necessary to keep them on manual to avoid overselling a particular province's surplus that you want to keep - Latium grain being a prime example.)
How this would look in practice: For each individual province, you would be able to set a target amount of each trade good; Goods produced locally would become available for export once they exceeded the target. For imports, setting a target would automatically set up routes (prioritizing domestic options first, and then by distance) as surpluses became available; The option would also exist to set up either type of route manually. You could also have a global version of this, which would set a default target for all provinces, but these would be overridden by individual province settings. (As a side note -- a nice complement to this setup would be a map mode showing where there are deficits and/or surpluses of trade goods.) Having these options would give the player much more fine-grained control over trade policy, but would also remove the need for constant maintenance by automating the actual selection of trade endpoints.
3.Routes on the map: This last part is much more a stretch goal, as I understand it would require much more work to integrate, but I think it's worth talking about. A big element that I feel is lacking from trade is the presence of physical trade routes on the map (I actually have a similar complaint about trade in Stellaris). This is very well implemented in EU4; And while the trade system is quite different in that game, it does capture the many dynamics around physically controlling and protecting trade quite well. I believe those dynamics should be just as important in Imperator (as they were historically).
How to put this into practice is a much trickier question, of course; Given that the geography is fixed, I believe you could could create a new static trade map layer, in which each province would be a node and they would be connected by a web of fixed paths. As routes are created they would follow the shortest path along the web to their destination. The value of any given leg on the web would be the total of trade route value passing through it, and you could use this information to interdict or protect the most valuable routes and chokepoints. This would add a whole new dimension to military strategy, make pirates a much more significant threat, and give much more weight to naval superiority. Clearly this would require a much bigger investment to implement than my first two suggestions but I believe it would really take the game to a whole new level of strategic depth!
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