The Current Trade Model

[nweismuller]

Now, to start off, I want to say I actually approve of the current trade model, where each colony, outpost, and market contributes to trade capacity, you get a fraction of trading partners' trade capacity added to yours by trade agreements, and the increased value of foreign trade means you'll see an increase in income from opening trade even before building more freighters to handle increased capacity. What unnerves me is the lack of sanity checks to make sure the 'foreign trade bonus' doesn't absolutely swamp the size of the domestic economy- something I see frequently with my trade partners in my own games as a trade- and Market-happy Phidi player.

I would think that it doesn't really matter how huge a market a neighbor provides, after a certain point you'll saturate a given society's ability to take advantage of export and import opportunities. The trade value reaped by a hypothetical single independent town opening trade with the United States is unlikely to be significantly greater than it opening trade with, say, Guatemala. Any thoughts by other players, or by the devs?

[Dragar]

Real world reference: trade between two countries is roughly proportional to the economy of the two, divided by the distance between them.

[Arioch]

The way foreign trade works (as far as I am aware) is that foreign routes are more profitable than domestic routes. When you sign a trade charter, any transports that are trading in domestic routes will switch to any available foreign routes. It's not a flat bonus; if you have no available transports, you shouldn't see any income increase.

[nweismuller]

The way foreign trade works (as far as I am aware) is that foreign routes are more profitable than domestic routes. When you sign a trade charter, any transports that are trading in domestic routes will switch to any available foreign routes. It's not a flat bonus; if you have no available transports, you shouldn't see any income increase.

Yes, I understand that, and actually alluded to it in my original post- I did mean you didn't need to add transports to gain revenue if you already have transports running trade. The thing that is bizarre is... give me a second here... launches game to pull up a save

OK, so in my current game, Humanity is running a current surplus of +369 coins annually, with a total population of 11,834,835. This is basically entirely due to their trade treaty with me. If I cancel my trade treaty with them, I lose 22 coins annually; their budget surplus drops to +3 coins annually from +369 coins annually. It is clear that the benefit they're getting from trade not only is vastly disproportionate to the benefit I'm getting, but that their trade revenues from me totally swamp the size of their domestic economy. It seems to me like perhaps there should be a sanity check so that a poor nation trading with a far richer nation doesn't end up getting trade revenues far out of proportion to their original economy. I have to imagine there's only so many imports and exports their economy can support at its current size.

[Arioch]

I'm not sure that's so terribly unrealistic. If a modern country like Japan or Korea or China were to suddenly lose all trade with the United States, it would be an economic catastrophe. Despite the huge number of domestic consumers each one of those countries has.

[nweismuller]

I don't particularly mind that trade with a wealthier partner should be huge in relative terms- it just seems to me like perhaps it should be capped at something like three times the benefit the wealthier partner is getting, so that, for instance, we don't end up with the degenerate case I have seen where a single leftover outpost was earning hundreds of coins from trade annually, which I'd think would be a bit above what one outpost could reasonably import and export.

[zolobolo]

Never got around figuring out how the trade treaty exactly effects my empire, except for it always benefiting the other party more and that it increased the trade pool capacity according to some logic

Would prefer the diplomacy menu under the enemy empire info pane and during trade deal to reference the exact effect whatever that might be - scratch that the hint actually shows the additional trade routes available to the player (does not show for the other party though)