Sharing trading gains [discussion]

[quantumstate]

As a point of curiosity the topic about trading gains was the extra straw that pushed me to start the discussion that eventually lead to the Design Committee being set up. So it only seems fair that the Committee shall now look at this issue.

Here is the original thread sharing gains with trading (patch included).

Basically the proposal is to have some portion of the trade profit go to the owner of the market instead of the owner of the trade unit. So when trading with an allies market your ally will receive some income.

A notable percentage is 50% which happens to be the same as the international trading bonus. This means that if you trade with an ally instead of yourself you don't get any bonus for the international trade but your ally gets income instead.

Main thread is at http://www.wildfiregames.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=17113

[mimo]

In fact, the proposal in the quoted thread was not exactly that one : it was to give only a fraction of the international bonus to the ally. So if the international bonus is 50% and that we decide to give 50% to the ally, the ally would only have 25% (50% of 50%) and the player 125%. So the player still gain more than with domestic trade where he would get only 100%, but part of this extra income is shared with the allied.

[Mythos_Ruler]

In fact, the proposal in the quoted thread was not exactly that one : it was to give only a fraction of the international bonus to the ally. So if the international bonus is 50% and that we decide to give 50% to the ally, the ally would only have 25% (50% of 50%) and the player 125%. So the player still gain more than with domestic trade where he would get only 100%, but part of this extra income is shared with the allied.

This. I like this.

[historic_bruno]

Why not make the player and ally get an equal bonus, so it's effectively 25% bonus for both? That seems clearer and simpler to me than a fraction of a fraction (which IIRC is how the patch is implemented).

[mimo]

A fraction has the advantage of being more versatile for future evolution of the game : it may depend for exemple on the civ. If we have by default 50% of the international trade for the player and its ally, we may turn it to 70%-30% when one of the civ was good in trading (like carthage for exemple).

[historic_bruno]

A fraction has the advantage of being more versatile for future evolution of the game : it may depend for exemple on the civ. If we have by default 50% of the international trade for the player and its ally, we may turn it to 70%-30% when one of the civ was good in trading (like carthage for exemple).

What if they're both Carthage? I agree civ-specific and tech bonuses would be nice, but I'm not convinced this is the right place to put it. In the scenario you explain, you would want to trade with civs that are terrible at trading, but never good ones like Carthage, because you'd get a smaller slice of the same pie. I think this is the opposite of what would really happen, people would trade with the civs that excel at trading in order to get better wares (not considering this from a microtrade level where we look at individual trader abilities, that would be silly). Couldn't we have independent bonuses for source and destination? Source bonus is applied when the trader returns to the source, destination bonus applies when it reaches the destination.

[wraitii]

Seems like it'd start getting really complicated to balance if we go down that road.

[mimo]

Couldn't we have independent bonuses for source and destination? Source bonus is applied when the trader returns to the source, destination bonus applies when it reaches the destination.

Thinking again to it, I agree. That would be the simplest approach.

[mimo]

There is also one point worth to consider with trade which is to have the possibility to put some limitations on the number of trade routes we can have on each market. A simple way to achieve this feature would be to have a new component (something like TradeSupply.js) acting on each markets and docks and in which we can implement such a code. This would have the additionnal advantage that some variables presently defined as constant in the JS could be put in the market's xml (like for example the bonus for international trade).

[quantumstate]

There is also one point worth to consider with trade which is to have the possibility to put some limitations on the number of trade routes we can have on each market. A simple way to achieve this feature would be to have a new component (something like TradeSupply.js) acting on each markets and docks and in which we can implement such a code. This would have the additionnal advantage that some variables presently defined as constant in the JS could be put in the market's xml (like for example the bonus for international trade).

Putting this kind of limitation in place just leads to each player creating 4 markets next to each other. The real cost of a trade route is creating the traders and protecting the traders from being raided.

[mimo]

Your objection can easily be prevented by requiring a minimal distance between two markets.

Without limits, it's enough to have two markets and fortify a bit the trade route (having fortress along it) to have a virtually infinite resource very easy to defend.

Having limitations force you to expand to build more markets and make it more difficult to defend all your trade routes because more scattered. This would give more possibilities for the ennemy to raid them. I think that would add to the gameplay.

The point is that this limitation should not be too strict : I was thinking of something like allowing 5 routes for each resource at a given market, but no more than 3 of them with the same second market.