Repeated Commodity Trade Strategy

[Adam Smith]

Sten, Ribinnah:
How the parens work depends on the city. Some cities will continue to read Silk, Wine, Coal or whatever no matter how many caravans of those commodities you deliver. You can make other cities alternate pairs of commodities as Tonic described. Other cities just fill up their trade slots as you deliver caravans. I dont really know what determines how a city acts. As far as I can tell it is random.

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Old posters never die.
They.j.u.s.t..f..a..d..e...a...w...a...y...

[Scouse Gits]

Silk is an interesting commodity, as it is often repeated. I have seen silk be demanded by a city from the BC years to the end of a game. Possibly this reflects the fact that there has been a steady demand for silk throughout the ages. Its demand is not altered by technological progress.

Different continents appear to be given their own commodity demands. Very often one Civ will require say - "Silk, Coal and Hides", whilst a neighbour will demand "Spice, Copper and Beads"
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SG (2)

[The Mad Viking]

Thanks for bumping the thread Adam.

I wonder, do these cities whose trade demands don't change already have 3 strong trade routes, which are not replaced when the freight delivers? That is, the demand being satisfied is linked not to receiving the freight, but establishing a new trade route?

In my current game I have a couple of cities producing Cloth freights turn after turn; if I could get a repeat Cloth reciever, hoo-haw!

[Adam Smith]

I've found cities like this with 0, 1, or 2 existing trade routes.

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Old posters never die.
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[Ribannah]

Adam Smith, a small correction to my last post.

Alternating ALWAYS renews demand in your own cities. In other Civ's cities, you are right, anything can happen, but the amount of trade generated by that city is definitely a major factor.

- Rib -

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If you have no feet, don't walk on fire

[SCG]

Reguarding those repeating commodities, I could speculate that each supplied/demanded item has a numeric value that once reached, supply/demand is (satisfied), and a second numeric value that when reached supply/demand changes, and that those values depend on things like size of the city and number of trade arrows, but that is about the best I can do with my emperical evidence.

Reguarding demand in a city, I've found that at least some of the time, it is based on the size (or maybe size of the trade potential) of the cities involved. In one game I had an AI capitol demanding dye. With some experimentation, I found that if i delivered the smaller payload dye caravans first, I could deliver more dye caravans before the AI demand changed or was satisfied. There seemed to be a certain size to which the dye changed to something else demanded, anything over changed the demand, anything under left it still in demand in the sink city.

Conversely, other than Hides, I've never had a repeat commodity to deliver without at least 3 trade routes already in the supply city. When I had 3 routes predelivery, and the city i was delivering to had less trade than the smallest trade city, it often would simply free up the commodity to trade again (i 'got rid' of the caravan, without filling in a trade route). The rest of the time, one of the supply commodities changed, sometimes to what I had just delivered.

Also, I've had small trade cities deliver lucrative caravans, gold to another continent for example, (satisfy) demand in that city, where its other commodites have no noticeable effect, so the factors that determine trade bonus and whether the trade route replaces an existing one are likely part of the equation when dealing with repeating commodities.

Hope I didn't just confuse everyone more than they already were

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April Cantor: Sire, in order to expand further we must first gain favor of the King

SCG: darn, I've never really got the hang of that tribute thing, guess it will be a long time until i make prince

*goes off and starts gifting gold and techs*