Date Line and Trade

[ramses II.]

Sometimes the date line goes straight through my empire.
I noticed that there are more specials than usual (=easy victory!). Maybe it's worth a separate thread.
And my question is:
Supposed you have two cities (Alphaville in the west and Betatown in the east), one on each side of the date line.
Will a caravan from Alphaville to Betatown bring more trade arrows than vice versa? Or is there no difference?

[Scouse Gits]

It has been widely reported that there is a maximum distance factor the game allows for computing trade bonusses - assuming this to be true both routes should benefit from this maximum distance, but will not gain road/rail connection factors ...

SG[1]

[Deity Dude]

I had someone accuse me of cheating in an MP game because they "started with a fish and whale 2 squares apart."

I replied "You must be on the zero axis - thanks for the information"

After that they dropped and made the accusation.

[rah]

I like starting near the dateline. Besides some interesting special patterns, the ability to use the same whale (or other special) for two different cities (if cities are on different sides of the dateline) is always fun. You just have to avoid using the goto command

[Mercator]

Originally posted by rah
[...] the ability to use the same whale (or other special) for two different cities (if cities are on different sides of the dateline) is always fun.

I didn't know that...

[rah]

Yes, if you have two cities on either side, when you go into the city screen to allocate workers, it doesn't show the workers from the other city on the other side. Even for non-special squares it's good because you can road/irrigate one square and use it for two cities.
But it is funny if you accidentally use a goto and watch the unit try to go all the around the world to get there when it's only two squares away.

RAH

[JCP]

As the meridian line is in water in the most games, the GOTO running at the opposite often happens to ships !

[rah]

We usually play our MP games on Smaller one-continent maps so there's a bigger chance of there being a wrap.

Maybe 1/3 of our games.

This can sometimes throw you off, because the stratagy in MP games like this is to expand towards the middle as quickly as possible and backfill behind you later. Sometimes you go to backfill and find out that someone is already there due to a wrapping map.

[samson]

Supposed you have two cities (Alphaville in the west and Betatown in the east), one on each side of the date line.
Will a caravan from Alphaville to Betatown bring more trade arrows than vice versa? Or is there no difference?

No. Distance does not affect ongoing trade routes at all, only the onetime delivery bonuses. And the algorithm used to calculate distance between two cities (for caravan bonuses) accounts for the dateline in ROUND world maps and wraps appropriately.

SG is right about road/rail connections failing across the dateline. This is probably due to a bug in the routing (as opposed to distance) algorithm.

[Scouse Gits]

Hey samson - long time no see ...

SG[1]

[samson]

Hey SG, yeah long time, I stopped playing for awhile.
Kind of quiet around here.