To caravan, or...

[SerapisIV]

Could someone fully explain the "Flying Squid" from CTP. Cyclo's explanation is a bit brief and I've heard lots of comparisons, but never used it.

[Cyclotron]

Sorry... what this means is:

CTP made trade routes into blue lines that went over tiles in a more or less straight route (preferring water tiles) from city to city. To signify the commodity that route represented, an animated picture of that comodity (grapes for win, squid for squid) would follow the line constantly, hovering back and forth on the line. Thus it is affectionatly named the "flying (your favorite commodity here)", and I happen to like the pink CTP wriggly squid the best. I liked the representation because it allowed me to see at a glance what the routes carried w/out going to another screen, but some thought it was stupid or annoying. I beleive there was an option to kill the animation and just have static images, too.

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- Cyclotron7, "that supplementary resource fanatic"

[Roman]

While Ctp style traderoutes are a good idea, PLEASE NO "FLYING SQUID: GRAPHICS!!! That just looks stupid. Sometimes less animation is preferable to more. I don't want Civ 2 to have too much I candy, this merely looks stupid and childish. I need the terrain, cities and units to be represented by discernible icons and that's it! Anything more just annoys me.

[Ilkuul]

Why should the 'unit' and 'abstraction' models be mutually exclusive? I like the idea of trade automatically 'happening' when infrastructure is built up - and this is true to life. However it's also true to life that countries deliberately send out traders (or 'trade delegations' nowadays) in order to find new markets.

Why not have an 'abstract' system that can be augmented by good old fashioned caravans (or traders/merchants) that are 'manually' sent to distant lands to establish trade routes? This especially makes sense in earlier ages when communication was not automatic or instantaneous. Such routes could be made even more lucrative than normal ones because of the goodwill generated by the trade delegation. Trader/merchant units could also be used to boost income from existing trading partners.