A Commercial trait commercial

[Catt]

Originally posted by Dominae
Catt, speaking very loosely, the Commercial trait provides +1 Shield in all early cities that are big enough to suffer from Corruption. That's tangible, and quite the ability. Yes, this depends on terrain up to point, but there's usually enough room to build a first core + part of the second ring, which is what the early Commercial benefit applies to.

I fooled with the editor a bit over the weekend in playing with a bunch of 3-tile spacing empires with various terrain and terrain improvements before I threw my hands up at the amount of work it would take to quantify it with any degree of certainty. But what my fooling around semeed to indicate to me was that the advantage was often fleeting -- in towns that got big enough and far enough away from the palace to feel the pinch, the commercial trait did add a shield -- but if the shield added was moving the city from 5 to 6 shields, it made a difference only in the costlier ancient age improvements -- barracks (for non-militaristic), granaries, temples and libraries for example. Far rarer was a move from 1 to 2 shields or 2 to 3 shields -- I think just because of rounding issues.

It sounds a little off-the-cuff since I'm not producing examples for everything, but my tests indicated to me that the effects, especially given the uncertain terrain and build pattern of any given game, and the nature of progressive city growth (instead of "insta-empires" created in the editor), not to mention the other numerous variables, meant that the early game advantages of the commercial trait would be incidental (but still helpful!) rather than something that one could effectively plan for and exploit as part of the empire growth strategy. On any given turn, in any given empire, it might mean an extra shield in these four cities or an extra shield in those five cities (independent of whether the extra shield speeded construction or otherwise let one rearrange citizens to produce more food without delaying the build) -- but it simply strikes me as inconceivable, at least with the degree of micromanagement I tend to put up with, that I would be able to effectively make build decisions and control pop growth timing to both (1) squeeze out the advantages it offers to their fullest extent, and (2) not impede a more important objective (like building the right thing at the right time, given the then-present needs of the empire).

Just my two cents.

Catt