Brokering Trade Routes feels a little obfuscated

[Darthcaboose]

I know there's a pretty big forum post about trading so far which you can find over here http://www.arcengames.com/forums/index.php/topic,15399.0.html.

Regardless of how trading is tweaked or balanced, I feel that the information presented to the player regarding trade routes seems a little unclear. Whenever I go to check out the Broker Trade options, I feel a little bit lost as to why trade routes can't be brokered. It does make sense that you can't have TOO many trade routes since there's only so many resources that everyone has to offer or needs.

However, the math behind what can allow a trade route is pretty unclear.

Actually, scratch that sentence. The options that the player can take to help improve the number of trade routes is not completely clear. Based on some quick tests, it makes sense that trade routes are dependent on the income rates of the 6 different minerals, since going about and helping the races colonize a bunch of moons results in new trade routes to appear. However, the ability to compare information to see what is needed to create a trade route is something that isn't quite in the game yet.

I feel that the Race Relations screen is probably the perfect way to do this. Imagine a 'Trade' mode in that view that allows you to see the resource production of all the races. With such a view, the player could see the differences in resource production between races as well as what the player can do to help 'create' a deficit; either by colonizing more moons and promoting mining developments to increase resource production or by sabotaging mines to decrease resource production.


Let me take an example scenario that came up in a most recent game (this is 1.004, excluding the Federation Points addition).

I have a Federation composing of 5 of the 8 spacefaring races, minus the Burlusts who are about to lose their last planet, the Evucks who are close to joining short of a few more credits from my end, and the Peltians. Those fuzzy Peltians don't like me at all, and I need to figure out a way to get them backdoored into the Federation through the Skylaxians or maybe even the Andors. At this point, I can't create a trade route between them and the backdoor-capable Federation races; which would be a great way to get them in. Some sort of screen to put the information out there would certainly help to figure out what needs to be done!

[Draco18s]

All I managed to figure out is:

Race A needs to have >500 (income) of a material that Race B does not have >500 of.
Race B needs to have >500 of a material that Race A does not have >500 of.

It's probably more like 600 or 700, I wasn't able to definitely determine that.

[NickAragua]

Because I haven't had too much trouble with the trade interface, I didn't really bother with figuring out how it works. If I want a race to trade, I go to their homeworld, then click 'colonize moon' as many times as I can before my money runs out or their moons run out. Then I have them trade as much as they can with whatever races I need them to like. Unless I explicitly want to set up trade, I don't do 'Colonize Moon' (wouldn't want those guys to have resources that some other race can trade to them). I'm also reasonably sure that races don't colonize moons, establish or break trade routes on their own (someone correct me if I'm wrong).

I expect I'd be pretty pissed though if I wanted two races to trade but couldn't get them to do it at all (I would want to know why without having to look through a bunch of really dense planetary information screens).