Gigantic Maps : Are Trade Starbases Worth It?

I do the same as you for slightly different reasons. I think trade starbases are more than worth it (what the heck would you back planets build if not constuctors, hehe, everything else costs money), and therefore it's better to have shorter routes with lots of starbase adds than longer routes with less bonuses. The main reason I switched to short routes though is the defense factor. I got tired of having the AI cut off my money surplus, and if they are short, defended, and lined with trade starbases, I am convinced they are far superior to the long routes.

If I -do- use a long route, it's usually to try and keep a stronger Ai from going to war with me (limited success). I really wish there was an "escort" function that allowed you to attack warships to your traders. Then longer routes might be more viable...

~SDC~

Make starbases in every sector along your trade route.. add some protection.

You can do this.. and upgrade them.. and be a trade mogul. I am trying to do this on my current game.

fleabitfox

I remember reading some preview of galciv long ago that mentioned a SB module that gave fighter protection to your freighters all along the route. Whether this was planned or whoever was reporting it got mixed up I don't know, but it sounded cool.

Argh! Forum ate my post... it was full of useful information too :/

I'm too lazy to retype everything, so I'll make it quick. Trade ships travel with the same path finding algorithm as normal ships. There are two rules I have observed for them so far:

1): Always travel diagonally before moving vertically or horizontally.
2): If there is an obstacle, circle it in a counter-clockwise direction.

The combination of these two rules means that a normal trade ship will traverse its full path in a parallelogram shaped route, never passing through the same square on its inbound trip as it did on the outbound trip. For your starbases to benefit both legs of the trip, you have to pick your origin and destination planets carefully to collapse the trade route into a horizontal, vertical, or diagonal line. The diagonal trade route is the most difficult one to setup as it has strict requirements for planet alignment.

Constructing starbases for the sole purpose of enhancing trade routes is generally not a cost-effective requirement unless you are stacking many trade routes between two planets. Remember that constructors cost 200 production points, and each starbase requires 5 BC/turn of maintenance whether or not a trade ship is actually passing by. Trade revenue increases by roughly 20 BC/sector traveled I think, so you can use that as an estimate of the full value of your trade route and decide how many trade routes you must stack to obtain a reasonable investment return time.

This really should be reported as a bug, then.

- The economic trade screen is wrong, because it misrepresents the actual path of trade ships.

- The benefit from trade starbases is much less than what you might expect. Requiring trade routes to be horizontal or vertial to get maximum benefit is counterintuitive.

- On gigantic maps, trade starbases just aren't worth it. You're better off making 1-sector routes, putting them all to the same pair of planets, and then maxing out the upgrades.
Really, starbase trade upgrades should work like influence. Each trade upgrade provides some benefit to each trade route, but the distance to the trade ship also affects the benefit.

The current starbase trade upgrade system is broken, because it requires the player to micromanage their trade routes.

A compromise I have suggested before, and I don't know if anyone took notice, is to apply starbase bonuses to the entire value of the trade route in a proportional manner depending on how much of the route it actually affects. If we have a +50% starbase along side a trade route of 100 distance and affects 10 squares out of that, then it should apply a +5% bonus to the overall value of the route regardless of where the trade ship is actually located. To discourage players from stacking starbases in a single sector, we could implement diminishing returns for trade bonus stacking on a per sector basis. This, and perhaps forcing trade ships to always travel the same route inbound as it did outbound could make starbase trade modules useful again.

You could also have each starbase module add a flat +1% to trade (like a mini-version of the techs that add +10%), regardless of starbase location. So +3% for a maxxed out starbase. This would be extremely simple, though whether it would be balanced (you'd definitely have a bigger bonus in bigger galaxies) or desirable is something I'll let everyone else think about.

I do know that I currently don't build these modules at all unless I happen to have a setup that obviously benefits from it. Too much work for way too little return, and not balanced at all with regards to the 5 BC maintenance change implemented in one of the patches.

As i already said, for me it's efficient if i want to make it efficient. I see that Za H changed his opinion about trade starbases.

~SDC~