in the long term, it's probably better not to think about trade as a major source of income. but on tight games it can make a difference.

ideally, you want both distance and high population from the planets you send your freighters to. it's a tough question to answer, what to do for the long term. in the long term, it's best to establish your trade routes early because they'll gain value sooner, but in the early game it can be hard to determine where the most populated worlds will be. homeworlds are usually a good bet; you know they'll get up to at least 12B. if you can find distant homeworlds, they're a good place.

in games where i've tried to build up trade revenue, i find the single farthest world from any of my worlds, hopefully a homeworld, send ALL my frieghters there, and cover it with econ SBs. i don't think the gain is worth the investment, unless you want an ally who'll never let you down.

this is however a viable way to use trade to get ++ will every race. even just one freighter, boosted with enough econ SBs, will really enamor the AIs.

In my expeirence trade isn't all that worthwhile in the long run.

In my 2nd to last game I went for a VERY, VERY long trade route. I was at times making 5,000 BC from the trade route, but to do that I needed tons and tons of economic starbases. I had something like 75+ economic starbases along this tremendous route. Most of the economic starbases were only getting used for one trip because the route was so long, and when the route didn't have economic starbases it was drawing only around 800 BC.

In my more recent game I went for the fastest trade route I could get. In the end I was only getting around 1,400 BC a turn, however I only built 10 economic starbases which were used over and over again, and the trade revenue was consistant as the entire route was covered by economic starbases at all points.

The BC was certainly more when I went for the long route, but the reality is that I didn't need that money in the long term, and it took a LOT of BC to build all those economic starbases.

I think it is better to go for a very short route as soon as possible. You will need the BC from trade much more in the ealry game and it won't be all that important in the long run.

From now on I will try to get trade routes established as soon as possible and with the closest planet I can find. The early revenue is worth more than the longest route in the short term, and trade really isn't worth all that much in the long term.

if you are trying to maximize your BC from trade route you might want to pick a medium or shorter route so that you can spam economic starbases that will get used over and over again. You can get a lot more from longer routes, but you will need to make a LOT more economic starbases. Economic starbases are the real key to getting lots of BC from trade, and it is really expensive to try to use these starbases on a long trade route.

Just my 2 cents.

- Livonya

Hi!

Ugh! You really have strange ways to entertain yourself. I 've built econ SBs only in GC-1. Trade there really meant something: in quite some games I've been getting over 50% of my income just from trade.

But in GC-2 I've built only a couple of SBs in very first games I played. IMO they're pointless to build, because:
- each one is in use only a small fraction of time,
- just about 6 of my good planets usualy generate more money I get from 10+ routes, and
- establishing that SB infrastructure involves way too much MM to be fun.

BR, Iztok

Traditionally my freighter strategy has been to use a high PQ world in a corner of the map make it my capital for extra population purposes and build lots of eco improvements there and eventually have all my trade routes coming from that planet going to other civs high revenue planets.

After reading Iztok Bitencs findings in his linked thread I guess this is the wrong strategy for maximsing trade money. It seems pretty much the longest route is the way to go (population has a small effect but considering I build 1 farm on all my planets poulation is likely to be the same everywhere eventually).

Suprising that eco buildings have no affect whatsoever to trade.

So unless I've missed something I guess this is the freighter strategy i'll be using in future, thanks Iztok.

50, 250 star bases? We are talking about the biggest map avaible, right?

Because, otherwise, I hope I never get that bored.

Wow, that's a lot of starbases. But I can understand. I too build many starbases as well to boost both production and research. Using them to increase trade is secondary since trade plays a very tiny role in my overall economy.

My games usually take a very long time to complete since I play in a huge galaxy and I build lots of very expensive capital ships that are very time consuming to build. For example, if I were to rush the production of a single dreadnought to be built in one year it would cost over 42,000 BC to build. Having multiple economic starbases can help reduce the amount of time it takes to build very expensive capital ships. It still takes a long time to build these ship, but it take even longer without the boost from economic starbases.

The most economic starbases I ever built is probably about 135 that are fully decked out defensively and offensively. I figure I use 35 Constructors to build each of my economic starbases, that means I built 4,735 constructors to build all these bases. That excludes influence, military, and resource starbases.

4,735+ Constructors in a single game sounds nuts, but one of my capital ship can easily outclass 8 capital ships from other races.