I understand the basic idea of how trade ports work with the longer the route the more lucrative trade ports will become. What I'd like to know is is there ever a situation where destroying a trade port will actually be worth more to your income than keeping it there? I've noticed the computer should pick out the longest route that is available to your empire, but if you make a specific effort to make it wind in a snake like pattern through your empire rather than going through it, will that make trade ports more valuable as opposed to just building a trade port on each planet?
Yes it will. I often pick and chose the optimal route, and only build tradeports ont he route, or in a position that will not shorten the route. You can easily get double or triple income from your trade port with careful planning.
So in my case, destroying a few trade ports can lead to more income then? I'll have to try this out later when I start a new game sometime. This might help solve some of my economic problems when being bashed on by multiple opponents.
it really depends on how much longer you're going to be making the route by removing a badly placed port. it also depends on how many trade ports you've already got built and how many your planning to build.
for example, you might gain .2 creds/sec on each port if you lengthen your route by 1 jump. if your existing routes produced 1.6 creds/sec per port then you'd have to be improving at least 8 ports (existing and yet to built included) before this could be considered a net gain.
moral of the story is try to plan the route before you build too much so you don't end up in situations where you have to scuttle trade ports to re-optimize the route.
Yeah Garv, here is nice (extreme) illustrated example of just that.
But remember, in Entrenchment, trade routes don't automatically jump over UCGWs, like they do in vanilla Sins. You have to build a starbase with the trade upgrade there, for the route to extend thru them. (UCGW=UnColonizeable Gravity Wells)
That SoaSE wiki site also has a good explanation of vanilla Sins trade.
The reality of the game isn't quite like that, since planet bonuses (ie: +30% trade revenue) may be enough to convince you to shorten your longest trade route, and in reality you are unlikely to fill every viable logistics slot before the game ends. As well, the longest chain disperity between trade spam and a planned build tends to only become significant after you control more than half the galaxy. This is particularly true on those huge sprawling single-star systems.
In the above example linked by SageWon, if you controlled only the top or bottom half of that system, the difference between spammed ports and a planned route would be 1-2 jumps, depending on how you count. This isn't a big deal. The issue of trade disperity only rears its head once you start to pick up enemy territory, at which point it may well be a moot point anyways. I find the longest trade route analysis comes into play most often in huge multi-star scenarios, where you do control entire solar systems and can plan them out.
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