this has to be the most limitless games I've play expect for trading. Bring in some trading content or DLC!

I've always wanted better trading but have never been able to mod it in my self very well.

I think trade routes rights through your land should be a things that you should have to arrange and grant in diplomacy. You could ban a person you don't like moving their trade routes through your land or tax the trade routes to get money or offer tax free trading through your land as a diplomatic incentive. You could also make trade stations which can be placed anywhere and can claim land (but not land a tile away from enemies to stop citadel pushing or anything close to it) in order to control strategic trade locations and is a jumping off point for trade routes so that routes that pass through the trading post get an increased range. The use of them could be a further diplomatic incentive and money maker as you could say certain people could use your trading post to extend the range of their trade post in return for something and charge them to use it or let them use it free for your allies or to gain more in a deal. These trade routes could have other uses such as a base for aircraft in order to transport them across greater distances than their range allows or to be a forward command base where you can deploy aircraft from. Perhaps these bases could be created and a limited number of basic buildings could be made their determining a speciality for example a marina allows navel trade routes to be extended further. Patrol vehicle park allows more land o be claimed and a greater line of site to be established, a larger airfield allows more aircraft to be housed, land trade route refuelling stations could be created to extend land route ranges, a repairing station dry dock and hospitals allow their respective units to be healed faster. Defences give the base a small attack and give units stationed there a defensive bonus. Maybe you can have an aircraft control and landing control team which allows aircraft to enter and leave for another base in the same turn and/or attack twice from it. You could have a hunting lodge which allows the base to take advantage of certain resources and get a small amount of food or a make it a mining town which lets certain tile improvements be made or maybe some kind of training centre which lets basic units be trained there and maybe a specialist unit like a alien tracker which can see if a unit has passed through a tile in the last two turns and the direction it was moving in. The possibilities are endless.

Also why have we never had a euro tunnel or Suez canal? I should be able to at some extent put a tunnel through coast line and say 2 ocean tiles (which cost energy and take more time to make) or put a cannel through everything but mountains with hills taking longer to make. Then you could make mountain tunnels which let trade routes and non-hovering land units pass through a mountain range.

And other diplomatic options could be offering and obtaining protection from aliens for your trade routes in a certain distance from another civs land. Failing to do so has diplomatic penalties and the civ may ask you to compensate for it and/or demand a certain amount of what the protector asked for in return for protecting the trade routes or denounce the other civ for breaking the agreement depending on your history and the personality of the civ.

And what about ability to break down a resource and say grant a tenth of a petroleum and put it into a trade route to increase its value. This is getting less specific to trade routes but what if you could have varying quality of different resources so that you could have low quality titanium which is more common and high quality titanium which gives units made with it better stats.


If you can make it the possibilities are endless.