Imperator: Rome – Trade – Tips & Tricks

Trading Tips for Beginners

• Cities produce predefined trade goods at a base rate of 1 per city.

• For every 15 slaves in the city (base value), that city will produce another “copy” of its trade good.

• In some situations, it may be worth it to move some slaves in order to produce a surplus of a key resource.

• Trade goods are managed on the level of provinces.

• First copy of every trade good produced in the province will stay there and provide local bonuses to all the cities in that province.

• Subsequent copies of a trade good make up a surplus that provides additional, albeit smaller, bonuses for every copy present.

• Surplus trade goods can be exported both internally to your different provinces and externally.

• First copy of every trade good exported abroad provides a unique country-wide bonus.

• First surplus in the capital province also provides a unique country-wide bonus, usually an even more powerful one.

• You can block other countries from requesting your capital surplus goods by switching a toggle in the top right corner of the Trade screen (F9).

• Specific bonuses are of very different value depending on the country and the situation.

• Both importing and exporting goods provide you with commerce value.

• Commerce income provided by trading goods tends to scale much faster with expansion than tax income.

• To import goods, a province needs to have a free trading route available. Those are created by laws, inventions, achieving a power rank, governor policies, other country modifiers, and even events.

• Creating a trade route costs a base of 25 civic power, but that cost can be lowered by selecting a mercantile diplomatic stance on the diplomacy screen (F7).

• Capital province trade routes are by far the most important and almost always worth spending the civic power to utilize.

• You can only import goods from countries in your diplomatic range. It gets bigger as you climb the power ranking.

• Diplomatic range can be seen both using a diplomacy map mode and by selecting a trade route from the province menu. It is shown as the lighter shade of gray.

• As of 1.0, diplomatic range seems borderline broken in some places, so your mileage may vary.

• Import requests from other countries are based on their diplomatic range, not yours.

• Non-capital trade routes can be very useful as well, but I’d advise restraint considering their cost.

• As of 1.0, AI tends NOT to break trades when they start hating you, but they’ll be automatically canceled when you end up at war with your partner, or the city that produced the good you import changes hands. It may end up costing you quite a lot of civic power if you aren’t careful.

• Importing from other provinces to your capital is often a good idea. You may review your current exports in the trade tab (F9) and possibly cancel an export agreement of something you need there as it will not show up on the province trade route screen.

• Both high and low commerce taxation settings in the Economy tab (F6) can be quite useful, especially early on.

• Additional import routes provided by the “Free Trade” setting will easily provide enough income to pay for that -15% debuff a few times over, but you need to have both goods to import and civic power to burn. Use with caution and trade route cost discounts.

• “Transaction Taxation” on the other hand gives a basically free +15% commerce income to countries that are nowhere near getting 15 slaves in one of their provinces.

• If a military unit requires access to a trade resource to be built, you won’t be able to reinforce it if you lose access to it.

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