I am not sure if this is a bug, but it is not mentioned anywhere in the tooltips. When trading with Malians and using Toll Outposts to generate tax, the tax obtained will be smaller if the initial outpost overlaps with the Market or Trade Post, as if it were overlapping with another Outpost. This can be seen below:
This position gives 5 tax on a 65 gold trip
This position gives only 1 tax gold
I don’t think this is a bug. You gain maximum toll tax when the Outposts don’t overlap. If they overlap you lose some. If you build them right next to each other, you lose all tax on the 2nd one. This means you want to space them out so that they’re never in range of another, because you only have 5 tickets and you don’t want to waste a ticket on a suboptimal Outpost. I think this makes perfect sens, and if anything, this is a tooltip bug.
Your description is correct but only with regards to overlapping Outposts. The tooltip mentions nothing about overlapping with the Market or Trade Post. So I have no way of knowing if this is intended or not. In neither screenshot above is the outpost overlapping with another outpost. On some 1 vs 1 maps it can be difficult to fit 5 outposts without overlapping any outposts and without overlapping the TP/Market unless you kind of stagger them so that their auras only partly cover the Trade Route. But I don’t think this level of micromanagement of Outpost placement along the trade is what is intended, and if so, it’s not good design.
