The developers have done some things to improve that. Although they’ve beenin the right direction, unfortunately it didn’t come to fruition as they had expected because of the “opportunity cost” you said.
We would be definitely using more natives nowadays if the cost of Native trading posts had received a simple reduction of at least 50w (200w-> 150w) rather than the reduction done to their elite upgrade (-100w, -75c).
I personally see natives as an acess to optional upgrades and suplementar army. Something like an “open deck with limited cards”. And I think the devs have done a very good job to this design.
- In D.E. the cost of Native Warrior Societies and Discipline Training upgrade (200w, 150c) was halved to (100w, 75c)
- They bumped their train limit a bit;
- They made good & unique native warriors, stronger/versatile improvements and bumped the amount of techs to at least 6 in The African Royals;
There are key tweaks already mentioned in the topic:
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cost reduction to (NTP) Native trading post (that’s essential)
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Embassy available only as travois/rickshaw and only from TPs and TCs:
- building a vulnerable NTP far away from your base is a con;
- the need of an embassy to train them in your base is already a con,
- 100w for a embassy in your base is a con,
- needing villagers to construct them, is just one more unnecessary burden
Quite frankly: Having the embassy in the building grid is a waste of slot for villagers: It is available to all but 4 civs, if and only once you decide to build a NTP, on top of being limited to a max of 3. Trading Posts and Town Centers have plenty of space to include a travois to their slots. The devs had such a problem with the villager’s grid 100% filled, that they even had to move Embassy to the Envoy, because of the Banks for the Dutch