The recent match between Hera + T90Official vs 5 intermediate players (P0WMATT 795 rating, Gabedini 1181 rating, mr.d4n 1347 rating, xvedejas 1297 rating, AceLeviathan 1465 rating) included a trade “trick”: making one market on the opposite side of the map, and sending trade carts from your cluster of markets to the single nearby market that your ally built on your side of the map. This saves a half-trip, which, when one trip is worth about 140 gold, effectively makes each trade cart give an extra 70 gold.
Even when AoE2 launched, it was possible to do this, but difficult due to several issues until trade carts were changed to prefer the furthest of your markets, instead of the closest. After this change was made, Black Forest tournaments made the rule that building markets on both sides of the map was not allowed; that it was cheating, even though the game allows you to do it.
In the years since then, using this trade trick was never common, but some players used a more relaxed form by building one market in the corner of the map, and more markets in their base, which is still closer to allied markets. Maybe in the future, everyone will use this trade trick as Hera and T90 did in their game, with the extra markets as close as possible to the allied market.
So maybe it’s time to update the trade mechanics in AoE2, to make doing this less necessary as well as to give players more options in dealing with raids on trade in team games. As it is, it’s often better to just let units continue killing trade carts, because pulling back trade carts is a huge disruption. Empty and full carts are grouped indiscriminately, and full carts which are sent back to an allied market could lose the value of an entire trip, worth 120+ gold on a Large (240x240) 8-player map.
My suggestion is, I believe, similar to the mechanics of another Age game. Right now, a trade unit invisibly tracks its home market, though trade units don’t save the building they’re created from as its home market. Add a ‘trade supplies’ resource: just like gold carried by a trade unit, this is visible as a number that changes based on the market the unit is traveling to. (If you task a trade unit with gold to return to a different market, the gold it carries will instantly update, based on distance from the market it last visited to the new destination.)
When your trade unit reaches a foreign market, it deposits the trade supplies, which the market stores, but simultaneously uses up an amount of stored trade supplies based on its home market destination. For normal trade between two markets, this new mechanic does not affect the gold carried at all: but if a trade unit travels from a market to a nearby foreign market, and is redirected from there to a distant home market, the trade supplies it deposited will be less than what it requires to carry a full load of gold.
So you just set the math so that in this case, the trade unit carries half the normal gold on this trip: instead of a full round trip, it only travels one way before depositing gold. It would still be advantageous to build markets on both sides of the map, because X gold in two minutes is still better than 2X gold in four minutes; just like it can be worth it to sell stone to click up to castle age and then buy back that stone. Getting resources earlier is better for the same reason that having a large bank of unused resources is bad.
But it wouldn’t be as good as it is now, so there shouldn’t be people who think it’s cheating and ban it from tournaments. It would also no longer be possible to double the efficiency of a trade cart by having yourself and an ally both build markets on both sides of a map, and retasking the trade cart to the nearby foreign market every time it delivers gold to a home market.
Implementation details:
Note that the trade supplies resource and gold above a half load don’t need a one-to-one correspondence: normal market operations could deposit a small excess or act in a nonlinear way, even if it’s mostly just so a busy market actually becomes different than a new market by having a stockpile of ‘trade supplies’. The possibilities this opens up could even be a feature, not a bug: if you sneak up a market close to an enemy market, maybe even the market of a defeated player, you could ‘steal’ the trade supplies by converting them into gold, without travelling the full distance to replenish what you’re using up. A different meaning of a trade raid.
If moving towards a destination that isn’t a market, trade units would still show up as empty. If moving towards a foreign market, they would show the trade supplies they carry, to better communicate this mechanic to players; so they could instantly go from empty in the middle of nowhere, to carrying supplies, to carrying a different amount of supplies if they are clicked to a different destination, just like how the gold a full trade unit carries can instantly change. And a full trade unit that changes its home market en-route would add or subtract trade supplies from the foreign market it last visited, to match the change in gold carried (and delivered).
To be clear, a trade unit that carries and delivers trade supplies does not subtract any resource from the owning player.
Should trade supplies be implemented to prevent trade units from delivering gold on both legs of a route?
- Yes
- No
Second suggestion: better control of trade units.
1) Add a “set home market” button to trade units
2) Add a “set destination market” button to trade units
3) Add a “back to work” button to trade units if they don’t already have one, which can be used for any unit that has home and destination markets set and is not currently headed towards a market
4) Maybe add a “deposit gold and stop” button to trade units
5) If possible, add a “do not use as home market” button to markets and docks, which makes trade units not automatically select the building as their home
Examples:
In a 4v4 Rage Forest game, the opposite flank on your team is losing their base, threatening markets. Your opposite pocket builds some new markets, but everyone now needs to use those markets. You use your ‘select all trade’ hotkey, click the new ‘Set destination market’ button, and click one of the pocket’s new markets. Existing empty carts will move towards that market. Full carts will continue towards your home markets, but will use that market on their next trip.
Same situation, but you’re the pocket or flank on the side that’s being pushed and losing: you use the new ‘Set home market’ button on the new market you just built.
Second scenario: trade raid on an unprotected part of a trade route. You select all nearby trade units and move them somewhere safe, then use the new ‘back to work’ button: the empty trade carts go to their foreign market, while full trade carts return to their home market; instead of empty and full carts all going to the same market that you click on.
Third scenario: on a water map, you are building docks all over the map for military production, but you want to do water trade and don’t want the trade units to go all over the map, so you use the ‘do not use as home market’ button on the forward production docks.
Should trade units and buildings have these extra buttons, if the UI allows it?
- Yes
- No
I might as well make a poll for this as well:
Should ground tiles which are frequently travelled by trade units gradually develop a road terrain, allowing players to modify the map’s appearance similar to how farms or destroyed buildings modify the map by removing snow?
- Yes
- No
And this, about a different market function:
Should the starting price of Food at the market be increased from 100 (buy 130, sell 70) to a value closer to the starting price of Stone which is 130 (buy 169, sell 91) in order to make buying food less attractive compared to planting farms in the Feudal age, and in doing so destroy the 25-year symmetry of wood and food starting prices and make DauT sad?
- Yes
- No