HUMANKIND™: Trades Guide (Updated to Vitruvian Version)

You don’t need have done any specific research to be able to trade.

But to sell a resource you need have an extractor, so you need have research the tech allowing build extractors, or you need that a merchant Empire used its special merchant action to build an extractor on your resource.

A trade is created by buying or selling a resource where an extractor is build.

This buy or sell is done only once.

It’s not an exclusive usage of a resource, you can sell a resource multiple time, once to each Empire, and you still benefit of the resource for yourself.

Beside the price paid or get from starting a trade you benefit of two points:

• A resource bought is like if it is owned, and it provides the same bonuses than a resource owned at exception some local bonus a resource can have.
• It adds one trade, and there are districts, infrastructures, civics, and global bonus cultures that have an income depending of the trade, most often it’s money income but not only.

A trade isn’t stopped by war, nor by having demands, nor by trade treaties cancelled, nor by any civic.

War, demands, trade treaties cancelled, and some civics, all only remove the ability to buy and sell more resources with the AI involved, but all existing trades still apply.

It’s impossible to cancel a trade specifically, but you can disable trades in few ways:

• Destroy the extractor of a resource you own, then all trades that sold this resource are lost.
• Destroy the extractor of a resource owned by another Empire, then you lost the trade that bought this resource, but also all other Empires lost this trade.
• Resource ownership change, the original owner lost all trades that sold the resource, all other Empires lost the trade that bought this resource.
• Destroy a commercial road, in this case it’s a temporary interruption of all the trades going through the road, most often it will involve sell and bought trades for many Empires.

Recent versions of the game could have change the effect of destroying a commercial road, not confirmed, but possible. Now in some cases the interruption could be very long, or even it could allow destroy the trades, per design or from bug.

The price of a trade is dependent of:

• Number of time the resources was already bought, no matter ownership change or even extractor destruction.
• Various tech in research tree lower the cost.
• Cost reduction for Merchant cultures when they buy.
• Cost increase when you buy to a Merchant culture.
• Alliance allows a special trade treaty, in this case there’s no extra cost and the price is the same amount for buyer or seller. But the base price is still increased by number of time the resources was bought since game start.
• Various extra costs increasing buying price but not the money received by seller, see next list bellow.

List of extra costs, probably incomplete:

• Travel type, from cheaper to more expensive, Sea/Land/Air.
• Travel length.
• Extra cost if you buy directly to a Merchant that did an investment of the resource (Merchant special action).

A trade road can have multiple trade points, to see better trade roads and trade points, use the trade tab in diplomacy, you can select bought trades or sold trades.

Currently the presentation of trade road points is far to be clear, the trade roads are shown, but the trade road points aren’t well shown except when they are in a territory without outpost or town on land, or when on sea and not on a harbor or some sea district.

One trade can have multiple trade road points, the first two trade road points are the start and the end of the trade, but there are also intermediate points.

They require that the full trade road is only on land.

They are more expensive than sea trades, but unlike sea trades they don’t involve many intermediate trade road points that can be destroyed with ransack.

You don’t need have build an harbor to make a trade going through the sea, the game will create automatically a small harbor used as a trade point. You don’t even need have research the tech allowing build an harbor, nor any special tech.

When you build an harbor it will capture the sea trade points close, but not those of another harbor previously build.

They involve many intermediate trade road points on sea, each can be destroyed with ransack.

They require an Airport at start and end of the trade road.

They are the most expensive trades.

Trade roads are a vector spreading the influence and the faith.

This topic is more for a guide about influence or religions, but it’s a side effect of trades that worth an highlight.

Because it’s difficult to cancel a trade it’s better use other tools to counter this.

For influence there’s those civics to stop foreign influence:
– Cultural Eradication: Stop foreign influence spreading through controlled territories.
– Isolationism: Stop non allies influence spreading through controlled territories.

For faith, there’s no civic to block faith spreading. This allows attempt a world religion domination without using wars and conquests.

Instead, use the other faith tools to struggle for a religion domination, or even you can choose the religion of another empire, this can be a good option if the religion has a good set of Tenets.