Port of Memphis?

[Guyus Germanicus]

Having played RTW for over five years, I've never seen any trade come thru Memphis's port. The natural port of Red Sea trade for Egypt is Thebes. It's probably a game design quirk. In a game I played recently with the Ptolemies faction, I received some trade from Petra to Memphis, but it was the overland variety as opposed to the port to port variety.

Certainly when there are rebels sitting on the roads to your ports or between cities, you're going to a see a trade slow down. But I believe Memphis is just peculiar. It would be interesting to see a scenario where one owned Petra and Bostra and Memphis, but not Thebes to see whether the sea trade routes would alter themselves so that trade came thru Memphis's port. But I've never seen or experienced that kind of scenario. My guess is - it would be no different.

I think it's just a game quirk. As for the little caravans and boat trade routes, I know that the boats and caravan animation doesn't always appear consistently in every turn. And I'm not sure there is a relationship between their appearance and numbers, and the amount of trade that appears in your city's trade summary screen.

I have modified the game so that when I build a dockyard I get three trade fleets instead of two. I noticed some time back when I was playing around in the game's code that their was no difference in the number of trading fleets between a shipwright and a dockyard. I changed that in my game. I would be interested to know if the little mini merchant boats that sail between your trading cities have any relation to the trading capacity of your port facilities. There doesn't appear to be one. When examining the mapboard activity for trade routes between my cities regardless of whether there be a port, shipwright or dockyard there seems to be no appreciable difference in the number of mini merchants boats sailing between the cities. So my guess is - the trade animation of mini caravans and merchant ships is just for show. Though, as one of you all pointed out - put a band of brigands on your trade route, and the little mini-caravan animation gets stopped up.

For sure if you blockade a port, you're going to see the animation affected. But looking at a game I just finished with the Greeks, my trade summary for Thebes shows a small amount of trade with Siwa. But there are no mini-caravans showing up on the direct route between Thebes and Siwi. There are, however, mini-caravans connecting between Memphis and Siwa, and alexandria and Siwa. Certainly the game is not free of bugs, so I guess these minor issues are just things we have to live with.

And get this - I just brought up a finished game I had with the Brutii last year. I'm staring at the mapboard right now and sure enough, there are little mini-caravans traveling between Thebes and Siwi. So go figure. :) And Memphis has no sea trade to boot. And here's something that's really intersting - only two of my 50 cities on this mapboard are showing a negative numbers. I never noticed that before. Usually I have several cities running negative because of high admin costs that the game's AI allocates to their burden. But then I ended this game with a six figure treasury.

Oh well . . . interesting conversation.