How does TRADE work in the game?

[alpaca]

Did anybody test if castle ports add trade routes?

[socal_infidel]

Foz -

Not sure if you're talking about actually moving the wharf series of buildings directly into the port line of buildings in the EDB or not...

But what I've done to integrate them is to add the bolded text to the wharf buildings:

merchants_wharf city requires factions { northern_european, middle_eastern, eastern_european, greek, southern_european, } and building_present_min_level port port

or

warehouse city requires factions { northern_european, middle_eastern, eastern_european, greek, southern_european, } and building_present_min_level port shipwright

And then you can assign the trade_base_income_bonus however you see fit...I'm thinking of the following:

1/2/3/4/5/6/7 (a 35% bonus on trade if you build the naval drydock).

Incidentally, does anyone know if there's a max of the number of export lines you can have?

I toyed around briefly with it this weekend. But it seems 3 is the max number. I thought it might have been tied to number of resources, but I added a fourth resource to Constantinople and then built the naval drydock but it still remained 3.

[Foz]

Foz -

Not sure if you're talking about actually moving the wharf series of buildings directly into the port line of buildings in the EDB or not...

Yes I was talking about putting them directly into the port line. The idea was that perhaps the code grants routes only for the buildings of the port series, so including more buildings in that line might actually make the game grant export lines for them too.

Incidentally, does anyone know if there's a max of the number of export lines you can have?

I toyed around briefly with it this weekend. But it seems 3 is the max number. I thought it might have been tied to number of resources, but I added a fourth resource to Constantinople and then built the naval drydock but it still remained 3.

This wouldn't really be surprising given that trade_fleet maxes at 3 in the EDB. While trade_fleet doesn't seem to be correctly implemented, it's likely they coded 3 as the export line limit, already with the idea in mind that they were allocating them via the wharf series.