Like the topic says, they need to be buffed. Them, and their vairents. The gold they give, is simply to small. The gold from trade routes is static, factors such as happeiness aand upgrades(bulbs) don't increase the gold from ttade routes. This makes the increase from these buildings, even smaller. Adding to this, they only give gold, if a city even has a trade toue. The copper mine is 5 gold, before bonuses. This means that you would need three trade routes, for the trading post to make more money than the mine, despite coming much later, and being close to 9 times as expensive. Lastly, they also lose a lot of vaule, if you don't go pacifism/houros/ go for one of the two civs that get trading route bonuses. Even then, they don't gain much vaule. What do you guys think, agree? disagree?

Trading posts are fine. Trading post give a +1 gold bonus to EACH MERCHANT in the adjoining city(ies), and has nothing to do with trade routes. Therefore: 1. Pacifism/Horus are not required to make them work, in fact, they become even MORE valuable to you on runs without those trade route bonuses. 2. Since they boost the merchants, all of the other +% bonuses are applied to them as well. 3. They wont disappear when another city changes allegience like trade routes do. 4. The Mathematics research has something valuable in it instead of just catapults etc. I've actually adjusted my research patterns to get it sooner since trading posts were introduced. Sorry if this sounded snarky, didn't mean it to be. Been cooped up and locked out of work (I work in a casino in rl) due to the Covid thing, getting a lil stir crazy/nuts...

I'm not talking about the improvement, but the building, and its varients like the bank.

Ah, you were refering to markets, banks, and stock exchanges, rather than trading posts. My appologies, although you can sorta see my confusion ;)

I'm not suprised, they do have similar names, and, I did get them mixed up in my post, but, I think by point still stands about the markets and such.

Out of curiousity, did some impromptu testing, and it appears there *are* some hidden modifiers to the market/bank bonuses after all . . . **Test City 1**: Starting population 1, zero trade routes. Located 2 cities on the available trade route list equidistant from test city (21.2 squares), both showing a base trade route value of 15 (both cities also connected to test city by roads). Established route with city A, saving B for control. Then built a marketetplace, which should have added +2 to the value. However, value went to 18 instead of 17 (value of unestablished control route went up as well, showing that the bonuses in effect are already included in the info for new trade routes). Then added a bank (+5), and value went to 25.1. For a total increase of 10.1 instead of the expected 7. Then I let the population go from 1 to 10, and the trade route value went from 25.1 total to 31.6, proving that there is some sort of modifyer for population of city as well. At that point I remembered that trade route values increase if there is a road connecting the two cities, which leads to **Test City 2**: Starting population 1, zero trade routes, zero roads to this city from anywhere. Established route with city X (34.5 squares away) with a base value of 12. Then built a marketetplace, and the vaule went to14.3 instead of 14. Adding the bank upped it to 20.1. Total increase of 8.1 instead of the expected 7. After allowing the population to then go to 10, value became 25.2. So there *are* some modifiers to these building bonuses, for population, travel conditions (roads), and probably distance, and maybe others. How much of a difference these may make, however, <shrugs> . I am off my meds, and about 2 quarts low on Mt Dew in my blood stream, so I will leave it to better mathematical minds than my own to decide how much of a difference they make. I do wish it was a better answer to your original post, but at least its something ;)

Hmm, after looking over those numbers, maybe markets and the like are fine. I don't know why the game doesn't tell one about the modifier bonuses that they give. Thank you.

population amounts change trade route outputs. i never checked exacts.