Rome Trade Routes

[Luridis]

Can someone please explain to me how this works? According to the description, trade routes get an additional gold for each trading post they pass through in your cities. I'm going to assume this includes internal ones. However, I don't know how to make this work. Every time I plant a city, no matter how close to another, a dedicated road is created to it from Rome. How do I take advantage of the extra gold if the roads are all direct?

Thanks...

[tempest.of.emptiness]

The free roads from cities in trade range of your capital to your capital are for flavor, a tribute to the famous saying "All roads lead to Rome.". They neither help, nor hinder, nor are in any way related to the extra gold for trade routes passing through your cities with trading posts.

Trade routes do not need roads in order to be formed. They do prefer to follow pre-existing roads when possible, but when roads are not available they can still be formed, and a road will be created as the trader travels along the trade route. Additionally, when a trade route is completed a trading post for the owner of the route will be placed in the destination city.

Trading posts act as a range booster, extending the maximum range of your trade routes that pass through that city by resetting the trader's range as though the route was starting from the city with the trading post. This allows you to gradually reach farther and farther with your trade routes as the game progresses, in the right circumstances.

Rome, as a bonus ability, automatically starts with a trading post in every city they found or capture. This saves the player the time that would be necessary to send a trade route to that city in order to create a trading post there in the normal way.

Additionally, Rome gets bonus gold (+1) for each of their cities with a trading post that a route passes through on the way to its destination. Consider this example: After founding Rome, you settle two cities, A and B, one on each side of Rome. Later, another player founds a city (C) near your city B. Then, you send a trade route from A to C. That route leaves A, passes through Rome and then B, and finally arrives at C. Because you are Rome, that route will be worth +2 (or +3, I can't remember if the starting city counts too) gold more than normal because of the bonus gold for passing through your cities with trading posts.

The bonus does also apply to internal trade routes. In that example, a route from A through Rome to B would earn +1 (or +2) extra gold.

Note that you can only choose the origin and destination of your trade routes, so for example it is not possible to force a route to wind around your civilization passing through all of your cities before reaching its destination. You can try to maximize the bonus by carefully selecting origin/destination pairs that will pass through as many cities as possible, but (unless you do something bizarre like try to have cities only in a straight line) there is going to be a limit to how much bonus gold you can take advantage of.