When you are focusing on trade is good to watch how big/important current deal can become for you. You didn’t think you’d only trade 15 goods with other countries, did you? We will look more on trade routes levels, how increase them and how decrease them.
Introduction to trade route levels
Trade route level show how much effective you could be in your trade with other countries. At start every trade route starts on level 1 but when you are negotiate about route you could see how big the importance of an individual trading route can be. There is rule bigger level = more amount of transported goods.
Levels of trade routes is changed by time depending on how functional and successful are. If you make profitable route for both sides, you have enough convoys then your route will probably grow to next level. Trade routes always tries to work at 100% unless there is some blocking events like embargo or navy raiding going on.
If you need to know if there is chance to increase level or what could you do to increase level you must be friendly with “predicted level” tab in which you could see what must be done to level up. On image bellow you could see that trade route won’t increase because will decrease income a lot of…
… and that make sense. You could see that I don’t have enough Tea in Spanish Market and I could half price with this trade. But if I decrease prices more (with more level) then won’t be profitable this route for me and it’s better not to operate it. That’s why the level probably won’t go up.
Increasing trade route levels
To increase trade route level you don’t need to focus just on prices. With some research you could increase “competitiveness” with collaboration with you.
For example free trade laws boost competitiveness by +50% and also there is research called central banking (+25%) or macroeconomics (+25%) which will increase competitiveness too.
Another factor is “age of trade routes” if you make deals more time. Then some routes could increase their levels. But I think that competitiveness is more important to “manage” with whom the AI will do business.
