Trading

This time playing the game I learned a lot about how trading is an important feature in the game. When you are limited to the resources that are on the land you occupy you must trade to get certain materials you need. A major example of why trade is important, is in certain buildings you can cut the production time in half if you have stone or marble. If you have the resource needed that could save you up to 15 turns or even more to build other things important to your city. In games in the past I had not had access to marble or Stone and went ahead and built those buildings anyway. If I had just found another society with stone or marble I could have saved those turns and built that extra military unit or library in which I didn't get the chance. This directly relates to the real world. There are many resources that we just don't find in our country like silk, sea salt, and rice. These are all resources we use on a fairly regular basis, but the only way to get these resources is to trade with other countries and give them something they need. The other thing that this brings up is the idea of supply and demand. In trading how much you can get for a resource depends on how plentiful it is found (supply), and how many other societies need that resource (demand). Something like fish would have a very high supply because you find fish everywhere, and a very low demand because almost everyone can find fish. Therefore what you can trade fish for, otherwise known in the real world as equilibrium price, would be very little. Now if you take a resource like marble this would have a higher equilibrium price, and you would be able to get more or better resources for marble. This is because there is a much lower supply then fish, and many countries don't have marble, but definitely could use marble. Another important thing about trading is it is a huge factor in Foreign relations. In the game one of the first ways to build trust with other countries is to allow open borders between the 2 countries. This is a positive thing and starts good relationships. Then later in the game when one country doesn't like another they ask you to stop your relationships with that country. This is where you can offend the country for not stopping the relationship, or really offend the other country by stopping relationships with the country. We see this in the real world all the time. Our country does not agree with how Cuba is ran, so they chose to place an economic sanction on the country, and now we can't buy Cuban cigars. Since there are many resources we could supply Cuba with we stopped all trading in order to try and change the way they run the government. Trading is an essential tool in the world.