William Blake

No, multiplayer is up to 6 people in the same game.

Some bugs cannot be found unless hardware is stressed for resources.

It is more valuable to test on a low spec machine. On a top level hardware everything will run anyway, so there is no point in testing it to begin with )

This question was talked over many times. They want multiplayer to be many people at once. The game is very long. There are a lot of battles. If each time 2 out of a six people want to have a 15-20 minutes battle the rest will have to wait and do nothing. It would take too much time and too much idle time for everyone else to have tactical battles in a multiplayer. They could not find a way to do it given the strategic game whey want this to be.

While I totally agree with you on principle ("Knights" is the major keyword), both original and KoH2 specifically are CLEARLY not focused on direct combat. Everything we seen from very beginning of KoH2 was always focused on a strategic gameplay and it appears to be the intention to have a game about long running strategic kingdom management rather than direct military/combat game. We don't know if this strategic gameplay on itself is rich and engaging enough to make a player "forget" or should I rather say "accept" very indirect involvement in battle and war. It might be the case. However from a standpoint of "setting" and "player expectations" it is very hard to step away from personal "knight takes up arms to lead the battle" idea. In fact I think there is a MAJOR issue with the way the game is presented. Just look at the official trailer: this creates ALL the impression that in fact this is a game where your diplomacy, economy, large scale problems of a kingdom are secondary annoyances while PERSONAL honor and direct involvement in combat are the Sovereign (can't escape this pun). While it is amazingly strong and very attractive message on itself, it appears to be exactly the opposite from the intention of KoH2 to be strategic, calm and calculated long lasting game of global dominance. Was it always the case or the game focus shifted during development since the trailer. We don't know. In fact I don't even know which would be the better game to be honest.

You can probably rename the intro video files somewhere in the game directory. This usually removes all the videos all together. Or it might in some cases.

Is "initiative" a resource or something? Is it calculated or runs out can I player see that on UI? I'm not sure if this is just a figure of speech or a vague description of a mechanic? Speaking of mechanics, we know from original, that there were a lot of hidden mechanics in tactical battles. Mostly morale from things like "enemy on my flank" or "enemy is all around us" and so on. However a player would had no awareness of all these and no UI or even a tutorial explanation of potential effects available. Looking at the screens right now, I don't see any indication that this is fixed. I would need to see icons or messages about ALL dynamic modifiers happening to be able to actually meaningfully lead a battle. If there is a debuff on units which move alone - I need to see that. If there is a bonus to archers on a hill - show me that. If there is a buff or debuff on units in a specific formation or against a specific enemy - a player NEEDS to be aware.

Pope is nothing special to claim a world victory for the given area and time period. For instance at the time Armenian Christians didn't give a damn about all that Papacy because they were Apostolic church independent even from Constantinople since 554. Same as Georgian Church for that matter, independent from Antioch even earlier. Moreover in 1054 all Eastern Orthodox broke off from Rome and won't give a damn about any claims of Pope in Rome - because all considered Catholics to be heretics. And these are just Christian side of the story. If you look at the map of KoH2 more kingdoms are not Catholics and have zero reason to submit to Pope. From 711 to 1492 half of Spain was under Umayyad Caliphate by the way. Moreover, even for parts of the game map always under Catholic control Pope was not an ultimate power. Between years 1378 and 1417 there were 2 Popes elected at once and from 1410 to 1415 even 3 Popes at once. And Pope didn't rule Papacy all the time, from 1309 - 1377 is know as Babylonian Captivity of the Papacy. During this period 7 Popes had to reside in Avignon, France and not in Vatican. It was not historically a significant independent power all above even half of Europe you can claim to be a victory condition for the whole game.

As a Pagan I'm very furious about whole idea and as an Orthodox I laugh about all these heretics trying to lead the world. The point is, that this cannot possibly be a religious victory based on a huge area and all religions present in the game. It has to be a political victory of political power projected by a player. If you don't think this is fitting your playstyle or your own story you create in-game, then there are other victory conditions you should focus on.

Well, this is large old expensive franchise, they have to aim at bigger and bigger casual audience. Anything with depth and immersion limits potential playerbase.

What did Total War do wrong for you to lose interest?

Problem with marshal skills is that they cost books now. If you are rich and powerful it is not a problem, so I don't even consider these scenarios. What I care about is recovery and come back options in case of near game loss and strategic warfare options with indirect combat. First, if engineering skill makes you siege machines and you happen to lose a marshal, all your new marshals are very weak against enemy cities unless you spend books to get required engineering skill. Since we can expect mid to end game provinces to be very well build up, it basically means that you have an extra required cost in books on any new marshal to be even somewhat dangerous to enemy cities. Makes it harder to come back from a marshal loss and I don't like "required" skills. Second, if we make advanced siege machines to be unlock on a kingdom level with a trade good "engineers" we can both have a curious gameplay around "trading this resource" like horses and can lock away powerful siege machines behind complex production chain. If engineers are not a skill, but an army equipment, then you basically will buy it as soon as you get gold and that could be very early on, making most early-mid game fortifications useless. If you make the price of this "equipment" high, it would mean that most poor kingdoms won't be able to compete or create danger to rich build up cities and also (see first point) will make it very hard to come back from a loss of an expensive army with expensive engineers upgrade. In my mind, the best gameplay is a narrow balance between an assured victory and a certain loss. It is way better to present a player with a risky situation if you have a known recovery strategy in case it fails. As such I'd rather see a kingdom level progress through trade good "specialists" unlocking engineering rather than an expensive upgrade into a single army which can lose and bury all hope for a recovery because you cannot afford to invest into a new one.

Not exactly. You need horses as a trade good, you don't have to have a province producing it as you can import horses. Then once you have unlocked horses you can build War Stable as an upgrade to blacksmith (I think). Then you can build cavalry units in any province with blacksmith. But if at any point in time you lose horses trade good unlock ( from import or your own produced) then war stable goes "off line" mode and you cannot make horse units anymore. So funny enough, the system is both way more complex and yet way more simplistic because you don't care where or how horses are produced. You could make camel cavalry in Scotland if your kingdom has this special unit and you happen to control a province in Scotland, but your global kingdom at the same time might have zero provinces producing camels, you just need to trade it. On that note, we don't really know if trade goods are required for all advanced units. Camels and horses for sure, but if you need steel trade good or something else for other unit type is not clear to me at the time. Totally agree. Siege machine should not be marching with an army, they should be buildable on a spot for a cost of army supplies and time. This makes significant difference in my mind, because it is commitment of time and resource each time separately. So you need to think each time if you want to start a siege and if you can afford a siege with a given state of the army supplies. If siege machines are just upgrades they make this army ready for sieges all the time and make not sieging a waste. Moreover, on a strategic level, if ANY army is potentially dangerous to my province I need to do something about them, but if the siege machines are upgrades I can disregard all enemy armies without machines if my cities are strong enough. I'm also very much against "engineering" as a marshal skill and think it should be some tech unlock on a kingdom level. In original KoH this skill was just basically "have to select it" in late game. I think it is very limiting to have skills which are required essentially and I think that any army big enough and supplied enough should be a significant threat to any city, no matter how skilled or not the marshal is. This allows come back gameplay after all or most skilled marshals were lost in previous battles but you need to push enemy city now with a new marshal. From what I understand there are "specialist" trade goods, these "people icons", I think these would be perfect vehicle for unlocking more and more powerful siege machines to be built by an army on a spot.

Yes I do. My motivation is very simple - this is Knights of Honor game, this is not "Merchants of Honor" nor "Spy of Honor" nor "Marriage Sim". Military aspect is the major driver for the game. And it cannot be lame, shallow and boring, because at the end of the day this has to be a game of military conflict and "medieval power through sword" type of thing. However, what we see so far, well for several years actually, is a bit lacking. First, RTS direct combat has never been shown, talked about in terms of foundation of the gameplay and wont be available in a multiplayer. Meaning it is not a main venue for military action. And it is not a bad thing on itself, far from it. If this is a grand strategy game you don't have to rely on direct unit control. You can look at steam charts and see that Hearts of Iron IV is amazingly popular, second only to Civ VI in top 25 as strategy games, and it has zero RTS combat mechanics. While for instance Stronghold Warlords has all the classic RTS unit control elements and still is a pathetic failure of a game even as a well known franchise cannot attract players. So a strategy game, even a pure military game can be very attractive for a lot of people without any direct RTS elements, agreed. Having said that, I'm not content with the global military gameplay we have been shown. The game goes into more and more confusing and misleading things like: "Manpower" rating for Light Infantry is 300, manpower rating for Teutonic Knight Infantry is 200. This is what you will see over the marshal head on a global map. But from all other stats Knights are like 7 to 10 times more actual power than Lights, so manpower especially combined manpower of an army is meaningless number. Yet it is shown as the main indicator of army power on the map. 300 manpower unit of Lights eat 1 food upkeep. While 200 manpower Knights eat 5 food. So you can't even estimate upkeep based on manpower numbers. Somehow units transferred from a garrison into a marshal army will get instantly boosted with %-tage manpower due to skills and equipment, but for an average player... Hell, I look at it for a half a year and I cannot figure out what power with what bonuses is better or worse, especially against a given opponents! And I study gameplay footage frame by frame time to time. At the same time you transfer units back to garrison and the same unit drops in upkeep and manpower instantly. So the game tells you different number of food upkeep of marshal units and garrison units separately. And somehow can move units from marshal and back and change food required for the same overall army. Now they tell us that you can in fact run a negative food supply for a short time. But I fail to even understand how a player can use that or moreover why would you even need that mechanics of negative food supply when you are already limited by number of marshals, slots, levies, province population and gold to make more units. I don't even see how it helps to have global levies AND local province population to be used for new units, you either take levies to be soldiers or you take common villagers from the province. Too many mechanics for the same thing. But fine, we'll manage to understand all that complexity with some in-game experience. And then, I look at the end result - actual battle and military play. And I see blobs moving with the same speed with very little options to counter play against any stronger opponents. I see zero control over a given battle on a global map, well you can run away, true, but it is not meaningful control. I also expect a pretty boring and repetitive army composition. Cavalry needs a kingdom trade good to be built. Meaning that most of your enemies won't have cavalry at all, which makes all spear units less useful. Considering that you need separate upgrades for each unit type there is very little reason to build anything but swords and ranged units and never use spears or cavalry due to little return on investment. This is will be even more entrenched with unit veterancy over time so you won't switch units on a fly to match an opponent. So if movement is lame, armies are limited by marshals = very few, battle itself has a zero input from a player what the military gameplay is at the end of the day? It appears to become "make economy, invest in army, choose weak weak target, click to take a city". I don't think it will be fun and engaging. To many complex rules on supply and unit production make no sense if you have very few usable unit types and very little military options to wage war. With this motivation I'm trying all this time to steer if not the game itself, but at least the discussion into more deep, action/reaction, movement/position military gameplay. Unless you want multiplayer to be a causal chat room with a fancy moving background, KoH2 needs action - time dependent, situational, with uncertain outcomes. Things to misjudge, misclick, miscalculate, predict, feint, plan for in a heat of battle. Most of us came here to be Knights. We came for... well this:

To continue my thoughts Expanding Military Gameplay with Army Abilities So, let’s for a minute run with an idea that we have player activated army abilities. These would cost army supplies and probably this cost should scale with the number of units a marshal has. Effect duration and cooldown would be very common mechanics most players would already have an experience with. For simplicity let’s look at a minimal ability set and see what gameplay possibilities these can provide. Consider the following: For simplicity lets say the all the following abilities have run time of 15 seconds and a cooldown of 60 An ability called “extended march” is activated to give an army a double movement speed, during cooldown army has half of the speed. An ability called “fierce assault” is activated to give army an attack bonus An ability called “fortify camp” is activated to give defense bonus but locks the army in place for the duration of cooldown Now consider a game situation with 2 armies on a global map. If you were to play as the game is right now, you options are very few – you either move away from a stronger army or you chase a weaker army. There is nothing else really in terms of military gameplay. But with the army abilities mechanics mentioned above we could have a potential for much richer play / counter play: You see my army moving in, you activate a “fierce assault” trying to attack. If I do nothing, you get to engage with a bonus. My counter play can be to run away. Your counter to that might be “extended march” to catch up. I can respond with either “extended march” but I risk to misjudge distances and timing and suffer from a cooldown slow speed, but I can outlast your fierce assault duration before we engage. Or I can respond with “fortify camp” and try to get fight with defensive bonus But you can counter play my fortify camp and cancel the attack while locking my army in place and getting potential reinforcements closer while I'm unable to move on a cooldown. Most importantly, we both have to time it properly because we are running out of army supplies each time we activate an ability. Indirectly we are investing or I should rather say "betting" resources each time we use supplies and the play is to maximize payback. However as in all good gameplay mechanics we have a counter motivation not to save our supplies forever because if we miscalculate and lose an army all the supplies will be lost anyway. Now all this becomes an interesting dance of time and judgment making global military gameplay way more deep and uncertain. This would be a tremendous bonus for a multiplayer where you don’t have RTS battles and all the military conflict will be reduced to a few marshals moving around with the same speeds. All these play options are greatly dependent on supplies available to a given army and a player skill and proper prediction of enemy actions. If the cost of abilities scale with army size you then can have a very interesting dance of smaller armies with more ability activations vs large armies which are not able to afford a lot of abilities. Imagine a play and counter play which wastes invading army supplies to the point that it cannot start a siege on a city and has to fall back home to resupply WITHOUT an actual battle even happening! And these are just 3 simple abilities out the top my head. You can enrich the global warfare dramatically even with a very few army abilities due it’s timed nature and potential to counter each other. All that can be done with a minimal impact on the existing mechanics just by using army supplies resource as a fuel for these abilities. Supply becomes way more important, size of an army would make it costly, but smaller armies will become more viable if a player uses abilities at a right time for a great effect and less cost. I would strongly suggest looking in this direction.

Devs made a lot of odd decisions, I cannot say they are all wrong, but they look very questionable. Manpower bonuses I understand the intention to keep limited unit slots, but allow to expand army sizes in a bigger range. But these magical “manpower” bonuses from marshal skills, traditions and now army equipment make no sense. So I have a base unit of say 100 men, they take say 100 levies and eat 10 food, upkeep 10 gold. Then, in a middle of nowhere I add an equipment to the army for +15% and magically have a unit of 115 men, which still eat 10 food and upkeep 10 gold and if I need to heal the unit it will take same amount of levies? Due all the respect, this is laughable or should I rather say – “out of the game setting”. Instead I would rather completely remove “manpower” bonuses all together and have plain old bonuses to attack, defense and so on. Not only it would make sense from realism perspective (different training, armor, tactical moves can buff stats on soldiers but same amount of soldiers), but also would allow you to separate bonuses to have only an attack bonus from one thing, or defense bonus from another or say “number of available arrows” from something else. With plain “manpower” bonus mechanic you just buff everything all the time and have no room for more intricate bonus effects. Costs and upkeep The system as described is way too complex for too little gain. Not only you have food upkeep on a unit level and a supplies on an army level. Things like equipment also have upkeep increase on top of that. Nowhere I can see a screen or a view which can clearly show upkeep costs table to a player. I will be lost in a middle of a game trying to figure out why my global food upkeep is negative and who where and why is using what. An army unit moved from 1 marshal to another or from to a province garrison should magically require more or less upkeep based on all these skills and bonuses. Yet, since kingdom food is not localized and is magically supplying everyone everywhere in most cases for most players this would be not an issue, they won’t even know the food supply is going on until it just shuts off. I have no idea how this medieval Maersk supply chain is supposed to work and it won’t matter if it was for the good of the game overall. But all I see is a mechanic to limit armies which are already supposedly limited by number of marshals, number of slots, levies, gold upkeep and army supplies. All this points to either a failure to balance army vs economy with an extra complexity to keep it in check, or a failed food sink in order to make burden on a mid to end game economy and take out food out of the province growth. In my mind this is too complex for a casual/grand world gameplay or too generic and lacking options and different management tools for a hardcore/logistics oriented gameplay. Army supplies Idea of army supplies looks very raw at the time. It is for some reason localized to the army unlike food and gold upkeep. Which is a good direction, but it appears to have a constant “supply depletion rate” and there are no reasons to believe this is anything but a “timer” between resupplies. I would imagine supplies would be used for “actions” (not just constantly rot away) to be different from gold and food upkeep which are also constant rate. By the way, a “depletion rate -0.6”?! Oh come on, decimals, really? In such a casual game you want players to deal with decimal numbers all of the sudden? "Sire, our army supplies are vanishing with 6e-1 rate per second! What shall we do my liege?" Instead I would rather keep supplies as an army localized resource, but I would have actions which use set amount of resource once activated. Without much thinking I can imagine: “lay siege” - would be N supplies action “double march” – a temp boost to speed action, would be M supplies “fierce assault” - a one time bonus to attack next battle would cost some supplies "fortify camp" - builds a camp in place for defense bonus for a short time, costs B "load on ships" - transfers an army to become a sea fleet and so on, you can think another half a dozen. Not only it would be dramatically more clear to a player when and how many supplies are used (as opposed to this constant slow drain), but also it gives you freedom to introduce timed, player activated army abilities at the cost of supplies. And I think your global military gameplay lacks that A LOT. Gameplay around when and what ability to activate and save or use supplies at a certain point in time is dramatically better then just another obscure slow resource sink.

Yes, you have to get barrels before producing salt. Moreover, even you built salt trade but after that lose barrels (production or import) your salt trade should also stop working. At least this is how I understand the production chains.

We expect the next dev blog to be about army and combat. Original game had a lot of mechanics in RTS battles to be dependent on unit relative positions and direction, so there are probably all the things like that in the KoH2. We just don't know yet.

Ha, that's an interesting complication. In short, they have 8 building slots per province. Purely because of the screen estate issues. So they fitted 8 big slots on a screen with a nice icons: But they need a lot more "buildings" for all the things they want to lock by a building. So they moved a lot of buildings into "upgrades" of a "base" building. Just like you have barracks as a main building and you have fletchers and swordsmith as an upgrade. So buildings are these square things and upgrades are round sub icons for each building. There are a lot of them, just to make 64 goods you need to shuffle 64 upgrades to existing buildings somewhere. For instance look at Artisans, it can have 4 upgrades to produce 4 trade goods: But if was not enough to fit everything, so some trade goods are produced by a special new type buildings like Salt Trade at the bottom, which does not have upgrades and exists as a separate building, taking a whole slot out of 8 available. So back to your question, the main building happens to be Woodworking, but it has Glassworks as an upgrade: Well, because you need to fit it somewhere and it is not important enough to have it is own dedicated building like Salt Trade. And I'm afraid this is only to answer "how it happened to be", but I don't know "why". Best guess is "well because you need to fit 64 somewhere and upgrades are only 6 per base building or it won't fit on a screen" ))

Well, it appears that the main logic was initially to create a situation where a small kingdom cannot possibly produce even a basic set of all resources thus enforcing trade and diplomacy. From this starting point and giving an average size of a kingdom to be 2-4 provinces they came to probably 10-20 essential goods. But due to the size of the map, this was repeating too much in all regions and created too many potential trade opportunities for the same smaller set of goods. So a decision was made to make a lot of diverse region specific goods. An alternative would be an additional complexity into trade mechanics, probably logistics and storage considerations to make local and close by trade substantially more efficient and cut off far away markets from inflating supply. But Black Seas does not want this complexity in mechanics and expects simpler mechanics with more goods types to provide better gameplay overall. PS In fact there are 24 province features in the game, defining resources available per province. The following is a view of provinces with 1 selected province feature (horses) in green. And compare this to Camels in Africa: We can see the this is practically the same distribution per number of provinces. But, it would be first very questionable to have so many horses in Africa and so few in Europe. It would also make horses as a single trade good on a global market to double, making it significantly less dependent on a good diplomacy for any given kingdom.

Meaningful screens from the dev stream: Effects and descriptions: From the effects and amount of goods required, we can clearly see that all of these are mid to end game things. Bonuses in percentages are only significant for a large empires. Most effects are obviously not worth the cost and effort and won't be a factor in most short to mid games. For the purpose of a multiplayer all this is close to totally irrelevant - too long to archive, too hard to get a required set based on your preferred starting location. Time is an issue, so the longer you drag the game the more is the chance that people would just leave unable to play anymore. This means that the only meaningful trade goods for early to mid game (and all of multiplayer) are the basic ones that unlock military units and such. If these are easy and abundant they do not matter (everyone can get them easily) if these are very rare or located in a specific areas of the map - then we have too much problem with different starting locations being unfair. Also this implies that the dev stream talk about "strategically cutting of enemy from some trade good" is a mute point. Since most of the 64 are going towards kingdom advantages which most of the players in a multiplayer won't live long enough to see. Basic ones for units will probably be too abundant to cut anyone off. There will be ton of AI kingdoms making these and you can trade with a good deal of them instantly giving you access to a trade good again. Localization and trade route safety is not an issue and the amount of AI kingdoms is huge to have anything close to real trade good blockades. PS List of all 64 goods with green mark on goods required for kingdom advantages: So about 1/3 of goods are NOT used for kingdom advantages, but is probably required as prerequisites for more advanced goods production. As I said before, it would be really great to have color coding on trade goods tiers to show that.

I doubt they will change that at this point. It is possibly an option for a game setup so you can disable it. Black Sea seems to be very relaxed with "feel of dark ages" part of the game. You can see "Age of Enlightenment" and admiralty icon with a XVI century ship and cannons on ships. So trade victory is more or less in line with that. It is probably a potential victory condition for a very long games anyway, so I doubt most of us will play a single game long enough to have this problem.

True, but if you make AI aware of kingdom advantages victory, I fear it will make AI too strong, because AI can calculate required goods and sources much better and diplomacy between AI kingdoms and their trade are not real (I suspect it is not real). So AI would probably be rushing kingdom advantages and put too much pressure on a player to compete ONLY for kingdom advantages victory. To make this even viable, I suggest an exclusive trade mechanic, so a any kingdom with a rare resource cannot possibly supply all AI kingdoms, just 1 exclusive foreign trade for this good type. So you could make this a condition/demand in diplomacy and yet you can track it - who is the single exporter of a good type. You could also potentially lock down trade good from others by having exclusive import yourself. So at least you can indirectly stop AI from rushing to victory with trade goods. Now, I also do agree that pure trading victory through kingdom advantages is a bit odd for a "medieval kingdoms setting", this is not a "Merchants of Honor: global trade EU" game. But the map is huge, the game can last forever and you need an option to dominate through economy before taking every single province on a map and an escape option to still win even if AI is military way too strong and aims for political (vote) victory. Needs to be an alternative option for a player.

No, I can bet you that "they need cannons to outfit galleons to sail far away to acquire exotic goods". So far as land military combat goes - there are no gunpowder units we know of. As naval combat go - it is even more simplistic, you don't have ships as a separate units, you just board a land army to become a fleet. Sorry )

Well, lets run with this idea for a bit. So you need basically a screen with all goods and "allow/deny" checkboxes for each other kingdoms? And you need also a reverse view - what a particular kingdom produces and allows/denies to you? You also need diplomacy flow to demand or deny a trade good? If you want to make this a diplomacy tool it needs to be more... hm... lets say restrictive or exclusive. Lets say you can only trade a good to a single other kingdom. So if you make a rare good and all of Europe wants it you have to choose which kingdom gets the export and deny all others. This would make it way more valuable carrot/stick. Maybe. Can't say. Having an unlimited resource you can allow to everyone and get benefits from everyone for same cost of a single province and upgrade sounds kinda fishy. Economy is a very simplified in KoH2 or so it seems, so kingdom advantages and trade goods are not a bad way to expand into economy side of kingdom life. But we don't know how it feels and plays especially early mid game. It can become just irrelevant hustle. If you make exclusive trade to a single foreign power it can bring trade goods more to the diplomacy system. Maybe. The more I think about it though... If you had way more kingdom advantages with less goods required for a single one, that would be better. Because it could allow you to get smaller but ARCHIVABLE bonuses early mid game. So lets say, a kingdoms achievement is 3-4 goods and it gives smaller bonus and we have say 20 of them. Like a tech tree basically. When I look at one of the 6 current ones - they require too much to think about it. If I could have a viable early goals of 2-3-4 goods for a small but realistic bonus it could be way more engaging. Also, if a next achievement is a question of 2 goods I have + 1 I need, it would make diplomacy for that +1 good very attractive and exclusive trade would make it ever better. So ok, sorry to thinking aloud, I should be way more brief: Make trade good available to producer kingdom + 1 another kingdom as an exclusive trade Keep current 6 advantages (just to save effort), but split each of them into 3 smaller advantages with small bonuses. 3 small advantages (inside current 6) should require very few goods 2 or 3 but give smaller bonuses Once you get 3 small together the big advantage bonuses kick in In this case you can keep most of the things you have already. So new balancing of goods production/rarity/location is not required. Since your new small advantages are already inside the existing 6 ones you already have strategic progression figured out. Just make more sub bonuses and make exclusive 1 trade to lock down unlimited supply to everyone from a single place. This will make it relevant to early game and makes an exclusive trade of an important good to be a major diplomacy factor.