Actually, I would think that's eye-candy there. You don't really do much but build a bigger port.
Essentially:
Bigger structure, more profit.
How do I achieve this in galciv?
Bigger population+Market, more tax
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I see the point you're getting at but I think you've missed the distinction I was trying to make WRT Rome: Total War. In the case of a port, it actually figures out every turn what the most profitable trade routes are, and these will change as other cities develop. Different provinces have different resources with different local market prices. Your relations with other factions will also determine how profitable the routes are, and of course your ports can also be blockaded during wartime.
So, from my perspective, that's a step up from the typical "I built this improvement X my population = my income" that we've had to put up with. I understand your point that it's just extra details added to a simple concept, but I always liked it when someone would post to the RTW message board asking why their trade had dried up, and someone would point out it was because they went to war with a neighbor -- that's the downside of automating these things... the player wasn't paying attention how much his economy was dependant on trade with someone he declared war on.
Rome: Total War is anything but a sophisticated strategy game... that's actually what shocked me about it... they put a tiny feature in it that I thought was new and added flavor to the game... just the sort of small feature that I thought should have been in Civ2 or Civ3 as an organic part of the game.
I haven't played MOO3... the reviews were terrible so I didn't bother. I see your point that ultimately we play these games so that we can control things, and when the "model" is so complicated and there are very few knobs for the player to turn, then it ruins the game. I agree. However, I do think that there are a lot of low-level things that should be automated, not only because it makes the game more fun, but also because it's not the right sort of control anyway -- few would argue that the President of the USA doesn't have quite a bit of power and choices to make... however, he doesn't sit down and figure out that Los Angeles should have a trade route with Hong Kong. No, not at all. He sits down with the leader of China and agrees on a trade policy, and the trade then happens on its own based on those rules. He might also get legislation through Congress to fund a billion-dollar upgrade of the Port of Los Angeles. That's the sort of control he has, and that's what I'd like to see in Civ and GalCiv type strategy games.
Ultimately, also, once you have a robust economic model, you can use it all sorts of ways within the game. People were mentioning the stupid way that GC1 would penalize you for conquering a neighbor... you'd make less money through domestic trade than through foreign trade... totally absurd. Well, if you have a robust economic model of supply, demand, resources, etc... you can use the same model for external trade as for internal trade... the goods just want to "flow" to all the right places because of the mechanics of the game. You can put up barriers to trade via policy... and internal trade would be negatively impacted by your tax rate... it reduces your level of economic activity.
In a game like Civ, one of the things that bothered me was how the largest city in the USA was somewhere in IOWA. Why? Because that's where the food was. Well, of course, that's not how it works in the real world. Rome was the largest city in the world during the time of the Roman Empire, and it wasn't because it was surrounded by prime farmland... it was because they had trade infrastructure that made the place where hundreds of thousands of people did business, and that same infrastructure enabled it to be supplied with food from Egypt and North Africa... nowhere near Rome.
In a game like GalCiv, I'd like to see the same sort of reasoning put into the economics... why would people live where they would? Where would trade take place? Where would the resources be? How would they move the resources to where they were needed? The player doesn't need to be able to calculate all of those things, or even know exactly what the game is doing, but if the game does it, the gameplay is much better IMO.
For example, from what I've read of Starbases, they're just another stupid "bonus" you build. Wouldn't it be interesting if they were truly centers of trade (the equivalent of cities)... the player could strategically place them to benefit his economy by making trade easier.
I also have a rule of thumb that I'm not interested in aspects of a game like Civ or GalCiv that dwell on stuff that I would laugh if I saw it in a movie. Yeah, sure, "realism" is a foggy thing in sci-fi setting like GalCiv, but even in FICTIONAL universes like Babylon 5, Battlestar Galactical, Star Trek, etc, you would burst out laughing if there was an episode where the commander explained they were building an "Cultural Starbase" as part of their government's overall strategy for galactic domination. I know people want to be able to win via some sort of cultural domination, just to have another option besides military assault, but come on... everyone talks about American culture taking over the world, but you don't see the borders of the USA advancing north into Canada or south into Mexico -- "Tijuana defects to the USA!" is not a headline I'll ever read in my lifetime. No, there are other ways something like that can be modeled. For example, if you are at a cultural disadvantage compared to a neighbor, your corruption might increase, or the political party of your neighbor might gain popularity... things that put your nation under indirect pressure.
