Bob

NightmareSr
However it looks like some of the best uses would be for Settlements in the mountains or highlands that can't get woodland or cropland hexes.

Interesting analysis, and yes, it's those players with limited choices who'd most likely find the Trading Outposts tempting. I'd like to make them a little more tempting overall, but need to be careful exactly how far I push that since they're already tempting in at least some cases.

Bob

Azure_Zero
That 6 food and 6 trade tell me that it was not a pure forest hex (it and it's core 6 being the same), as I use Hunting in pure forest hexes and get 7,7.

Whoops, you're absolutely right, I missed my target hex by 1. The one I was using had slightly lower Game/Wood ratings. Switching to the correct hex, the Hunting Outpost +0 does indeed produce 7 Trade Goods (plus 7 Food) while the Trading Outpost produces 8 Trade Goods (5 for Wood, 3 for Game). The spread increases to 22 vs. 26 at +5. Again, not a huge increase, and rarely worth the substantial trade-off in Food production, but still hits that minimum bar of being better at Trade Good production in any similar hex.

Bob

Azure_Zero
Sorry, Bob but I disagree with Trading outpost being better trade good producers as they currently are,
As the OP clearly states they at best a match to a hunting outpost in trade good production and the Hunting also generates the same amount of food on top of it.

I think if the percentages were raised to at least about 37.5% it would start to match a ranching outpost in trade good production in a plains hex, which is currently the best outpost and hex type combo for trade good production.

It's not a big difference, but I went on Zog and placed a Hunting Outpost +0 and a Trading Outpost +0 on a very standard Woodlands hex (400 Stone, 800 Wood, 600 Game) to test it out. The Hunting Outpost (the only other option that would produce Trade Goods in that hex) said it would produce 6 Trade Goods (plus 6 Food), while the Trading Outpost said it would produce a total of 7 Trade Goods (broken into 4 for Wood and 3 for Game). That lined up pretty well with the spreadsheet math I did, though I had to fudge a little to account for rounding issues.

Basically, I agree that Trading Outposts aren't the best Trade Goods producers, and are in fact guaranteed to be relatively inefficient at it. You're almost always better off using a different outpost for Trade Goods production, but in a different hex. It's just that in over half of the claimable hexes, they're the best choice if you want to focus on producing Trade Goods in that specific hex, which might be needed if someone can't line up a better hex. That's not a very high bar to reach, but they'd be clearly broken if they didn't meet it at least some of the time. That would then define the bare minimum fix, and would be pretty easy to define. I'd go ahead and make that now, knowing that any balanced change has to go at least that far, with plans to adjust further when I had time to run more numbers. Since they meet that low bar, there's no clear bare minimum fix to make. That doesn't mean they're balanced, it just means I shouldn't do anything until I have time to run all the numbers.

Bob
Agreed, the math guarantees they'll always be pretty poor at generating Trading Goods, but even with the exclusivity pairs they're still usually better than the other options at generating Trading Goods in any given hex. Of course, those hexes are almost definitely better suited to generate other bulk resources instead, and it may be pretty rare to find yourself with a mix of hexes making those tradeoffs worthwhile. Still possible though, which is enough to make picking a "balanced" point require far more math. Some quick calculations convince me I can find the right numbers, and they wouldn't be a huge change or hard to implement, but running the math to convince myself the new numbers are in the right range is going to take some work.

Rynnik
People rarely play in their own self interest. Game designers have to consider that what players say they want and what they actually want are not always the same. Games have killed themselves by doing exactly what their player base asked for.