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The Trading Dome is a special tile improvement in Civilization VI. It can be built by a player that is the Suzerain of the Samarkand city-state.
- Effects:
- +2 Gold
- +1 Gold for every adjacent Luxury resource.
- International Trade Routes sent from cities with Trading Domes generate +1 Gold for each Trading Dome present.
- Restrictions:
- Cannot be adjacent to another Trading Dome.
Strategy[]
Among all city-state tile improvements, the Trading Dome is by far the worst one. It is incredibly one-dimensional, as the only yield it grants is Gold. The Trading Dome poses the same issue as the Kurgan or the Ziggurat: the total effects of the improvement will be trivial if there are too few, but the growth and productivity of the city will be stunted if there are too many, since none of these improvements provide any Food, Production, or Housing. Moreover, Gold is the least valuable currency in the game in spite of its versatility. 1 Gold is worth half as much as 1 Faith in purchasing, cannot compare to the value of 1 Science or Culture, and is the easiest yield to generate in great abundance.
The bonus to international Trade Routes is even more trivial. Bandar Brunei, Venice, and Hunza provide similar bonuses, albeit with much greater efficiency and without requiring you to invest space or build charges, and these three city-states aren't even among the most outstanding city-states to begin with. Overall, the limited usefulness of the Trading Dome puts Samarkand very close to the bottom in the power ranking of city-states, and sending any non-free Envoy there is discouraged.
If, however, you become Samarkand's Suzerain and want to make optimal use of Trading Domes, you can do so by designating one city as a trading hub, much as you would when playing as Mansa Musa or after building Great Zimbabwe. It doesn't matter if the city is small because all you need is space for tile improvements. If you have five Trade Routes running from that city, a single Builder's worth of Trading Domes will yield +15 Gold, a second Builder will give you +30 Gold, and so forth. Since there are so many ways to either obtain Builders more quickly and easily or give them more build charges (e.g., Ilkum, Liang, and the Ancestral Hall), for a small investment, you can grow your Gold income exponentially.
Civilopedia entry[]
One of the most innovative architectural features of Samarkand are its domes. Not content with building one dome above a structure, architects piled dome upon dome, linking them together to make a stable but spacious internal space. On the inside, many of these are decorated with elaborate Islamic muqarnas – ornate decorative vaults. The Chorsu bazaar, the trading dome at the intersection of the roads linking Bukhara, Samarkand, and Tashkent, is an example of this kind of architecture. Inside the bazaar during Samarkand’s height would have been goods and people from China, India, Europe, and the Middle East – virtually the entire known world.