In the 1.2 beta, the cpuncil event seems to be completely ignored even if your route limit is less than 12.

Have you tried using the extra trade route ablities in the begining of the game and researching Neutral Shipping as well to see if this is a true hard limit?

Bah! Real GalCiv players are too busy waging war on everyone to trade with them!

Heh, well, not really, but in my last game I didn't build a single trade ship because it just wasn't worth it. As soon as every last world had been colonized and I was ready to switch from expanding my empire to building my infrastructure, I got attacked. When the Drengin come-a-callin' it's time to build warships, not trade boats. After I conquered their empire I had enough population that the 20 BC or whatever a turn that I would have gotten from a trade route just wasn't worth it.

At the end of the game I had all the trade techs only because I kept getting them as 'rewards' for taking over enemy planets. Never build a single trader.

Has the value of trade routes gone down?

I have been trying (without much success, alas) to command a significant portion of the enemy's income -- and therefore good reason for them not to declare war.

Since it takes a lot of resources to research, build, and deploy freighters to a far off civilization, seems like the rewards could be higher. That way I could spend a huge whack of money and construction time developing a chain of star bases. And deploying defenses for them as well.

The trade routes are worth more as time goes on. With 12 routes I can usually pull in an extra 1000 or more per turn, depending on the planet quality and distance. The PQ has more to do with it than actual distance, from what I have observed. A PQ23 planet will usually yeild more income than a PQ 12 at twice the distance.

I don't think defenses for starbases are worth the time it takes to load them up. I protect my resource starbases only.
The econ bases can be replaced fairly quickly if they are destroyed, and the cost hit is not as much as the cost to protect them. It only takes 4 constructors to complete a trading outpost starbase.

And it does not take that much time to research Neutral, Advanced and Master trade if you have decent research facilities. Nor does it take much time to build freighters. They build faster than constructors.

I agree with Moosetek13. Granted, I am a more warlike player, but money is always welcome (1000 seems right, maybe more with econ stations).

And there's no better way to alleviate borders tension than to trade heavily with that neighbor. Likewise, no better way than drive a weak player to war than to obviously neglect him in your trading missions. One game I traded exclusively with my huge neighbor, being the Arcean Empire. Within a dozen turns and a little monetary prodding (which was no sweat off my back, I had buckets by then), we were allies, and within a dozen more all my other neighbors attacked me one by one because of "escalating tensions". The Arceans wiped them out and little ol' Earth got all the scraps from that table. Well, until we contacted the Iconian Refuge, but that's another story...

Being a trading civ isn't very expensive and won't detract from your other strategies, but it will help your diplomacy vastly and the money doesn't hurt, either.

Yeah, trade routes are way undervalued - especially on larger maps. Their only practical use is to inprove relations with other races.

I don't even bother hardly with starbases to increase revenue. I build them to increase production on my planets. But if a trade route happens to pass through the AoE of a starbase, then that is just gravy.

Constructive Criticism: Double the value of a trade route and have the revenue from a trade route on a sliding scale relative to the size of the galaxy. The number of trade routes also needs to be relative to the size of the galaxy.

To be honest, I have never really understood why you needed to research anything beyond the initial ability to trade. More trade routes beyond that should really be a function of how many ships you can build and maybe a limit of trading revenues to say 25% of planetary income.