I've been thinking this a while now while playing some of the recent commerce games, and it really solidified in my brain when I was perusing the wiki for Commerce.

Commerce Overview:
Commerce games stray from just rewarding income to be used for armies the next turn. Instead, you get Gold, which can be spent on either armies or cities.

Gold is further earned by having cities.

The two main commerce settings that vary are the cost per city and the army multiplier penalty. The cost per city is the base cost of gold to place the first city on a territory. Each subsequent city costs +1 more gold, and all cities give +1 gold. Typically, the first army you deploy costs 1 gold, and with a default army multiplier of 10, the first 10 armies will all cost 1 gold each, then the next 10 cost 2 gold each, etc.

Local Deployment and Commerce
When you combine these settings, the gold earned from holding a bonus can only be spent either in that bonus, or building a city anywhere. Further, the gold earned from cities translates to anywhere armies.

Result:
You can use the gold earned from far-away territories to build cities, and subsequently use that gold to deploy anywhere armies far away from the territories that earned them.

Sample Games:
Here are two sample games for reference.
https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=19076733
https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=19076582

Indeed, commerce reduces some of the tedium of large LD games, since you don't have to deploy to every bonus one you hit the army multiplier. I think the settings go together very well and I'm surprised that few have discovered this.

Edited 7/10/2019 16:43:54

This was actually a very good idea, and was popular during NinjaNic's tournament UC Davis.

I have just created a multiplayer game, 2v2v2 using local deployments and commerce. The main difference is, very low income. I play tested it a number of times in a single player mode, I believe it should be quite interesting as a team game. It should promote cooperation, as a necessity for maximizing team gains.

Indeed, I am a fan of the commerce+Local Deployment setting myself. I created a challenge on this premise some time ago.
https://www.warzone.com/SinglePlayer/Level?ID=1235529

Was a bit surprised that folks found the challenge harder than expected. I was expecting a 20% win rate but it was only 3%

I really like this combination of settings, for all the reasons mentioned above.

However, I really struggled with using Cities in this environment. The problem is that Local Deployment makes Cities FAR more valuable than other ways of getting income. For most situations, sitting in a corner and building lots of Cities was the optimal strategy, and in a head-on fight, the person with the most Cities tended to dominate.

In our games, local deployment quickly became irrelevant, because Commerce meant that once you deployed your "anywhere" armies, you had no more armies left over to deploy. In practice, all our deployments were "Anywhere" armies once we had a few Cities in play.

I increased the cost of Cities quite a bit (to 25 gold), but it was still better to build Cities, almost all the time. (I should note, though, that our games were FFAs and on maps with lots of wastelands. The dynamic might be different one-on-one and a map with normal/low neutrals.)

Is there anything to counterbalance this, in terms of settings? Why didn't that happen in your games?

I'm thinking that in the future I'll use Commerce and Local Deployment, but without Cities.

Here a game on ld commerce where rak and i discuss what's needed to make such a template work well. Read chat if interested.

https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer?GameID=19160517&From=PastGames

Edited 7/30/2019 05:33:35

Consider increasing cost of cities (5-7ish) and maybe work with army multiplier (penalty for more anywhere armies).

Some of the games also used 20% attack, 80% defense. Not sure if this helped, or just made it different.

One way to counterbalance the significance of cities is rather than raise the cost of cities, increase the gold value holding territorial bonuses (ie: 10x standard) and run a high or no army multiplier and a low offense/high defense ratio (ie: 20/80). Folks will build cities, but it won't be a crazy 10-20 cities every territory as these dynamics put more emphasis on strategic deployment in the early and even mid game.

I am hosting a small tournament (https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer/Tournament?ID=30150), just finishing up, where cities cost 10, but the army multiplier is stiff (every four armies), and minimum reinforcement is 1. Using these settings, local deployment is still significant even fairly late in the game, and it takes careful planning to justify building cities. Thanks for the discussion with Rak, Master, I will take it into account.
I plan to re-host the tournament in a day or two, using a 3v3v3 random team. I meant to do it this time, but I screwed up the settings (my first tournament ever hosted).

Okay, for those interested, here is the link to the new team tournament, 2v2v2, with only 18 players, no entry fee, and 66 coins to first place/28 coins to second place. I welcome feedback. https://www.warzone.com/MultiPlayer/Tournament?ID=30279