After Paul talked a little about what trade routes will look like I had a couple of quick thoughts.

1) I would encourage the designers to think seriously about something similar to the Civ V BNW way of doing trade routes. For me, its the best thing about that expansion. It makes trade routes easy to change as the economic circumstances change, but not require too much micro. It also doesn't require you to actually fly your transport to the destination to establish the route.

2) Please allow us to add escorts to a trade route. The way they were described, it seems like they will be easy to attack and difficult to defend. A player should be able to move their ship onto a trade route and then choose an option to escort that transport (limited by logistics of course). Then, when a ship or fleet  goes to attack the route, they are shown the escort fleet and can choose to fight the fleet and pillage the route, or cancel its attack on the route.