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I will, but I feel a little dumb to scout the wilderness in order to discover citys to trade with...........where no citys are....Your best bet would be to scout evenly around your city so in a circle and hope that in time either you will be moved or you will get new neighbours to the left of your city. Uneven scouting gives all kinds of problems. Joining an FS will at least help you with trading.
Even on the best area of the map, with lots of completed provinces, your trading will be rubbish unless you are in an active FS.
Sentient good trading is fine. You can trade with the whole server with no trading fee. Discovered provinces, FS, no FS are all irrelevant - you see every sentient trade on the server anyway.