First I must say this is not a Homework or something related, this is a problem of a game named (freeciv).
Ok, in the game we have 'n' number of cities usually (8-12), each city can have a max number of trade-routes of 'k' usually (4), and those trade-routes need to be 'd' distance or further (8 Manhattan tiles).
The problem consist in to find the k*n trade-routes with (max distances or min distances), obviously this problem can be solved with a brute-force algorithm but it is really slow when you the player have more than 10 cities because the program has to make several iterations; I tried to solve it using graph theory but I am not an not an expert in it, I even asked some of my teachers and none could explain me an smart-algorithm, so I didn't come here to find the exact solution but I did to get the idea or the steps to analyze this.