Guide to really be good on trade - no novice guide!

[Garashta]

I am failing to find such a strategy guide.
Most guides are youtube videos, duration of 30 minutes more or less, so you have to watch it and spend the whole time only to see it did not provide any useful new info.
I already grasp the basics, it is really not that complicated:

- You collect on your capital (or trading capital)
- you can use your merchants to collect on other nodes at a 50% mallus, or on your home node for a 10% bonus.
- You can use your merchs to steer trade, not only sending the trade value downstream, but also increasing trade power both in this node and in your home node
- You can gain trade power mainly by having provinces rich in trade power or by using light ships, although merchants give a little, and there are also ideas and events, peace deals, etc.

and those 30 minutes videos only talk about that. It is really a tutorial only, for those who don't know how trade works. they are by no means a strategy guide.

So it seems pretty straightforward: Send trade value to your home node and try to have trade power there, mostly by controlling provinces that are high on trade power.
Still, I am miles away from those players that manage to earn a hefty sum on money by trade. In all my games I am more or less struggling with income. Not uncommon for me to have 2-3 monthly ducats, even after mothballing forts and setting army maintenance to zero.
So it is clear that, even if the basics of trade are exactly what I described above, there are some fine tunings, strategy and even game features that are "hidden".
So how can I get good on trade?

Please, by god, do not tell me to watch a long video that will say only the basics! And even if there is a video that would help me, I would prefer a written old fashioned guide, if possible.

 

[bbqftw]

I tell you a secret guide.

Transferring trade power sucks in most cases. Seriously I don't even know why trade guides go over transferring, its basically something you do when you control entire trade nodes of territory, which is not exactly going to help a new player.

If you have significant power in the node (25%+), send merchant to collect from the node. and you may ask "well I only have 2 merchants", well this is why trade companies are OP and colonial nations (which give +1 merchant for each 10 province CN) are pretty good.

ez trade monies

 

[Reman]

I tell you a secret guide.

Transferring trade power sucks in most cases. Seriously I don't even know why trade guides go over transferring, its basically something you do when you control entire trade nodes of territory, which is not exactly going to help a new player.

If you have significant power in the node (25%+), send merchant to collect from the node. and you may ask "well I only have 2 merchants", well this is why trade companies are OP and colonial nations (which give +1 merchant for each 10 province CN) are pretty good.

ez trade monies

I continue to disagree with the assertion that you should usually collect instead of transferring. Collecting is great when you control less than 50% of the trade value in your home node, but otherwise the argument for transferring becomes stronger and stronger, especially as you start to get a stranglehold on large swaths of land. It can be a bit iffy if you are in the 45%-60% of trade power controlled in your home node due to how the denominator works for losing trade value while collecting in non-home nodes, but beyond that it's pretty cut and dry.

People already know that you lose 50% of your tradepower when you collect, but you also forgo other benefits when you collect in a node that's not the home node.

1. You get +10% trade efficiency if you have a merchant collecting in your home node. If you direct all your trade there, that's a sizeable bonus.
2. Trade steering bonuses can help you direct a greater portion of where transferred value gets sent in the second stage of competition. This vanishes if you collect, effectively making you lose more effective trade power than just 50%.
3. You get 5% extra trade power in your home node for each upstream merchant transferring power. Note that this includes jumps through multiple hops, so if you have a large trade chain this can be a huge boost. Also note that you forfeit this entirely if you collect in any node that's not the home node. You don't just lose out from the merchant who's collecting instead of transferring, you lose the entire thing.
4. You forfeit the multiple merchants bonus (the bonus to trade value that gets added when you send it forward). This is small in the case of one hop, but it can be massive if you stack it from Indochina to Western Europe.

Given that you can typically control more than 50% of the trade value in a node pretty early in the game, I continue to think collecting is an early-game aberration that gets outclassed pretty swiftly.

Of course, I'd love to be proven wrong on this and if anyone wants to have a more in-depth discussion on this I'd be open to it.

As to the OP's point, the "secret" to making a rich trading empire is trading along the right paths. India, SE Asia, and the East Indies all have high-valued trade goods, so if you can dominate them with trade companies you can make buckets of ducats. You can then send all the trade in a corridor from the rim of the Indian Ocean to Western Europe, getting a substantial increase from the multiple merchants bonus. However, while you're doing this you need to make sure to have an overwhelming amount of power in your main trade corridor at key points so it doesn't get siphoned off. Key points include the Gulf of Aden and the Ivory Coast.

Another good area with high-priced goods to try it with is the Caribbean+Mexico region. It's a lot easier to just colonize or conquer natives than take over all of India, but colonial nations take 50% of the trade power.

You're generally not going to be making a huge amount of money from trade if you don't go to one of these regions. You can make some, but it wouldn't be considered a "trading empire" by any means if you managed to annex all of Europe. You'd make far more from production/tax.

 

[Badesumofu]

My current strategy is to collect only in one node, ideally Channel. Then I aim to get a PU over an Iberian who will collect in Genoa and Sevilla - this means that the value you are missing out on by not collecting in Genoa stays in your greater empire. Aragon and Portugal, my loyal PUs are both filthy rich - they use the money to do things like build colonies for me, field serious navies full of heavies that show up all over the globe to help out in my many wars, maintain large armies and so on. Back before I had more money than I know what to do with I'd siphon income from them regularly for huge cash injections when I most needed them. I feel like this strategy gives me the best of both worlds - I don't lose out on the significant bonuses for only collecting in my home node, but I don't simply leak trade value to nodes where I can't touch it, granting free money to future targets.

In general, I like to conquer as much of the African coast as I can. If you have total control over Zanzibar, Cape, and Ivory Coast, you are well on your way to great riches. Then head into India to send more trade into your funnel - the pitfall here is Gulf of Aden - no TC zone there and the Ottomans and Ethiopians can be non trivial to conquer. Get what you can and stuff a ton of light ships into the node. Keep shoring up each node along the way and then conquer further upstream. One 'secret' to this is to take Exploration ideas - they give you missions which give you claims on key provinces, allowing you to set up the trade empire. Trade ideas are not at all required, I have 17 merchants in my current France PU/trade empire WC attempt, and I've stopped bothering to assign new land to TCs long ago. 10 Merchants transferring power gives the max 100% bonus to trade power in the home node.

It's easy enough to get 100% in Zanzibar and Cape. Ivory Coast will have other Europeans trying to horn in, so the trick is to be aware of where they are trying to steer trade and knock out the ones steering in the wrong direction.

 

[Ironside121]

The reason you can't find a strategy guide is because trade is actually simple and straightforward. The only complex thing is the math, which you don't even need to know to make it work.

It's simple: Get an end node, conquer all nodes that lead to it and transfer down the line. Build every possible manufactory you can and boom, you're rich. The math only really helps when you're calculating which manufactory would be best for you in terms of profit, and that requires knowing when all the price modifier events kick in.

 

[Reman]

The reason you can't find a strategy guide is because trade is actually simple and straightforward. The only complex thing is the math, which you don't even need to know to make it work.

It's simple: Get an end node, conquer all nodes that lead to it and transfer down the line. Build every possible manufactory you can and boom, you're rich. The math only really helps when you're calculating which manufactory would be best for you in terms of profit, and that requires knowing when all the price modifier events kick in.

Anything's simple when you can boil it down to a few strategies or rules of thumb. What you're saying is generally correct though; conquer up the line and transfer downstream. There can be a few problems with pirates or nations getting tradepower from downstream provinces, but you can solve that by conquering them too.

 

[Bouchart]

Zanzibar can be a highly valuable node. Trade from Zanzibar only flows into South Africa, so if you control South Africa, Zanzibar is a fake end node. Trade from India, China and Indonesia can all flow into Zanzibar and you don't need too many merchants to get there.

There are also a number of gold mines in the Zanzibar region.

Some people love light ships for trade. I find they require a lot of micromanagement. They're easy targets in war so you'd need heavy ships or galleys as escorts that you'd rather have out harassing the enemy. And I'm often at war, so...

 

[TheIronRelic]

Transferring trade boosts the value of trade. It literally takes money and randomly increases it whenever money is being traded. That is why its always better to transfer all your trade into one or two nodes where you collect.

 

[DS_McWerp]

This is the best guide. It is a long video. However, if you only want the basics, the last 6 minutes is a rehash of everything he talks about in short form. Start at 15:45 and watch the rest.

 

[Incompetent]

bbqftw and remanemperor are both right/wrong. *If you have the right land* it's better to only collect in the main hub. But taking land in the most trade-efficient order is usually inefficient in other respects, so in practice, your empire will often be fragmented and not arranged in an optimal way for trading. Then it can be much better to just collect where you can do so safely, and not worry about special bonuses from steering. There's no one plan that always works best, and multiple collection points being best is certainly not just an 'early-game aberration'. Having over 50% in your home node is a good start, but it's still not enough to automatically justify making it your only collection point.

For instance, suppose your main hub is Genoa and you're going for the around the Cape route. It's going to take a long time to monopolise Genoa, for reasons of AE, truces and alliances; even if you had most of Genoa, you still have to worry about Seville, and even if you have all of Seville as well, you can get poached by English Channel and Bordeaux projecting their trade power to Ivory Coast. But in the meantime you can quickly secure control of Cape and Zanzibar (making Zanzibar 100% safe to collect in), and get strong positions in Asia that feed into Zanzibar. So do you send everything to Genoa anyway, or do you collect somewhere in Africa to stop it all getting stolen on the way to Europe? It really depends on the detailed numbers.

 

[Badesumofu]

Transferring trade boosts the value of trade. It literally takes money and randomly increases it whenever money is being traded. That is why its always better to transfer all your trade into one or two nodes where you collect.

This is mostly true, but there's nothing random about it. Trade value that flows out of a node gets boosted (the value is created out of nothing, much like the value of tariff efficiency) for each merchant up to 5 transferring in that direction. As a result, there is a standard view that creating long chains is optimal. Problem is that unless that chain is water-tight you'll lose more value at each step from other nations collecting or transferring the wrong way than you'll gain from multiple merchants. Having said that, a long chain with 100% control the entire way will make you a fortune, especially as it picks up more value from each node along the way.

That long chain isn't so great if you lose half the value at Ivory Coast, though. That's the sort of scenario where it might be worth collecting in Zanzibar which is relatively easy to 100% control along with Cape. Longer term, the goal should be to shore up your control in Ivory Coast or as I like to do, have subjects dominate the end nodes that you don't collect in so that value isn't lost entirely.

 

[Reman]

bbqftw and remanemperor are both right/wrong. *If you have the right land* it's better to only collect in the main hub. But taking land in the most trade-efficient order is usually inefficient in other respects, so in practice, your empire will often be fragmented and not arranged in an optimal way for trading. Then it can be much better to just collect where you can do so safely, and not worry about special bonuses from steering. There's no one plan that always works best, and multiple collection points being best is certainly not just an 'early-game aberration'. Having over 50% in your home node is a good start, but it's still not enough to automatically justify making it your only collection point.

For instance, suppose your main hub is Genoa and you're going for the around the Cape route. It's going to take a long time to monopolise Genoa, for reasons of AE, truces and alliances; even if you had most of Genoa, you still have to worry about Seville, and even if you have all of Seville as well, you can get poached by English Channel and Bordeaux projecting their trade power to Ivory Coast. But in the meantime you can quickly secure control of Cape and Zanzibar (making Zanzibar 100% safe to collect in), and get strong positions in Asia that feed into Zanzibar. So do you send everything to Genoa anyway, or do you collect somewhere in Africa to stop it all getting stolen on the way to Europe? It really depends on the detailed numbers.

This is a good way to put it. In my trade FAQ video (link in signature) I go over the 3 most common times it's superior to collect instead of transferring:

• Less than 50% of trade power in home node
• A "hole" exists in your trade chain
• You control more than one end node

However, I'd say the vast majority of my games I collect only in my trade capital (or in two end nodes) for the vast majority of the time. If I'm blobbing but not doing a trade-oriented run, I'll slap my other merchants in my two richest nodes I dominate. If I'm blobbing with trade in mind, I'd specifically orient my country to maximize trade value, and the best way to do that is to get the long trade chain. In these cases the trade power from downstream nodes is almost always outweighed by the multiple merchants bonus and the trade efficiency from your trade capital. Even if this isn't the case, you can always send light ships.

The idea that you should almost always collect is pervasive in the more well-informed members of this and other forums, and I'm wondering what types of games they're playing where that becomes the case. There are certainly scenarios (like the one you mentioned) where collecting can be superior for a long time, but for that to be the case people have to be very consistently expanding in asymmetric ways. Most runs I've seen, even when they were going for diplomatic/AE efficiency, expand in ways that would make transferring superior.

 

[Yxklyx]

I used to be a firm believer in transfer but my Kaffa game was different. I had about 70% in Alexandria AND Zanzibar so I HAD to collect in Zanzibar and lost my capital transfer bonus. I also found I'd make a lot more money collecting in Gulf of Aden instead of transferring to Alexandria. So the 50% rule isn't right.

 

[Badesumofu]

So the 50% rule isn't right.

No one ever claimed that <50% power in home node was the only time you should collect. Your situation is covered by the 'hole in the trade chain' rule.

 

[Freeeeeeeeeeeeeeeedom!]

I'd say that the most importing thing that has been explained to me is the way that your trade power in provinces WITHOUT a merchant is applied. Non-home node, non-merchant trade power will always push trade forward, but the merchants that are present will determine what direction "forward" is.

Confused yet? Here's an example:

In a game, Alexandria was my home node. I had a lot of trade power in Aleppo, but hadn't put a merchant there (my 2 were collecting in Alexandria, and transferring in the gulf of Aden). Due to the fact that the Ottomans had a merchant in Aleppo, transferring to Constantinople, my trade power was "blindly" pushing forward to Constantinople, transferring the Aleppo trade away from me. Once I put a merchant in Aleppo, my trade power there started transferring to Alexandria, where it would actually do me some good.

 

[bbqftw]

The idea that you should almost always collect is pervasive in the more well-informed members of this and other forums, and I'm wondering what types of games they're playing where that becomes the case. There are certainly scenarios (like the one you mentioned) where collecting can be superior for a long time, but for that to be the case people have to be very consistently expanding in asymmetric ways. Most runs I've seen, even when they were going for diplomatic/AE efficiency, expand in ways that would make transferring superior.

There are two separate answers, one which has to do with gameplay, and one where I take issue with your math.

If you're able to point at land and say "this is mine" then you will benefit from transferring. And yes, in theory you should aim to control every province in every node from Zanzibar to Aden to Goa to Indus to Ceylon, in such a situation transfer is better. But given the shift of many experienced players to VH mode, being able to take prime contiguous trade land is not trivial. In order to gain control of these nodes you are looking at truce locking on the order of 1 million troops (Ottomans, Indian sultanates, Arabia, North Africa, and if Timurids own Persia - decently possible on VH since they are extremely stable, another 80k). In Europe, the most AE efficient areas to expand are England, Iberia, Scandinavia, PLC, Russia, and Anatolia (if you somehow manage to beat 300-500 FL Ottomans) which almost guarantees a multiple collect setup due to high trade power in Sevilla since Portugal/Castile are the most isolated Catholics to KO with minimal hate from Europe and moderate power in EC (London is ok, Antwerp / Holland pretty much destroy your entire AE buffer in central Europe, not worth it for 2 provs)

(you should always be willing to evaluate conventional wisdom, for example conventional wisdom holds that Zanzibar is the best ROTW trade node, yet for geography / gameplay reasons players like Alexti have convinced me that Ceylon / Bengal are better trade capitals for the majority of the early game)

Collecting everywhere is more adapted to challenging starts where opportunities determine how you get to expand, not a predetermined game-plan where you can more or less guaranteed blast your main competitors. In such a strategy, I think that convincing newer players to think that they must trade chain or forever be impoverished is a big disservice.

How do you optimize your trade income? Technically, "one-tag the entire world" is close to the correct answer. But it is not a very useful one.

As for the math, I disagree strongly with this 50% concept. Because of the nonlinearity of trade power with trade power proportion, you can still monopolize collect nodes, and doubling / tripling your trade power in collector nodes rarely translates to even doubling in income.

Put with some actual numbers:

If you triple your trade power where you have 50% trade power in your node, you go up to 75% total control.

If you halve your trade power where you have 90% in the node, you still have 82%.

 

[Badesumofu]

This is where it comes down to 'this is what you should do in an ideal situation' versus 'this is what is best in actual situation you are in'.

It's like my suggesting that if you have power in multiple end nodes that you have a PU collect in one of them - all well and good if you happened to PU Aragon and they took Trade ideas, but PUs by their very nature are not reliable to acquire (very, very valuable once you do, if you know how to leverage them, but that's another topic).

If you are playing as a strong European nation on normal, then most likely you should aim towards a situation where you only collect in either Genoa or EC. You look at all the situations people actually find themselves in, there is a different answer for all of them. So I tend to agree with the poster that said that bbq and Reman are both right. You just have to take their respective advice in that context. Reman has set up an ideal trading situation and shown how and why it works. bbq is quite correct that in many situations and especially with rotw starts on VH you simply won't be able to do that. A leaky transfer network where half the power is working against you in each node isn't going to work nearly as well just collecting in each node.

Or to put that another way, transferring is more efficient in general but if you're losing half your transferred value at each of 4 more hops along the way to where you collect, you aren't actually getting much value at all from the nodes early in the chain. And that's without a specific hole and even when you have 100% in your home node. But then the question is, how viable is it to patch up all the leakiness? How viable is it to remove all the nations whose trade power is working against you? If you can do it, do it, and then transfer. But that might not be a viable short or even mid term goal. In that situation the advice that you should work towards only transferring isn't so useful because it's more important to figure out what you're going to do in the meantime.

 

[Badesumofu]

In a game, Alexandria was my home node. I had a lot of trade power in Aleppo, but hadn't put a merchant there (my 2 were collecting in Alexandria, and transferring in the gulf of Aden). Due to the fact that the Ottomans had a merchant in Aleppo, transferring to Constantinople, my trade power was "blindly" pushing forward to Constantinople, transferring the Aleppo trade away from me. Once I put a merchant in Aleppo, my trade power there started transferring to Alexandria, where it would actually do me some good.

To be more precise, your trade power was contributing to determining how much trade remains in the node and how much flows out. It wasn't contributing to determining the direction of the flow, though. The distinction matters when you consider the 'Trade Steering' modifier.

 

[Yeekim]

At the end of the day, when in doubt between transferring and collecting, it is actually possible to experiment, i.e. change orders of a particular merchant and observe the resulting change in trade income.

 

[IndraSunrise]

No one has mentioned a key and subtle point.
Sinking enemy light ships decreases their trade power, which gives you a higher percentage of control. In addition, your enemy has to rebuild, which requires time and cash.
Always make killing enemy trade ships one of your goals during a war. It's not the primary goal, but you should make an effort to sink them.