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

[Choggy]

In the early game where I don't have a high trade bonus from dip tech, it's not difficult to work out if the -10% 'malus' to your home trade node's income from collecting from that trade node makes more money than the amount that would made from transferring it instead.

I generally find that assuming a -50% trade power malus to collecting in a trade node that isn't my home node gives a good estimation of what the impact of both merchant actions will be. This doesn't work later on in the game, but by then most players have control of the home trade anyway (at which point it's a meaningless question).

 

[Garashta]

Some answers here are really not helping.
Answers like "try to control all nodes upstream". Well, of course it would help. But this is like answering the question "how to do world conquest" like these: "Conquer most provinces on the world and be the only great power and then just do the mop up". Well, obvious answer, but not really addressing how to get there.
For instance, if you are not playing as a great power you can't possible have control of the end trade nodes, even your home trade node is a challenge, at least early game. And if and when you turn at a great power, having the capability of controlling nodes far away from your starting position, then it is pretty straight forward is it not? It is like becoming "too big to fail". Strategy is less important at that point.
But to be powerful like that you need income as well.
So we are still struggling with trade. If you are playing a game as brandenburg, bohemia, Byzantium, florence, papal state, any japanese daymio, muscovy, wallachia, great horde, etc, or pretty much 99% of the nations you will not be able to put in use those advices. They really only work if you are the likes of England/Great Britain, France or spain /castille. Or if you managed to get your small nation to become "too big to fail".

 

[earlofbrigand]

'Conquer a node and all the nodes transferring to it' isn't a useful guide.

If you can do that, you don't really need the money anyway. How's that going to help Saxony in 1444?

 

[bbqftw]

Yeah, for start like Saxony you have to ask, what is the most AE efficient way to get control of a good trade node?

In the immediate neighborhood at 1444, Lubeck is going to get you coalitioned to death, full control on EC is going to get you coalitioned to death, Genoa is going to get you coalitioned to death and / or requires beating France or Aragon.

So now we ask, what are good trade nodes we can realistically control? Ideally you want to pick a node that has high value, minimal exit nodes, takes minimal AE, and has many CoTs so you can hold high trade power% with minimal provinces collected, can transfer chain with minimal merchants. Finally there is a consideration of how easy the war should be. There are a lot of variables here and you can really only get a feel for it through experience.

Baltic is nice (only 3x Estuary / CoT) but you're in the position of dropping a no-CB on a German minor (TO LO Riga)
Novgorod also nice (3x Estuary / CoT) but you also have to no-CB someone, almost certainly Novgorod. But with alliance with Poland (with immediate promise land you can call them in day 1 of allliance) you can blast Muscovy and Muscovite is large enough to make it worth accepting.
Constantinople also good but requires the no-CB on Byz opening + Ottoman war drag. However crack the Ottoman shell and suddenly you have lands to expand into that are completely outside the Christian AE sphere
Sevilla strong but often requires something horrible to happen to Castile (Leon / Galicia) release and no-CB granada is no longer a particularly reliable strategy

Regarding transfer chaining with minimal merchants, what you're looking for is how long of a trade chain you can establish with as few merchants required to transfer as possible. A node with only one exit node will push in your intended direction even if you don't commit merchant to it (e.g. persia moluccas bengal) and that's an important consideration early on where merchants are very limited (and you don't want to take terrible idea groups like trade).

Novgorod can chain down to Beijing with only two merchants for example. You need transfer in Astrakhan, transfer in Samarkand, and can run Beijing -> Yumen -> Samarkand -> Astrakhan -> Novgorod. Pretty good value on 2 merchants.

 

[Ultima_Ratio]

What are you expecting? There is no magic trick to turn a shitty trade position into a good one, except to conquer.

 

[earlofbrigand]

Something that doesn't involve conquering half the world would help. What's the point in trade anyway at that stage?

So perhaps tips on which provinces to develop and why focusing on getting say Riga to help transfer power to the Lubeck node for instance. Brandenburg can conquer Danzig and Pommerania and be in a strong position for trade. It doesn't involve having to own West Africa, Lubeck or Hamburg... you can then move onto Denmark's centres of trade.

That's the conquering part. Do-able over time by most medium sized norther HRE nations.

The trick many would like to know relates to the where you collect, when, who to boycott, the proportion of your fleet you keep in your home node, and the ones you are transfering from. Whether you should go over your fleet limit because of the modifiers relating to the sheer number of barques you have etc etc

 

[earlofbrigand]

For instance. Using the Lubeck node as an example. You get trade power from provinces - so how many development points in a standard province are 'worth' one point in an important province of trade like Hamburg?

This isn't necessarily about controlling trade, but like other forms of income, using it to supplement your wider strategy.

 

[earlofbrigand]

One thing I really don't understand is how to get a merchant from dominating the West African trade node. In South Africa it's easy. Colonise the Cape and add it to your trade company and its instant. In West Africa, you can have over 50% and still get nothing.

 

[bbqftw]

it only counts trade company provincial trade power. You get tons of downstream transfers for Ivory Coast which don't count for the merchant calculation

In my experience you need Cayor, that colonizable CoT, and Benin, or Cayor + Benin + all the coastals.

 

[earlofbrigand]

it only counts trade company provincial trade power

Great. That helps. So if you own a few provinces, transfered to your trade company - it's purely the value of those provinces that count towards getting that merchant then?
I made the mistake of thinking that if I looked at the trade node and saw I had over 50% of the power, that would work (which it didn't)

Will trade ships help or is it a case of having to build them up or conquer some of the ones you mentioned?

 

[bbqftw]

Trade ships do not count for the +1 merchant. Only province trade power does.

 

[earlofbrigand]

Trade ships do not count for the +1 merchant. Only province trade power does.

You've saved me endless head scratching and annoyance! Cheers.

 

[DS_McWerp]

If you aren't a trade based nation (most non-republic non-GP nations), just ignore trade. Throw your merchants into collecting into the two nodes where you have the most power and ignore trade until you are a GP.

If you need money just stack interest per annum instead. Makes your money esssentially infinite.

 

[earlofbrigand]

I dunno. If you're Brandenburg (to use the same example) and you get just one coastal province - a few barques protecting trade will give you a decent boost to your income each month. It's all about balance really.

If you start off with a coastal province, it makes a lot of sense to immediately flog off all your cogs and reinvest in trade ships. There are methods to help that might not be 'game changing' or domineering, but do help out a bit.

 

[DS_McWerp]

I dunno. If you're Brandenburg (to use the same example) and you get just one coastal province - a few barques protecting trade will give you a decent boost to your income each month. It's all about balance really.

If you start off with a coastal province, it makes a lot of sense to immediately flog off all your cogs and reinvest in trade ships. There are methods to help that might not be 'game changing' or domineering, but do help out a bit.

Yeah but you don't need a trade guide to decide between privateering or protecting when you are talking about the difference of a half ducat per month. Just do whatever you want it's essentially irrelevant.

 

[Gnostek]

I'd like to point something most people seem to disregard: In a fast-expanding scenario, Trade is irrelevant thanks to that sweet, sweet thing called overextension, that basically wipes out your trade power for no reason

 

[earlofbrigand]

It depends on how much you know about the game. For a beginner, I think a 'trade guide' that doesn't involve conquering the world would be very handy. It doesn't need an excel spreadsheet explaining things either.

Just point by point tips to maximise your trade income and the practical steps you can take to improve it.

The biggest thing any nation can do is to take trade ideas

 

[Reman]

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)

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%.

At this point I think our disagreements on trade can be summed up by what a lot of other people have been saying: we're both right under different circumstances. Under your scenario where you're attacking the most AE efficient areas, it absolutely would be better to have merchants collecting in multiple areas due to holes in your trade chain. I guess the people I've been watching haven't been as hardcore as I thought because they usually don't expand that way, even though I know you're correct in your assessment of AE efficient areas.

In the vast majority of my games I'm playing "casually" (i.e. not aiming to be efficient with AE), and when coalitions start to become a problem I just put the game to speed 5 and wait a bit. This allows me to expand more historically and create cleaner borders, and in these situations I've usually found transferring superior.

Also, the "50% rule" (which is shorthand for 45%-60% depending on factors) is only meant to be a disqualifying factor. It's necessary, but not sufficient to have 45-60% of trade power in your home node to make it worth collecting. It's generally not a good idea to transfer trade power to a node where you have significantly less power, and it's almost never a good idea to transfer trade if you'll lose more than half of the value to other countries. However, if you have a good chunk of the trade power in your home node and it's percentage controlled by you isn't significantly less than how much you control of a nearby node, it's worth transferring.

For example, say you control 88% of the share in your home node and 90% of the share in an upstream node, and lets say the upstream node has 10 ducats of value.

If you collect in the upstream node, you'll halve your trade power so it becomes 82%. Thus, you'll collect 8.20 ducats per month.

If you transfer in the upstream node, you'll transfer the full 90%, get the multiple merchants bonus (increasing outgoing value by 5-11.3%) and the added trade efficiency from a merchant in your capital, if you decide to do so (+10%), bringing your total haul to 10.40-11.02 ducats per month. This value will also get bigger from your trade steering (e.g. from naval tradition/ideas), and the 5% trade power boost in your capital.

 

[kakatua]

If a guy still needs a trade guide, he probably doesn't play on Very Hard, so bbqftw answers, despite correct, are useless.

 

[gigau]

Guides are

to the EUIV: FAQ & Strategy Guides subforum.