Yes, I can confirm the first part works. I eventually did max subventions to export Merchant Marines and the unprofitable ports the company kept buying (mostly within my customs union) quickly became profitable enough to make the whole company prosperous. (I was on Laissez Faire). I also trimmed some of my foreign investment deals so the company wasn't wasting its buying potential on unprofitable ports outside my customs union, but I think it's mainly the subventions that worked.
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The wildest idea is to totally disconnect ports from inrastructure. If you look at ports, they are only the place where goods are swapped between land and sea and vice versa. There is 0 logic for them to provide the state infrastructure, if anything they should consume it. Ports need vast networks of roads, trains and inland canals to supply the goods inland. If they are attached to a big city and/or urban state, they of course use this infrastructure for their own benefit. Think about modern ports. How do we get todays containers to the cities where consumption is happening? They always have a very good highway connection, rails or loading places for canal and river transportation. In Victoria 3, these assets are separate modelled, so infrastructure is not part of the ports.
I also do not understand why we still have convoys. We now have merchant marine (which we could simply name trade marine), which is more then enough in my view to do what we need: The country can also buy merchant marine to ship goods for treaties. I mean they already do it for goods in treaties, why not for other government tasks as well? They can do the same for port connections, let the market decide when ports are in need to expand when the prices start to rise with demand. If the government wants o keep the prices low, subsidies can still be applied. Use clever auto-expand rules to ensure the prices stay low. Shipping goods within internal market areas is not in need to be done from the government, the private industry can handle it.
It is already tracked how many trade certain nations ship via sea nodes. Convoy raiding is currently still based on convoys, why is that? I still remember the system Empire: Total War used: They had a global shipping lane system as well. If you placed a fleet with raiding on the lane, the value the factions you were at war with were reduced, depending in the volume and your fleet size, and parts of that was added to your treasury. Can we not also do something like that? This would also maybe finally give us a situation where fleets are needed to patrol shipping routes to ensure they are free when at war.
I also do not understand why we still have convoys. We now have merchant marine (which we could simply name trade marine), which is more then enough in my view to do what we need: The country can also buy merchant marine to ship goods for treaties. I mean they already do it for goods in treaties, why not for other government tasks as well? They can do the same for port connections, let the market decide when ports are in need to expand when the prices start to rise with demand. If the government wants o keep the prices low, subsidies can still be applied. Use clever auto-expand rules to ensure the prices stay low. Shipping goods within internal market areas is not in need to be done from the government, the private industry can handle it.
It is already tracked how many trade certain nations ship via sea nodes. Convoy raiding is currently still based on convoys, why is that? I still remember the system Empire: Total War used: They had a global shipping lane system as well. If you placed a fleet with raiding on the lane, the value the factions you were at war with were reduced, depending in the volume and your fleet size, and parts of that was added to your treasury. Can we not also do something like that? This would also maybe finally give us a situation where fleets are needed to patrol shipping routes to ensure they are free when at war.
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Another issue I noticed is that you can easily bankrupt an AI nation by spamming ports in their states. They will happily subsidize any amount of ports, which will also draw pops away from actually useful jobs that are not government-run or also subsidized.
And this can not only happen from a malicious player, sometimes it happens on its own.
And this can not only happen from a malicious player, sometimes it happens on its own.
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bringing back ye old ranch only foreign investment so grain cant be produced in other nations forcing riots
Convoy raiding does also damage the trade route efficiency, it's just pretty hard to notice unless the player has an army overseas taking organization losses from it (meanwhile, the periodic convoy losses keep getting their own notifications).
Agree with the general point that convoys feel like a vestigial mechanic now. Maybe they'll have a purpose again with the coming rework where ships need to be physically built?