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After discovering the option 'auto send traders' I always use it. Now my question, is it always worth it. Do I always earn more on leting the computer send traders then not sending them at all? When you have monopoly in the closest CoT it usually becomes very expensive to send traders, and if you have 12 every year (Spain) and it costs around 20 for each I'm not sure if it is worth it.
Is there any good strategy for using the 'automatic send' option?
The auto-send will ALWAYS send your merchants, even if there's nowhere useful for them to go ... it will happily spend 10D each and every month trying to secure a 6th trader in Venice, who repeatedly gets kicked out one day after arriving, or else an extra spot in Holstein which is now worth 2 1/2 D. .... don't use it.
Other than Venice and any that you happen to own, CoT's in Europe really aren't worth fighting over. If you can place a few (or up to 5) traders, good - but don't keep beating your head against a wall trying to do it. Colonial CoTs are another matter - especially the ones that you own and few others have discovered. Pause the game every Jan 1/July 1, look around, see if there are any gaps in rich CoTs, otherwise don't bother spending the money.
When you're faboulously wealthy in the end game and can't be bothered with the trouble it saves time but still loses money. At the beginning it's a sure fire way of burning those precious D's
You also lower relations with every country that looses a trader. With autosend, you have no control on that. Your closest friends might become your closest enemies, if you put the autosend on.
I used it when I started the game and have only turned it off when I want to overload a Cot to get a CB.
I seem to get great trading income and monopolies in most of the high income Cot's so I have no problems with it. I will admit that I don't have great relations with the AI's but didn't realize some of that could be from trading competition. I may try manually sending traders in my next game to see how that goes.
Well, I use the autosend to handicap me AND to lower my relations with other countries! If I DoW more than 8 times per ICG, then I've been doing something wrong. By pissing off other countries, I get them to either DoW on me eventually, or embargo me to give me that much coveted CB. I also usually can't be bothered to worry about sending traders myself anyway, so it works just fine for me. And. of course, it would work better economically if I did it myself, but I;m using it as a political and diplomatic tool.
Originally posted by Garth Vader I used it when I started the game and have only turned it off when I want to overload a Cot to get a CB.
I seem to get great trading income and monopolies in most of the high income Cot's so I have no problems with it. I will admit that I don't have great relations with the AI's but didn't realize some of that could be from trading competition. I may try manually sending traders in my next game to see how that goes.
Originally posted by Garth Vader So you don't use all your merchants then? I always thought of them like colonists and it's better to use all you get and not let any go to waste!
If you have total monopolies in all the colonial CoTs you own, and five merchants in every European CoT, then sending any merchant to anywhere is probably a waste of money. The auto-send will keep churning them out regardless.
