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Victoria 2 has a system that's very ambitious and really quite brilliant, but it has some issues in implementation; mainly that it's just too Byzantine and opaque.

I'd say the best implemented trade system is the one in EU4, but only because it works very well for the kind of game EU4 is.

In Victoria 3, I'm hoping for a trade system as ambitious as 2, but as polished as EU4's.
 
Victoria system is too rigid. For exemple lumber factories are just horrible in every single game, the real deal is to let the AI ruin itself building the worthless factories, buy their worthless goods to make furniture/luxury furniture and crazy profit in the process. Whoever is blessed with dyes will roll on money spamming cloth and luxury cloth factories,... Way too easy to game.
 
I'm pretty sure you're universally going to get Victoria 2 as the finest example. Extremely convoluted to understand however.

EU comes close, since it dumbs trade down a bit. Unfortunately that dumbing down also means all trade has a final "endpoint" which should not be a thing.
 
I'm in agreement with the various Vicky2 comments. It's by far the "deepest", but has its share of issues which need to be resolved if/when they do Vicky3. The biggest problems, in my opinion, are:
1 - The top GPs get first pick of as much as they want to buy on the world market, rather than first dibs on it up to some percentage, so countries not a lot further down the list may get NOTHING, no matter how much they're willing and able to pay. The real world doesn't work like that.
2 - Transportation costs aren't considered, so it's no cheaper to buy bulk items like wheat from the farms in your own province than to import it from the opposite side of the planet, which was certainly NOT the case in the 1800s. Transportation wasn't free, and the price difference between sources had to cover the cost of transporting the goods, otherwise you'd buy it from someplace closer.
3 - The amount of money in the economy doesn't increase at nearly the same pace as consumer demand for products (which grows by orders of magnitude), so your pops are unable to purchase everything they need in the later stages of the game, almost entirely due to the lack of capital to cover the sheer magnitude of daily purchases.
4 - There are NO stockpiles, so anything produced and not sold that same day is simply lost. Nobody bought that state of the art airplane or automobile today? Scrap it! Storing up a year's supply of everything, like in HOI3, is silly, but the real world definitely maintains some stockpiles, as well as goods in transit, amounting to at least several weeks worth of goods.
5 - Workers are paid a percentage of profits, so if the goods don't sell that day, there are NO profits, and the workers are unpaid, meaning that they have no money to buy other items on the market. This can lead to a snowball effect, and the closing of factories where there's insane amounts of demand, but no money to buy the products.

HOI4's production lines and "equipment" are a step forward from HOI3, but the series really doesn't do any semblance of an "economy", and HOI4 removing money from the game doesn't help. I can't speak for EU4, but EU3's economy was rather rudimentary at best, and the only thing that mattered about trade goods was their cash value; it didn't make much difference in price, no matter how much you sold of a given product in the same market region. Sadly, I think that Chess has almost as good of a trade system.
 
EU4's trade system is purely a gameplay device- it's designed to encourage a certain style of play, not to accurately simulate anything. So I'd agree that the trade system is elegant in terms of game design but there's no economic logic to it at any level.

Victoria 2's is a lot closer to ideal, but it also has flaws and shortcomings.If it could model transport costs and have some kind of banking system to increase the money supply, I'd be pretty satisfied with it.
 
I'll tell you what game has the worst trade system. CK2 basically didn't have one for the longest time (patricians barely count) and it's all based on one important trade route that doesn't even reach the end of the map.

So much for the era of trade republics.
 
Victoria 1 is the "HOI3" of economics when manually trading. Only played a few hours of Vic2 so can't say much about that one

Best implementation of trade is EU4
 
IMO, people here are significant overstating how good EU4's trade system is. Its failings include a total lack of trade coming from the Indian Ocean to Europe, even if one conquers the entire east, south and west coasts of Africa, and an inability to simulate the power of say, Venice due to trade monopolies.
 
Best trade system...Funny thing, but i would say HoIIV.
Why? Well...
EU4 trade system is boring and there is no much to do with it.
CK2 trade system is much more interesting than EU4, because it requires you to be in special regions or be trade republic.
Victoria2 trade system is some insane stuff which even developers don't understand.
HoIIV is simple, understandable and provides you with what your country needs.
 
The only two modern paradox games with trade systems are Vicky2 and Hoi4. Both EU4 and CK2 have magic money generators with no actual trade involved.

I would say of the two, Vicky's is the best.
 
Victoria 2 has the best trade/economics system, because it is the most realistic of the bunch.

Some look at its opacity as a drawback. I argue that it is a positive. Why? Because Victoria 2 is partly about fighting over which ideology has the best economic model...Ideologies that have relevance to this day...the very ideologies that we argue about every day becaus guess what?...economics is quite opaque, and we still can’t agree on which system is the best.

I think that makes Victoria 2 quite unique and something very special. It’s not perfect, and @Kovax and I’ve had this discussion before, and I agree with many of his points...but they could only make the only system better.
 
The only two modern paradox games with trade systems are Vicky2 and Hoi4. Both EU4 and CK2 have magic money generators with no actual trade involved.

I would say of the two, Vicky's is the best.

While I agree with your first statement, I have to disagree with the second. Any "trade" system where you can acquire and use 100% of a region's resources without being able to trace a transport path from the region to your base is hot garbage IMO...
 
While I agree with your first statement, I have to disagree with the second. Any "trade" system where you can acquire and use 100% of a region's resources without being able to trace a transport path from the region to your base is hot garbage IMO...
Hi, I'd like to buy ALL the cannons in the world.

But we're at war sir.

I'm still going to buy ALL the cannons.

Ok, fine, you have money, so sure.