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I start my first ever campaign with Byzantines. I found some discussions here about it was the richest one if the trade could be set up. Anyway, it takes 3 years to build a ship and I shall need a lot of them in order to get to the nearest friendly port. Just wonders how can you guy manage to get rich so quick. Is there anything I can do to accelerate the process? Or something else better for Byz to do other than trading.
Crush the turks.
Grab a few Neutral provinces.
Repel/disuade the scilian assault on greece.
Then think about trade, when you have a second center capable of building ships, byzantiums juts to useful for that
Just keep building ships and have more than one province building ships at a time. In my current campaign I have 1/4 of my provinces with ship building (but most of my provinces are on the coast). There is really no other way to speed up production other than that. The starting years seem to go by quickly if you are focusing more on ecoonomy and defense than if you are on offense. If you dont want to spend florins on ship building facilities or dont have many coastal provinces, attack some provinces with ship building facilities in place and hope you dont lose them during the battle to take the province. And start cranking the ships out.
If you're playing the early period, it'll take a while for anyone to get trade going. It goes quicker in the high period or especially in the late period, when more ports are available at the start.
But to get trade going quickly, try getting ports and dockyards built on your islands as quickly as possible, and have them crank out ships. This way you're not tying up your land-based provinces that can be building armies for you. Also, you'll need ports on those islands if you ever want to base troops or agents there anyway. Once you have a few ships, connect Constantinople to the Adriatic, then to Genoa as quickly as you can. After that, expand to wherever there are ports, and be building ports and merchant buildings in any coastal/island provinces you own that have trade goods. Within 60 years or so you should be able to cover every coastal province on the map if you're not at war, and your trade should be huge.