Trade and the Economy

I think this deserves a thread of its own. Although Fisherking commented about this earlier in a small, obscure sentence in the thread about the latest patch, I noticed that it didn't really get a lot of attention.

Anyways, here I was ready to take advantage of the nigh-empty spice trade nods (pirates were being a pain in the ***), sending in 14 Indiamen ships as a full-stack to occupy one of them. As soon as I hit the nod, the price of spice went down, IIRC, from 21 to 13!!!

Isn't that a bit extreme? I can only imagine how far the price will continue plummeting as the rest of the trading nods are occupied.

Oh yes, and I'll make a poll, too.

Its extreme but i've never seen a trade commodity drop below 10 while ive been selling it. So as long as you supply lots of spice you should be able to make up for the drop in price. (I hope)

I hope that made some sense.
Ne =)

You do make better polls than Fisherking

It's an old specialty of mine.

And btw, none of the resources so far fell lower than 10 monies. The global economy in ETW is kind of messed up.

14 Indiaman on a single trade node? Was there any sea left, or was it simply all ships? Still an extreme drop though...

And yeah, in my most recent game, Furs are only bringing in 8. Kinda annoying to finally Smack the French and assorted natives out of Canada only to realize that Furs are worthless... Well, more worthless than usual at least.

In my GB campaign which I started to try out the new DLC, I noticed that the AI is less interested in the trade nodes. I was able to grab all nodes near Madagascar and all the spice nodes (alas not the girls :laugh4:). I did notice that prices could crop very fast. I controlled the North American fur trade and when I upgraded most of the traders at once the prices went down to 7 gold.

May be it is time that we revere to this update as patch 1.6 :idea2:

Yep, they drop like a brick but what is worse is that they stay there.

It is like 30 years later now with most of the tech tree developed in my campaign and I have given away all sorts of techs to raise income and population to everyone hoping the prices would go up.

You know they have! Some commodities now sell for as much as 17! Furs are all the way up to 9. But I have not upgraded a single plantation or trading post.

I haven’t even bothered with Indiamen. Ivory is in the tank too, selling at 16 and the fleet to protect them from pirates or enemies is too much to bother with at the moment.

Not only that but there are some more things to watch for.

When I completed my mission to add the 13 Colonies my income was supposed to be 9017.

I ended the turn and at the start of the next turn I got 324. “That’s all”!!! Nothing was auto built as I don’t use it.

No raids or trade blockades. No reason what so ever.

So I reloaded and tried again. Same thing. Nothing I did made a difference. I should have received 9000 and got 300.

I did notice that I got a garrison of troops in the old capital which I had never seen happen before, but as to the money it was just gone.

What caused it, I just cannot say, but I have the save game file from the turn before and it always comes out the same.

There are some things going on with this that I just can’t figure out.

As to the update!

Well, there are no documented changes.

We don’t know what, if anything has been changed.

But it sure looks like something has been tweaked or the game has gone Hal on us!
:laugh4:

Under the urn, churl.

The variable for the the price of resources should be like this:
[(population/100000 * factories) + Trade Rightsx(population/100000 * factories)] = Demand
[Total Units Domestic + Total Units via Trade Rights] = Supply
Price = (Demand / Supply) * 100

So lets say domestic population is 1 million, you have two factories (type of factory could make a difference) and you have 30 units of fur and no Trade Rights.

Demand = 2
Supply = 30

Price = 13 per fur.

Now include trade rights. Lets say you are now trading with Sweden who has fur. He has 10 million population and 10 factories. He can supply 300 fur.


102 = Demand
330 = Supply

Price = 102/330
Price = 30 per fur

Basically, higher demand means bigger prices.

Obviously you would tweak the system to get all the variables looking right, my numbers were a complete stab in the dark, however, it makes trade more dynamic in a good way. Let's say you was Russia as seen above, you might trade with Germany, France, Spain and Austria, as they have no furs, but lots of demand, their price would be far higher for selling, which they will benefit from trading with others.


This means, the greater the population, the higher the price of commodonity.

Thanks for reminding me that I should be studying for my economics exam tommorrow. :sad: