A call for an in-depth look into the STW:2 economy.

There are several good topics and guides out there about the economy in STW:2. This topic is meant first to collect questions about the mechanisms, to create rough hypotheses and to test them.

Some ecnomic guides about STW:2:

Frostbeastegg's guide

Dark Side's Economy Guide (Totalwar.com)




I started to look at trading and got the following question which I will try to address in the next days:

1) On which factors does demand for trading goods depend? (The supply side seems pretty clear)

2) How exactly gets trading taxed?

3) How do customs for trading goods get calculated?

Hopefully we will understand such issues better, in the next days:

1) There seems to be a hard limit to demand per trading partner. Across the bank I could sell only 12 pieces per trading good to the 26 provinces strong Oda clan and the 16 provinces strong Date clan. The Homna clan with one province imported 3 pieces per good. [An earlier safe game showed that the 2-prov. Date could only import 5 pieces of each good. So the first (home) province seems to give 3, while the second one gives only 2. I don't know how things go from there.]

2) The bonus between long lasting trade partners seems to depend on time and volume. My export trade volume with the two large clans goodwise four times as large, and the bonus for each trading season is 22 koku compared to 6 koku with the single province clan. So both numbers roughly match (4 vs 3.5).

3) Surplus goods are taxed at just short of half the price compared to exported goods, getting your treasury just 22 instead of 48 koku per silk package. Very similar numbers hold true for other goods obtained by sea trading points.

4) Customs are a bit of a mistery. Oda pays roughly 50 koku more than the Date, 456 compared to 407 while importing the same amount. The Homna pay 334 for a quarter of the trade volume. Costums seems to be roughly similar for each side.

5) Buildings and Arts give you tax increases on trade.
a) Externally, when trading with other people this increase seems to concern only costums, which dropped fittingly roughly 10% when I destroyed the building giving a 10% increase in trade taxes.
b) Internally, my income through surplus selling dropped only roughly 5%. Perhaps administration costs (46,7% in this camp.) or a fixed tax rate is (f.e. 50%) is figured already in.

This aspect will get tested with another campaign.

6) A big question remains the importance of the factor of harbours called "increases export capacity by +80/120 etc ". Frankly I have no idea about what it does. [This might determine the "hard limit" I mentioned earlier. If things are as I think now the export capacity is simply the number of goods a trade route can transport. So if you have 120 supply but only a simple commercial port you can only supply your trading partner at most with 80 pieces. Namban harbours might thus be incredibly important in mid to late games where trading partners are few but big, as only they can allow you to match their big demand]

7) Trade surplus selling is also yet a riddle. I can not understand why it increases and why it suddendly stops to do so at 29000. Still a lot of work to do.

1) Now I'm pretty sure that there is a hard limit to the amount of goods you can ship to a single trading partner and that the cap is 12. So at max you can trade 106 pieces with your partner. Even Namban trade quarters and large trading partners allow not for more and they hit that level at least with 7 provinces. It depends on the number of provinces but I still have to work the formula out. Seemingly it goes something like 3,2,2,1,1,1.

4) You collect customs both for imported and exported goods. In general the amount seems to taper out with the amount of goods, for example 45,x,x,x,x,.. 30

6) Still no idea about that one. Perhaps they wanted to include a trade route limit in addition to overall supply and demand but didn't implement it and left it in the description.

7) I tend to think that I had maxed out supply and tax bonii.

Thanks for the information above.

I guess everybody agrees that the shortcut to richness is the four western trade nodes. It does not even require any knowledge on trading mechanics and strategy to make lots of money and stay rich in the campaign. Of course, figureing out the mechanics and details is fun, but it probably will not change any strategic decision that the player needs to make. (1) Fill the nodes with 10 trade ships; (2) Make as many trade partners are you can.

But maybe we can have a more in-depth look at how much money exactly we can expect from each trade node, and compare that with incomes we can expect from tax, etc. But I would bet on "shipping a stack to northern Kyushu as early as possible".