region specific recruiting and trade

two questions come to mind:

1) will there be restrictions as to where you can recruit different units. For example, in RTR, you go thru something called assimilation or some such before you can produce units native to your motherland. So if I take some french fortress, and I am english, I can't start to produce longbow man, can I? Another part of this question is, will you ever be able to recruit certain units elsewhere in the world at all? For example, is recruitment of longbowmen and billmen and English knights and such at all possible outside of the british isles?

2) I know there are guys like merchants now, who can kind of stand on resources and stuff. But how is that handled exactly? Say I have my english merchant, who spotted a nice chunk of wine or olive oil or whatnot in some foreign land, can he still go and sit on it? Can multiple merchants go and sit on it? What if there is a venetian or french merchant who want to sit on it too? Will these merchant guys have to duke it out, or can these noncombatant units share a single tile of campaign map? Other than these merchants, is trade pretty much similar to rome?

Regarding point 2, I think I'd seen somewhere on one of the blogs about merchants that it was possible to stack them on the same resource, I vaguely also recall seeing it mentioned that it was advised to do so since rival merchants will fight for your resource to. Hopefully someone else can calrify better for you.

so if i have 3 guys, and the french have 2, then they can't occupy my resource? Sounds like we need to keep spawning merchants.

Im pretty sure how it actually went was that only one merchant can be on any resource at a time. But if you have several merchants skattered across the map and on the same type of resource then you can start getting a monopoly. So the more resources you own of the same type across the map, the more money youll get from them.

but what about competition between merhcants representing different nations? what if the french are not happy about my monopoly on say, silk, or jems?

From what I've been made to understand, they send a merchant to one of your owned resources and an event triggers, much like assassination or whatnot that determines which merchant gets driven out (or rather, whether your merchant gets driven out). Of course, later you can do the same thing to the enemy.

The idea is nice, though I have my doubts about how it will work ... it might prove a life-saver for those tiny factions that historically did rely on trade.

so each merchant should be accompanied by an assassin to do his dirty work for him then. This is starting to sound like fun