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That's weird... I drop my merchants off north of the city just across the straits from Cordoba, and they can walk from there to timbuktu's gold in 7-8 turns without a road.
PS: Click to see the best route over the mountains:
Spoiler Alert, click show to read:
Exploit? Well, maybe, but I think it fits within the rules of the game... This is how to generate fortune using merchants.
How do you use merchants most efficiently?
How do you monopolize the most expensive resources?
And how do you protect your merchants from take over?
Well, if you want to achieve the above, there is neat trick available, that I have not seen posted elsewhere.
Well, most of you probably know that you can that you can attach you agents, such as spies , priests etc. to an army. The merchants are no different. In order to protect your merchant from a take over by the enemy, simply place an army unit (I usually use depleted, obsolete units to keep upkeep low) on the resource, and then march your merchant (stack it) onto the army. This way, no hostile merchants can ever destroy your income. Not only this, but you can march a whole bunch of your merchant on that single army unit and have a full stack of merchants generating the income from that single resource. I’ve done that in Timbuktu, where I’m generating about 17,000 per turn from a single gold source (my wealth is in the $700k range :egypt: )
So, there you have it.
That is simply an variant of the fort exploit... (Though a bit less of an exploit if you ask me... simply think of it as Merchant Guards...)
A bit more risky your depleted unit is fair game to any enemy unit passing by and retreating will carry over all the merchants while a fort would require at least a turn of siege thus enabling you to prepare a counter-attack...
Thread necromancy = bad. :thumbsdown: Better to just start a new thread.