Is theAI mean? Earth quakes in Timbuktu

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Originally Posted by Carl

Thats my point Dismal, Merchants SHOULDN@:T be only viable after you've wiped out most of the other factions and won/nearly won the campaign. They should be usable right from the start.

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I don't disagree. It would be nice if they were a better strategic option. I donb't see how it follows from this that the merchant-fort "trick" is not the result of a bug.

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Frankly that type of net income with that many provinces is pitiful, with Rome Florance, Genoa, Milan and the starting Sicilian city, (I forget the name, sorry), I can make 15K net income inside of 10 turns of capturing the lot as the papal states. Which is another point about blitzing, your cities are rarely well developed considering the size of your empire and you have a large standing army, so you have poor net income. A slow campaign gives you FAR more Net income from that much territory, so much that 7K is a drop in the ocean.

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Pitiful? I guess I shall have to console with the fact that I was out winning the game instead of making better buildings in Milan.

Actually a big part of the reason my net income was so low is I was playing past the end to enagage in an all-out war with the mongols and probably had 8 or 9 full stacks in the middle east.

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The great Markets of Course. You never have to replace the Markets ever 50ish turns, they never cost you 1000's when acquired, they never need one or two replacing every 10 turns or so and they give BIG trade buffs.

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The payback on a great market is definitely not less than 3 turns.

Sometime try opening a scoll and see what the game projects your additional income will be when you add a great market. It's often as little as 20 or 30 per turn for an investment of 4800.

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The payback on a great market is definitely not less than 3 turns.

Sometime try opening a scoll and see what the game projects your additional income will be when you add a great market. It's often as little as 20 or 30 per turn for an investment of 4800.

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I was talking over a prolonged period of time, and I don't know exactly what it adds in the way of income, (how do you find that out anyway), but I do regularly feel like I'm getting a lot out of my great markets so...

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Pitiful? I guess I shall have to console with the fact that I was out winning the game instead of making better buildings in Milan.

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It comes down to play style, most settlements have gone up at least one level in size after i capture them but before I move on. When your a slow player however you don't tend to attack something as soon as you possibly can. i tend to take my time and build up an overwhelming force to attack the enemy, I also tend to wait till they declare war on me, and if they Are catholics, i wait till they get Excomed. As a result I can be stood 15+ turns without anyone to conquer even once I've got an army ready to go. A few turns after the enemy has declared war I'll have as many settlements as I feel my former Field army can adequately Garrison (I tend to occupy), and at this point I'll hang around till I get the settlements built up a bit and get a good cheap Garrison in them, then move on again. Rinse and repeat.
I play slow because an aggressive sacking style where I'm taking a settlement every 2 turns or less just doesn't come naturally to me.

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Actually a big part of the reason my net income was so low is I was playing past the end to engage in an all-out war with the Mongols and probably had 8 or 9 full stacks in the middle east.

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Thanks for the clarification on that, thats actually a potential circumstance where merchants could be useful again, when for some reason beyond your control you have a lot of expensive garrisons/Field armies, it's quite handy to have a few thousand extra as it might actually give you something to spend.

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I don't disagree. It would be nice if they were a better strategic option. I don't see how it follows from this that the merchant-fort "trick" is not the result of a bug.

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I NEVER said it ISN'T a bug. It PROBABLY is. I merely said you can't say IT IS a bug till CA confirms it.

My only point was that as a slow expander it's the best and, (nearly anyway), only way of getting merchants to work in a useful way if you aren't a blitzer, as otherwise the prolific high finance enemy merchants will kill of a fair chunk of your trainees, losing you a lot of money. The forts trick lets you train a lot at once in safety and that makes merchants very useful then IMHO.

I fully agree with Carl, early on the fort technique helps bring in some money and makes merchants useful early on. Some people prefer to send them on missions trying to find other merchants for hostile takeover, I had that fail one too many times so I took to the fort deal. Whatever, it's not a bug unless CA recognizes it officially. For all we know this could simply be unintended behavior, but not neccesarily a function that they tried to explicitly prevent. I vote that it stays. :grin:

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Originally Posted by Carl

I NEVER said it ISN'T a bug. It PROBABLY is. I merely said you can't say IT IS a bug till CA confirms it.

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I know. It seems we agree on most aspects of this discussion really. When merchants are good, when they are not worth making, etc.

To me it seems inconceivable to me that CA intended to have stacks of 20 merchants sitting in a fort, trading a single resource, immune from takeovers. I've written enough programs over the years to smell a bug. This smacks of the sort of thing that slips through because no one thought of this misuse when writing the code for the intended functions of merchants, forts, etc. Forts existed in RTW, the ability for agents to accompany armies existed in RTW, the code that governed this already existed and probably wasn't changed when merchants were added in M2TW.

Anyway, bottom line is, I don't use it.

If others want to use it, it's not really any concern of mine.

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I know. It seems we agree on most aspects of this discussion really. When merchants are good, when they are not worth making, etc

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I'd say the same thing.

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To me it seems inconceivable to me that CA intended to have stacks of 20 merchants sitting in a fort, trading a single resource, immune from takeovers. I've written enough programs over the years to smell a bug. This smacks of the sort of thing that slips through because no one thought of this misuse when writing the code for the intended functions of merchants, forts, etc. Forts existed in RTW, the ability for agents to accompany armies existed in RTW, the code that governed this already existed and probably wasn't changed when merchants were added in M2TW.

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I agree tottally, i'm as close to 100% sure this is a big as it's possibbile to be without confirmation from CA.

My only argument about it has been that whilst it probably wasn't intended, it's a damm useful way of making merchants useful for those of us who like to take our time about things.

I'd much rather however see it fixed and merchants tweaked so as to make them useful.

The problem with merchants is that they exist. It takes a great deal of micromanagement to use them well and otherwise they just clutter up the map. They should simply go away and the income from various markets and such should be tweaked.

If anything else is required just make provinces with certain resources worth a lot more money. And make the player have to defend them.

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Originally Posted by chickenhawk

The problem with merchants is that they exist. It takes a great deal of micromanagement to use them well and otherwise they just clutter up the map. They should simply go away and the income from various markets and such should be tweaked.

If anything else is required just make provinces with certain resources worth a lot more money. And make the player have to defend them.

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Meh. I kinda like the whole Merchants thing, it adds a new bit of gameplay and strategy to the mix.

One thing that continuously surprises me is the number of folks who don't like micromanagement. What the heck are you doing playing the TW games for then? :grin: The SP campaign is all about micromanagement. Custom battles and MP are for the combat-driven folks! :smash:

My merchants work just great early in the game. You just have to pay attention, not "micro manage." In my current Byzantine game I'm hardly a world power but my merchants are a big factor in maintaining my economy and there's only around 6-7 of them.

First thing is I use watchtowers more to detect merchants than armies. My merchants (trained at the merchant's guild in Constantinople) start out on the silk nearby. If they see merchants they can acquire, they do so, if not they move, but I'll usually keep one highly skilled merchant around there as protection for the other ones. If the lesser merchants can acquire, I let them, if not the big boy does it.

Once they get about 5 stars it's off to real resources in the Holy Lands or to Italy, but I send a spy with them to detect trouble/opportunities. The ones in the Holy lands start around Antioch on the spices until they get to around 8 stars and then they go to the Ivory in Dongola. I usually send a single one to Italy as it seems there's an unending supply of new AI merchants to acquire. Every other turn on average I get a takeover as well as 300-400ish from the textiles there. Sure, sometimes 95% chance fails, but it's just a chance to work up the latest guy in training around Constantinople. In maybe 20ish turns your merchant will generate enough coin to buy 1 decent military unit per turn, making the whole process worthwhile.

As for the fort/exploit thing, I'm with the people who say you might as well just open up the console and give yourself some money. Plus who cares if you call it exploit or what CA thinks about it? If you look at it logically and come to the conclusion that you should be able to stick 20 of your merchants in a fort on the most valuable resource you can find while the AI can't/won't/doesn't and think that's the way the game should work, great. I would think that's unreasonable, but If the whole merchant part of the game isn't your thing, that I can understand, but I think people are either paranoid about AI merchants having some "I win" button or crazy advantage and looking for excuses to cheese or just being lazy and expecting:

1: Create Merchant
2: ????
3: Profit

where ???? is doing absolutely nothing but moving a merchant to resource and doing nothing else. I think I've got a pretty good system of ???? and it works well, not as well as ~ add_money 99999, but it's a start.

[QUOTE=KHPike]Would like to add on that the AI seems to 'detect' and attack concentrations of armies and agents with natural disasters.

I had 10 full stacks of troops near Yerevan preparing for the Mongol invasion. However, the turn the Mongols appeared a flash flood wiped out half of my army. As a result I was beaten back in a humiliating manner.

When I started this thread, this was the question I was trying to answer. I believe the AI detects high concentrations of merchants and attacks them with natural disasters. If this is the case then I would suggest that using forts for merchants is not a bug, but an exploit that the AI is aware of and it may choose to punish you for using it.

Since the earth quake killed off my stack of merchants I have spread them out a bit more. Since doing this I have noticed that ivory is now more valuable than gold . My empire has expanded slightly, but my capitol is the same. Is this because of the changing year, New world is now there but I havent got there yet, or have all my merchants over used the gold resorce?

I think that's just a global market fluctuation that swings around once in a while. Sometimes ivory is more valuable than gold. Even with trading forts, while you can put most of your merchants on one type of resource, it's really not the wisest strategy long term.

Heck even inside traders often have diversified portfolios. :beam:

If you spread your merchants out, you may have established a monopoly on ivory, which gives your merchants the monopolist trait and makes them earn more (I don't know if the monopoly itself makes the resource worth more). Gold is much harder to monopolize because it shows up in more places.

You don't have to do that to get the "monopoly" line of traits. All you need is a province that has 2+ instances of any resource, and to make sure that nobody but you is trading that resource in that province. Timbuktu has two pairs, two gold and two ivory, and thus you can get monopolist by standing on one or both of either of those resources, so long as no foreign merchant is on the other.

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Originally Posted by Microwavegerbil

The AI rarely goes to Timbuktu and never the New World, so I'd say the player definitely has an advantage there. As for 2 and 3, I'm fairly certain neither of those are true.

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You can test 2 and 3.

Test for 2. Find a AI merchant sitting on a resourse send a spy to see his details, see how much money he makes. Select own merchant with the same skill level. Move the cursor over the same resourse and you will see that your merchant will make less on the same resourse.

Test for 3. Select own merchant and left click on an AI mechant with the same skill level and see the probability of successful takeover.

Another thought. On what level do you play? I play only on Vh/Vh may be you are right on the ohter levels.

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Originally Posted by todorp

You can test 2 and 3.

Test for 2. Find a AI merchant sitting on a resourse send a spy to see his details, see how much money he makes. Select own merchant with the same skill level. Move the cursor over the same resourse and you will see that your merchant will make less on the same resourse.

Test for 3. Select own merchant and left click on an AI mechant with the same skill level and see the probability of successful takeover.

Another thought. On what level do you play? I play only on Vh/Vh may be you are right on the ohter levels.

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Hard to say since 2 depends on the capitol location. There are times I make more than an equal AI merchant. As for 3, do you know what the AI merchant's chances of take overs are?

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As for 3, do you know what the AI merchant's chances of take overs are?

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You can't normally find out, but genrally the AI merchants raerly fail their aqqussition attempts even when they are of similar or slightly lower finance. hey only mess it up if they are signifacantly lower.

p.s. give me a moment and i'll respond to your other points in your previous post.

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Originally Posted by todorp

You can test 2 and 3.

Test for 2. Find a AI merchant sitting on a resourse send a spy to see his details, see how much money he makes. Select own merchant with the same skill level. Move the cursor over the same resourse and you will see that your merchant will make less on the same resourse.

Test for 3. Select own merchant and left click on an AI mechant with the same skill level and see the probability of successful takeover.

Another thought. On what level do you play? I play only on Vh/Vh may be you are right on the ohter levels.

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On number 2, that doesn't work properly at all, the value is affected by your capital's distance from the resource.

On 3, it seems to me that the challenging merchant has a disadvantage, so without some look at the code, no it can't be tested.

Also, I play only on VH/VH.

I've seen people claim that AI merchants never seem to fail, and like the original topic I think this is a case of people remembering the bad things more than the good. In my last campaign I lost a handful of merchants to takeover, and had several of my merchants be challenged and win. Likewise, I think people just tend to remember the one horribly unlucky disaster and forget the other three that didn't affect them at all.

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My merchants work just great early in the game. You just have to pay attention, not "micro manage." In my current Byzantine game I'm hardly a world power but my merchants are a big factor in maintaining my economy and there's only around 6-7 of them.

First thing is I use watchtowers more to detect merchants than armies. My merchants (trained at the merchant's guild in Constantinople) start out on the silk nearby. If they see merchants they can acquire, they do so, if not they move, but I'll usually keep one highly skilled merchant around there as protection for the other ones. If the lesser merchants can acquire, I let them, if not the big boy does it.

Once they get about 5 stars it's off to real resources in the Holy Lands or to Italy, but I send a spy with them to detect trouble/opportunities. The ones in the Holy lands start around Antioch on the spices until they get to around 8 stars and then they go to the Ivory in Dongola. I usually send a single one to Italy as it seems there's an unending supply of new AI merchants to acquire. Every other turn on average I get a takeover as well as 300-400ish from the textiles there. Sure, sometimes 95% chance fails, but it's just a chance to work up the latest guy in training around Constantinople. In maybe 20ish turns your merchant will generate enough coin to buy 1 decent military unit per turn, making the whole process worthwhile.

As for the fort/exploit thing, I'm with the people who say you might as well just open up the console and give yourself some money. Plus who cares if you call it exploit or what CA thinks about it? If you look at it logically and come to the conclusion that you should be able to stick 20 of your merchants in a fort on the most valuable resource you can find while the AI can't/won't/doesn't and think that's the way the game should work, great. I would think that's unreasonable, but If the whole merchant part of the game isn't your thing, that I can understand, but I think people are either paranoid about AI merchants having some "I win" button or crazy advantage and looking for excuses to cheese or just being lazy and expecting:

1: Create Merchant
2: ????
3: Profit

where ???? is doing absolutely nothing but moving a merchant to resource and doing nothing else. I think I've got a pretty good system of ???? and it works well, not as well as ~ add_money 99999, but it's a start.

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Thats a nice strategy, but how Viable it is depends on your position a lot and on who your playing as and what your starting area is like.

First, you actually need a decent number of monopolies close to each other to train them up on. Most provinces only have 1 monopoly of 2 2 resources of the same type, (e.g. the silver in London Province). If you don't have a lot of monopolies in 1 or 2 adjacent provinces it can take a turn or two to get your merchants from your training center to a more distant monopoly and it isn't really feasible to protect such spread out merchants with just one merchant.

Second, training up such a defensive merchant takes time as you have to get his monopolist line up to full then send him off to a distant spot, (as any of the Catholics except maybe Spain and Portugal I'd choose Constantinople. Probably the same for Russia and Egypt too, but I'd go for the textiles in northern Italy as Moors, Byzantine, and the Turks. Gold and Ivory in Timbuktu would be my preference as Spain or Portugal though). Sending them to said spots would normally take about 10 turns, sometimes 15 if I play as some factions or send them further abroad. then I have to sit them their while I level up. Then send one back whilst i move others onto more profitable areas. Overall with the travel and training times being what they are it's typically going to be a good 40+ turns before I have my first merchant up to the max of 7-8 Finance, (without guild traits it's VERY difficult to get 9-10), and back I'll only have about 10 turns of guarding out of him before he dies and thus I'll need to be sending his replacments along about the same time he arrives to protect my training grounds.

Third, as mentioned I'll have merchants training at (for example as Danes), Stockholm and Constantinople, but I'll also want to try to get some on the Silk round Baghdad, the Ivory in Egypt, or even, if I can get some boats in the Med, send some off to Timbuktu and Arguin. As a result that takes quite a lot of merchants. Including those traveling, (but not those training in the homeland training ground, (i.e. those being protected by an Anti-Poaching merchant), I've assumed only 1 anti-poaching merchant too), the total number of required Merchants is already 8. For every additional training ground or distant resource you need another 4. Theirs also the problem that until you have a lot of territory or until you have Stockholm your limited to about 7-8 merchants training at once, and you need one merchant in initial training for every 4 merchants elsewhere. even 8 merchants (plus the two initial trainees needed to support them), are far more than a I'll be able to build for a long time. You can cut it down by 4 merchants if you are willing to accept resources not being manned/training ground not being protected 100% of the time, but even then you've only got 1 distant resource. You need several decent sized cities before you can get together enough merchants to get a decent number on distant resources, and until you do the merchants aren't going to be making a lot of money.

Fourth, until you get a guild and/or a few other traits going, your going to have issues getting a 9-10 Finance merchant, as a result thats going to produce issues with protecting your trainees from 6-7 finance merchants, the AI seems to succeed on low chance a lot more than you do and your not likely to have better than a 50% chance. You could easily lose your protecting merchant to a backfire like that. So even then your going to need a good 30ish turns to get a guild up and get a protecting merchant trained from it then send him out and get him back.

Fifth, it's an insane amount of micromanagement, most people will not try to micromanage more than about 40ish merchants regardless. With this system, your only going to support 8 merchants that are either doing anti-poaching duties or are on a distant resource. typically with only 1 monopoly that can be guarded by any 1 anti-packing merchant you'll only have 6 merchants on distant resources at any one time making a lot of money (plus about 8 on medium distance resources making a fair amount). you may get your money back, but considering the time and effort put into it it's rather too Little profit for most peoples tastes. Thats an important point to remember, Time and effort put in factors into peoples considerations on weather to use something just as much as actually monetary cost does. for the effort they are putting in. Many people will expect much better total income than the 10K or so they'll actually get.

Overall point: The training forts allow you to train a lot of merchants quickly and safely, as a result they cut some of the worst micromanagement out and allow you more merchants on distant resources netting you more income and making it feel more worthwhile. it's still a Little low, but more acceptable to many people.

Lastly, regardless of the above, it is inarguable that their are a number of resources, and even resource types that have (because they have few or no monopolies), are unsuited to training, but are also very low value. this leaves forts as the only way of making any money off them worth talking about.

Everything you wrote is true for the most part and I feel bad about replying with a trite response, but "you get what you put into it" is true in this case. If I can spend 15+ minutes "micromanaging" a battle I can certainly spare a minute or two every turn to make sure my merchants are working optimally. If I don't do that management of merchants there's a good chance I wouldn't be fighting that 15 minute battle because I couldn't afford the army to fight in it.

As for the fort thing again, people make it seem like you're forced to make merchants and it's their divine right that they can all make 500+ florins a turn on them. As has been said in the thread if people don't think they're worth making, then don't make them. There are limited resources in the game for a reason, artificially inflating them by using forts that basically add 20 new resources to the map doesn't seem reasonable, at least to me.

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Everything you wrote is true for the most part and I feel bad about replying with a trite response, but "you get what you put into it" is true in this case.

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Don't worry about sounding trite~:). Whilst i know this is going to sound suspicious, I was actually planning to add a section on this to my above post, but someone I wanted to talk to signed into MSN just as I started on it spell, and I can't run MSN and IE at the same time due to a buggy net connection.

I agree with most of what you've written in your reply, I've got to say that micromanaging a battle is a lot less tedious in my experience, (assuming the path-finding doesn't go all to hell on you), than merchants because your not doing effectively the same thing 40+ times, your also often dealing with a dynamic situation that taxes your brains, i can certainly manage 20+ merchants, maybe even 40, but most people lack the Patience for that level of tediousness.

In general what you've described WILL work if you have enough time effort and Patience, but it's going to cost you a lot of merchants early on till you get a level 9-10 protector up and running. After that it's just a case of repeating the same moves every few turns and away you go.

What I'd like to see changed is a strong increase in income from all resources, so that any resource more than 2-3 provinces from your capital is worth putting a merchant on if you have one to spare with nothing better to do, their are a fair few resources in HRE/France/Iberia/England that are of low value and aren't monopolies, it would be nice if these where worth using for someone, even the Islamic factions don't make a lot of money off them.

I'd also say they either have to treble basic acquisition chances, or reduce them to a third. This cuts the power of AI merchants by either meaning that level 4-5 merchants actually have a chance of acquiring the level 7-8 AI ones (not a good one, but enough to risk it), or cuts the AI's chances enough that they'll actually lose the odd merchant, which will help you a lot as it gives your merchant the odd finance point and gives you back money lost to the enemy acquisitions that do occur. You still need a high level defense merchant either way, but his job is made significantly easier now as he doesn't have to be level 9-10 all the time to do his job well.

I certainly don't want to see 500+florins from every resource,, but 50-80, (and maybe going up-to a hundred in some cases), would be nice, outside those Right outside the capital anyway. I don't want Merchants to become massive cash cows, just be useful additions without becoming tedious for most players before they generate a lot of useful income. if necessary reduce the maximum number available per city to compensate.

I'm with you on the part where I don't think they should be major cash cows and there there needs to be some adjustment. I think there's too many resources that I wouldn't even put a free merchant on while OTOH the resources that do produce money seem to produce a stunning amount with high level merchants. There's just no viable middle ground for average merchants.

I do think, that even the least valuable resource, should be able to pay off the price of a merchant in 10 turns. This would include average levels of skill development in the equation from a starting level of 0 finance. But basically, it shouldn't take more than 10 turns on any resource at all for a merchant to pay off their investment. Otherwise, it doesn't seem like the merchant themselves would want to get involved in trading whatever it is... he is a businessman after all and DOES want to make some profit. If it can't make that level of money, it shouldn't be on the map because no one would bother sending merchants for it. I think this would benefit the AI because their merchants would be making them more money and thus make them more challenging.

Cash cows? I'm not so sure... but honestly, past a certain point, I think merchants should make the difference between simply being able to garrison your cities and defend your borders, and actually being able to launch offensives.

There is another piece of the economic puzzle there though. Armies in other nations should cost significantly more in support costs than ones within your own borders... and armies maintaining sieges should cost even more than that. Armies in recently conquered territories should also cost the same as ones on foreign soil, for 5-10 turns or so. Sort of the time it takes for them to turn from being an occupying force to just local troops. There would also be a good mechanic to make "steamrolling" harder, by making it take longer and be more expensive to integrate a new territory.