how do u use merchants?

[HopAlongBunny]

Everything said above is true; there are resources on the map that are worth silly amounts of money: ex. the gold/ivory far up in the corner of Africa (Timbucktu{sp}) the silk around Constantinople and Baghdad, wine in France and various textiles all over the map. A half decent merchant on the gold in N.Africa can make 1k a turn, if you monopolize the area you can turn 3k.

The real money comes from building up a few merchants and raiding other merchants. This works well if you have a good training ground: merchant guild (you get some bonuses right away) and a safe area with 2 identical resources; put a guy on each one until they get the "monopolist" trait and they are usually good enough to bring down their opponents.

All in all, its time consuming and very much a gamble...but sometimes fun and profitable

[Marauder]

The monopolist trait incraeses by +1 for every 5 turns that the merchant holds a monopoly (doesn't have to be consecutive). The other way to train merchants is to send them off to distant lands, they can pick up the foreign merchant trait and there is a retinue or two they can get. Taking other merchants is another trait line you can boost their stats. I don't think merchants are all that useful in the early period. Spending 550 florins on an agent is steep when that buys you more in the early game. That said, if you can get your merchants over to the silk/gold mines early, then you could benefit more from the money...

[PBI]

Check out my latest SS 6.1 campaign as Denmark in the Pics and History thread for an example of how effective merchants can be; by the end of the campaign I was making 15000 a turn just from merchant trade, having monopolised the resources in the Middle East whilst having my capital in Scandinavia. For comparison, that's roughly the equivalent of sacking one large city per turn in vanilla, while in SS sacking cities will never make close to that kind of money. It's enough to field around four extra full stacks on top of your normal forces. In short, it's a lot of money.

I don't even bother trying to take out foreign merchants with my own, I regard it as far too high a risk of losing an experienced merchant for far too little payoff. I just take out any foreign merchants that wander onto my patch with assassins, it's much more effective and eliminates the risk to my less experienced merchants. The real money is to be made from trade: Each merchant costs 550 gold to train, and costs no more upkeep henceforth. On a good plot of sugar, spices or silk, a basic merchant can make at least 100-200 gold per turn right off the bat. So that's only 3-4 turns to make back your initial investment, after which everything you make is profit. That's far better than almost all the normal ways of making money, like markets, farms etc, which take much longer to make a profit. For the more valuable resources such as gold or ivory, the maths gets even better; 1k per turn per merchant is quite feasible. Similarly a local merchant factory with a guild HQ and a high level market will up the income a lot.

The only disadvantages of merchant trade compared to settlement improvements are:
*Merchants are at risk of being taken out by foreign merchants.
*Merchants don't last forever.
The first point can be rendered almost negligible providing you keep each merchant theater covered by at least one decent assassin; acquire any weaker foreign merchants with one of your more experienced ones and use your assassins to cheaply eliminate any more serious competition. On the second point, your average merchant seems to last around 60 years, in which time it can make back its recruitment cost many times over.

Of course this is all just for vanilla; in mods the calculations get even better. In BC each merchant only costs around 100 gold, so there's really no reason not to spam them to cover ever resource available. In SS they cost the same as in vanilla, but since sacking income has been so drastically reduced, you really have to diversify your income; plus there are simply a lot more resources.

In vanilla and SS the resources to go for as a European faction are the spices, sugar, silk and textiles stretching in a band from Egypt, through the Levant and out into Mesopotamia. For Middle Easterners the amber in Eastern Europe and Scandinavia, the wine in France and Germany and the iron in the Balkans and elsewhere are worth a fortune. For all factions the gold and silver mines in Austria and the Balkans, the resources in north Italy and around the Bosphorus and (in vanilla) the gold, ivory and slaves around Dongola and Timbuktu are extremely valuable.

In BC almost everywhere has plenty of resources worth snapping up, but the region which especially stand out is the abundance of gold mines India (pretty much every province seems to have one), as well as the Levant and Mesopotamia as usual. I seem to recall the wheat resources in the Ukraine were also surprisingly lucrative.

Oh, make sure though, that your capital is somewhere as far away as you dare from your main merchant fields, since their income increases based on the distance from your capital of the nearest type of whatever resource it is they are trading. In my SS campaign I left my capital in Denmark even though almost all of my holdings were south of there simply because all my merchants were in the Middle East.

[gardibolt]

The AI's merchants at the beginning are almost always too high level for you to take on, for some reason. Stay away from them. They won't attack your merchants if they're not actually sitting on a resource, though, which is handy. You can try training them up by monopolizing a resource in a province, and that can get you up to +3 pretty quickly, but as soon as any foreign merchant comes within a move, get the merchant off that resource or he'll likely be eaten and your investment with him.

The best use of merchants is the following: build 4 or 5 merchants, 4 or 5 priests, 2 spies, 2 assassins and 3 or 4 ships. Load all the characters onto the stack of ships. Sail them to a distant, non-Christian land (assuming you're playing a Christian faction). Move the ships slowly so you don't run into pirates. Land the characters. Keep the priests together in the pagan land. You need a bunch so they don't turn heretic, but you'll quickly convert the area and make cardinals so you can become pope. The priests are a side venture, but since you're sending the ships you may as well kill two birds, etc....

The real moneymaker is the merchants. Move them, together with the spies and assassins (hopefully 1 of each survived the boat ride---I suggested 2 since I have terrible luck with spies and assassins dying on shipboard, but you only need 1 of each to get there alive). Move them towards a set of valuable resources (gold & ivory at Timbuktu, silks in the Middle East), the spy leading the way. If there are merchants there, try to kill them with the assassin(s), if the chances are reasonably good. Sit your merchants on the resources and watch the money roll in, and they'll level up quickly. Once they're higher level, they should be able to seize the assets of any merchant who comes calling (if not, keep the assassin handy). While you're moving them into position, build another set of these characters, send the ship back for them, lather, rinse & repeat. You can generate a ton of money per turn from merchants alone if you do it right, without resorting to fort cheats. But they can't stay home.

[TechStrider]

It has been mentioned above, but not clearly enough.

The value of a resource is based in part on how close the first instance of that resource is to your current capital. If your capital is immediately adjacent to an Amber source, Amber will not be worth very much ANYWHERE in the game.

This leads to much confusion until you learn to take this into account. This leads right into the next issue:

As you grow, you will need to move your capital. You do this from the Settlement Detail button. Check your current financial projections and take note of the various sources of income. Move your capital to a different location and recheck. Note that by moving your capital many things change. By looking at individual regions you will see that as the capital gets closer or farther away there are many changes. When the capital is closer, corruption will go down for a direct income improvement. With the capital closer, the populace is happier and you can often increase taxes (which is not automatically taken into account on the financial projection - you have to learn to jigger all these about for a complete assessment). Do note, however, what effect all this has on the merchants.

In one of my current campaigns, the proximity of the gold resource NE of Ragusa made me move the capital so that my merchants on the famous gold fields in North Africa could make more money. Another excellent example is Constantinople and the nearby Silk resources. You may need or want Constantinople to be your capital but you must take into account that the local silk will take a dive and the merchants at Baghdad are going to be suddenly dressed in rags even though they are thousands of miles away. Overall this is a great subject for some finesse to be applied by the attentive faction leader.

One other often overlooked aspect of merchants: Even in a remote area with a terrible level of corruption, the merchant income comes directly into the coffers. This is incredibly important when assessing the overall value of merchant trade. The same area with greater than 50% corruption may make a mine that is supposed to return 800 give less than 400 net. A merchant that makes 600 here actually puts ALL 600 into the overall income. There is still considerable value in building the mines as the merchants on the affected resources will make substantially more which then goes completely into the till, so it is worth building the mines anyway.

Making great money with merchants requires attention to details. All the previously mentioned ploys are valid: travel with spies, protect with assassins (if you are willing in the specific campaign to take the rep hit), acquire other merchants or run and hide based on the observations of the spies and a realistic review of your merchant's chances, covering all like resources in a region to build the monopolistic traits, and other techniques. To really do a good job you need to understand how the value of the resources will vary based on proximity to the capital (and how to use the Move Capital function), and you need to value their impact on the faction bottom line based on their actual contribution which is NOT, so far as I have seen so far, reduced by corruption as so many other assets are.

I hope this helps. I've gotten very happy with merchants as I have learned how to use them well. I have not noticed any reference before concerning the issue of merchants and corruption. Having now made the correlation I find that I have modified the order in which I build or recruit for maximum net income. It seems to help tremendously.

[Monk]

The value of a resource is based in part on how close the first instance of that resource is to your current capital. If your capital is immediately adjacent to an Amber source, Amber will not be worth very much ANYWHERE in the game.

This bit of information, either through my own reading or just not seeing it has always escaped me. It was a point of the game i never grasped but makes perfect sense when i think about it now. Cheers for the clarification!

[PBI]

There is still considerable value in building the mines as the merchants on the affected resources will make substantially more which then goes completely into the till, so it is worth building the mines anyway.

Generally excellent post, but I should pick up on this point; I'm pretty sure I checked this once by monitoring a merchant's income before and after building mines, and found there to be no difference. This was in the Britannia campaign, but I doubt it's a game mechanic that varies between Kingdoms and vanilla.

Of course, mines are almost always worth building anyway in spite of the corruption, so it doesn't make too much of a difference strategy wise.

[TechStrider]

Generally excellent post, but I should pick up on this point; I'm pretty sure I checked this once by monitoring a merchant's income before and after building mines, and found there to be no difference. This was in the Britannia campaign, but I doubt it's a game mechanic that varies between Kingdoms and vanilla.

Of course, mines are almost always worth building anyway in spite of the corruption, so it doesn't make too much of a difference strategy wise.

Oh well, it always pays to check carefully. I would have sworn differently but I just checked in vanilla and you are correct. I will try again later with a bit more time as I was sure I have seen my original assertion be true in Crusades and the vastly profitable mines in the areas like Van, Yerevan, Tblisi, and the others.

So much for my memory, humbled here.

[HopAlongBunny]

An excellent post TechStrider

Clarified a few things for me; cleared up a cpl things that puzzled me about the whole merchant business ie: why stuff that was just a cash cow under one faction was almost worthless with another

Thanks!

[Anonymous II]

But they can't stay home.

Sure they can! (see my post above) They can make tons of money by taking out foreign merchants that comes around (especially if you live in Northern Italy).

[Anonymous II]

The real money comes from building up a few merchants and raiding other merchants. This works well if you have a good training ground: merchant guild (you get some bonuses right away) and a safe area with 2 identical resources; put a guy on each one until they get the "monopolist" trait and they are usually good enough to bring down their opponents.

This is by far the best way to use merchants if you actually want to make money from them. I ususally don't bother too much with merchants before later in the game. Having well developed markets in a city + merchants guild can make a really good merchant straight out of the "factory". The fastest way to further develop them is to wait around in the city (so he won't be put out of business by a higher level merchant) in a busy region to overtake the lower level merchants. AI usually spams merchants to go to Constantinople or Northern Italy.

In my current Venice game, I have 3-4 merchants in their early 30's already on level 6-8. When they have reached level 8, it's safe for them to move on to foreign lands (where there is no friendly city to hide inside) to stand on a valuable resource, preferably the silk in Baghdad (which is farther away from my capital than Constantinople).

edit: I'm not sure how much, but by taking out a foreign merchant on level 5-6, I think I make a couple of thousad florins. Maybe someone can confirm this?

[_Tristan_]

I'm not sure how much, but by taking out a foreign merchant on level 5-6, I think I make a couple of thousad florins. Maybe someone can confirm this?

Merchant acquisition works by 250 florins increments, starting on Level 0...

So buying out a Level 6 merchant should net you 1750 florins.

[Anonymous II]

Merchant acquisition works by 250 florins increments, starting on Level 0...

So buying out a Level 6 merchant should net you 1750 florins.

Ah... so that's how it works? Thank you!

The young fella below is now a "commercial conqueror", which means he has made 4-7 acquistions by now. Let's say it's four times in four turns. That would be, by the system explained by Tristan, some 7000 florins in a very short while. (Though he didn't take out that high level merchants the first times. Usually level 2 or 3).