Odd facts about trade

[mbrasher1]

Did you know:

-- that your mines give you trade goods (it is a part of the "other goods"). The bonus is about one-third of your wealth income on the examples I checked.
-- that your plantations also give you trade income as well as "wealth income". The ratio is approximately triple your wealth income, subject to some qualifiers.
-- that your plantations offer bonuses that can add 20%, 50%, 100%, or 200% of the stated output. The bonus benefits both trade and wealth income from plantations
-- that some plantations yield 80% less than the stated amount (ie 3 bales instead of the supposed 15)
-- that every Indiaman on a resource reduces the average returns on all Indiamen on that resource (but it still makes sense to spam them because the returns are so high). Since Indiamen cost so little to keep up, it makes sense to keep producing them until their per-turn production approaches their upkeep.
-- the wealth income from plantations (but not mines) will decrease (or be eliminated) with a blockade or trade route raid against you
-- that the dreaded "stranded Indiaman" bug occurs when you move one ship of a multi-ship fleet away from a trade slot, and that it can be avoided by moving the whole fleet away and then moving the ship(s) you want at the location back there, thereby separating the departing ship
-- you can avoid getting your Indiamen attacked by pirates by avoiding the trade routes and going to a different theater exit

What I do not know:

-- what are the components of "other goods" besides the output from mines (deleting other buildings besides mines did not seem to reduce it)
-- what accounts for the bonus on plantation output (it does not appear to be the average vs high vs meagre vs low yield)
-- why do some plantations at some times yield less than the stated amount (possible lack of trading partners or ports?)
-- why the numbers on the campaign map's trade routes do not equal those on the trade summary

On this last point, I noticed that the numbers on the campaign map totaled 12965 for a recent Spanish game, but my trade income from exports was only 10239. The very next turn, after adding the ottomans as trade partners, the campaign map total increased to 15970, while the export earnings increased to 10925. I am not sure if that indicates that the Ottomans are gaining 3000 from trade with Spain while Spain is gaining only 700, but it suggests that trading with a future enemy may be unwise.

Anything else I am missing?

[nafod]

Did you know that trade from New Mexico is broken? Even holding Texas with Metallic roads in both NM and TX I get nothing.

[SpiritFox]

Apparently having even a single port blockaded results in a complete shutdown of trade. I don't know if this has been fixed.

[Dead Guy]

Trade, especially with other nations, does not seem to "re-route". For example, the Mughals lost the region where their "home" port was located, and my trade income with them was lost though I still had the agreement. Even when they took the very same region back the trade didn't come back. There where numerous other routes that I could connect to them.

Nevermind the fact that I can't trade with my vassals Saxony or Poland whom are both surrounded by my borders...

Could Wine be a part of "other goods"?

There are only two instances of coffe in the entire world (Bahamas and New Andalusia iirc?)?? Wild guess is that there was originally another trade theater that was removed because of balance (Why can you go to Panama anyway? There aren't even any ports on that side. Perhaps it's quicker for the Marathas if they want to invade or something.). As it is, coffe has way fewer instances than wine but is still a special resource.

[al Roumi]

I've not seen any mention of industrial/manufactured or processed goods either... All those bales of cloth and 'widgets' from your weavers and iron-works -are they also grouped in the "other goods"?

Surely that sort of trade should become more and more important too -is it only reflected in tax income perhaps?

[anweRU]

-- what accounts for the bonus on plantation output (it does not appear to be the average vs high vs meagre vs low yield)
-- why do some plantations at some times yield less than the stated amount (possible lack of trading partners or ports?)

Bonus in plantation output tracks the yield in my games. Meager yield gives 1x, i.e. 15 bales for the small plantation, and abundant yield gives 2x, i.e. 30 bales for small plantation. The multipliers are 1.25, 1.5 and 1.75 for low, average and high yield respectfully.

Note that the same multipliers work for your farms' fiscal contribution to your region wealth.

The only times I've seem the 3 bale plantation regions were:
- when I destroyed an existing plantation to build the alternative (there was way too much tea, and hardly any cotton in the global supply in my UP campaign). It returned to 15 bales once the new plantation was built.
- when I captured a region that didn't have a plantation built yet (seems there is a base 3 bale income regardless of the plantation's existence)
- when I captured a region that didn't have access to the sea until I captured it - this returned to normal the next turn
- the two pirate islands, as they don't have trade ports. You need to demolish the ship yards and build trade ports.

[Servius]

The numbers on trade lanes not matching your Trade window may represent the difference between the total amount of, say, sugar, that is is transported to London (shown on the trade lane) minus what is consumed by the people of England = what you make money on to export.

Ministers can have traits that change the output of things like plantations and such. Sometimes those traits or ancillaries only change the production in the home zone or even home region.

Something else, you get 2x money from trade goods. You get 100% for exporting, then 100% modified by tax rate applied to the town wealth, which turns into tax income.

I have not been able to figure out the Other Goods bit either yet. I have figured out most other income calculations though, and have built them into an Excel that tells you how many turns each building upgrade will take to pay for itself, based on several conditions. You can find the one I'm using for my England campaign here...

http://www.unc.edu/~pcaldwel/ETW - Great Britain.xls

It takes technologies, region tax rates, yield variables, market prices, etc. into account. If you have any questions, PM me.

[nafod]

Apparently having even a single port blockaded results in a complete shutdown of trade. I don't know if this has been fixed.

It has not. I own all of the indian subcontinent and if one port gets bloackaded....

No more tea or spice for the Prussian Empire.

[Servius]

I know that, if even one trade port is blockaded in a theater, then in the Trade window it looks like no trade goods are coming in from the entire theater, but trade goods DO still come in from the other ports. I think that's just a poor visual cue they chose. The Trade box's imports window is very general, only showing one line per Theater, but they should fix it so that only the particular resources from that theater go red when a port is blockaded.

But like I said, I think the other trade goods still come through (unless the trade routes from the theater are being raided). Just look at the export side of the Trade window. Unless you see a drastic downturn in trade income, then the system is working correctly but doing a bad job of acurately portraying the situation.

[al Roumi]

I have figured out most other income calculations though, and have built them into an Excel that tells you how many turns each building upgrade will take to pay for itself, based on several conditions. You can find the one I'm using for my England campaign here...

http://www.unc.edu/~pcaldwel/ETW - Great Britain.xls

It takes technologies, region tax rates, yield variables, market prices, etc. into account. If you have any questions, PM me.

WAOW

This could be very powerful... it's pretty damned complicated though too. How long did it take you?

I take it you didn't have much to do over Easter though...

This could be very useful -kudos for the effort!

[Servius]

It took about a week of constant tweaking. The first part was trying to figure out how the game calculated tax and trade income. Once I figured out that all the income variables were based on fixed numbers depending on the building type, level, resource type, and yield (average, meagre, growing, prosperous, etc.), I had to ask some modders to find me the original data in the code. The next part was the trickiest, figuring out how many columns I would need and writing hundreds of =IF(x=y,show_A,otherwise_show_B) calculations. I think I locked most of the calculation cells to make sure no one accidently messed it up, so you can't see how many lines of calc text there is, but there's a lot behind the scenes.

It's still a work in progress, but it works, so I've stopped progressing on it... :-) It could use some polish on the interface and perhaps some better explanations of what you have to do. I'm also thinking of making another worksheet that just allows you to put in 2 building's variables to compare Option A to Option B. Were there a lot of interest, I'd put more time in making it more user-friendly. Otherwise, polishing it will probably have to wait until after CA fixed the remaining CTD bugs, since I'm not playing it anymore until they do.

[mmk]

Apparently having even a single port blockaded results in a complete shutdown of trade. I don't know if this has been fixed.

It seems that it hasn´t been fixed yet. Was playing UK yesterday, had 4 trading ports in the Carribean, took Georgia, had one trading port there, which got raided, trade from the Americas got shutdown completely - even though none of my ports in the Carribean was blockaded.

[SpiritFox]

But like I said, I think the other trade goods still come through (unless the trade routes from the theater are being raided). Just look at the export side of the Trade window. Unless you see a drastic downturn in trade income, then the system is working correctly but doing a bad job of acurately portraying the situation.

It's been a while since it happened, but I am quite certain my trade income was "0". I was pulling in 30k per turn until I took ... Vienna I think ... from Austria. Then I lost well over 10K which was approximately how much I was pulling in through trade.

What happened was this: Having pissed all over the Swedes and the Ottomans in the early game, I was content to build up the Commonwealth for an epic invasion of Prussia and Austria. The Austrians somehow managed to piss of a whole junk of people, including (ridiculously) the Knights of Malta and they were blockading the one of the Austrian's trade ports. It was too good an opportunity for me to resist, so after I noticed that France had retaken Flanders from the Austrians, I stormed into the place and took it for myself, including that one port being blockaded by the Knights...

... who were so totally befuddled at the very idea of a Polish conquest of Austria that they somehow failed to recognize the difference between the dirty little Austrian rag and the glorious Polish-Lithuanian banner and continued to blockade the port.

I didn't give it much thought at first, but just out of curiosity I opened up the trade window to see whether he was hurting my economy in any way - an lo! I had exactly 0 trade income. Despite having Indiamen all the way down the coast of Brazil and trade ports on both sides of Africa and Java. Despite having overland trade routes with Russia. Despite having a total of 5 other fully upgraded trade ports in the Mediterranean theatre alone - plus 4 more in the Baltic. Zero. Zip. Nada.

The kicker is... all that trade came back when I demolished that one blockaded trade port. Also, the silly Knights never actually realized they were now blockading a heap of construction materials and remained there for a full 12 turns before finally getting bored and leaving. In that time, I'd already made up my mind to blow those brain-dead blockaders into orbit if they didn't leave as soon as I reconstructed that trade port. I rebuilt it on turn 10. They blockaded me for another 2 turns, both of which saw my trade once again reduced to "0". Fortunately for THEM, they finally came to their senses 3 turns before the Polerują Wysoki Morza Flota caught up with them...

[Liberator]

-- that every Indiaman on a resource reduces the average returns on all Indiamen on that resource (but it still makes sense to spam them because the returns are so high). Since Indiamen cost so little to keep up, it makes sense to keep producing them until their per-turn production approaches their upkeep.

Don't forget the recruitment costs here!

On this last point, I noticed that the numbers on the campaign map totaled 12965 for a recent Spanish game, but my trade income from exports was only 10239. The very next turn, after adding the ottomans as trade partners, the campaign map total increased to 15970, while the export earnings increased to 10925. I am not sure if that indicates that the Ottomans are gaining 3000 from trade with Spain while Spain is gaining only 700, but it suggests that trading with a future enemy may be unwise.

I think some goods are just counted twice, i.e. the first time when they are moved from the Americas to Spain, and second when they are exported again from Spain to whereever

[Servius]

For those of you interested, I've updated my efficiency calculator and made a Read Me for it. You can find it at...
http://www.unc.edu/~pcaldwel/ETW Eff...Calculator.zip

[aimlesswanderer]

Well, it would be nice to see exactly with who and how much I am trading since my trade window shows that I am not trading with anyone and have zero trade income (despite having 9k trade income in the summary window), despite having 10 trading partners, some land routes to neighbouring countries and unencumbered trade throughout the Med...

It has been like that for about 20 years.

[Servius]

I think the export window is the most accurate, at least for telling how much $$$ you're getting from who, but if all your ports that provide sugar were blockaded, the sugar portion of your trade with those partners would be generating 0 income.

I see both sides of this coin. On the one hand, the information we have is not as clear as we'd like. On the other hand, it's leaps and bounds more detailed and explanatory that what's been in previous TW games.

[andrewt]

Other trade goods rise as the number of trading partners do. Income from trade goods such as tea, spices, etc. don't. They just get divided among the trading partners.