Are Merchants Useless?

[Zajuts149]

like Yaropolk said. Also, train your merchants in one city only, to gain points to trigger merchants guild. That'll help his survivability.

[Galain_Ironhide]

As above. Merchants can be a huge factor in the income of your kingdom.

[PBI]

Monopolise the key exotic trade goods with your merchants and you can easily rake in 10,000+ a turn; on the right resource a merchant can easily recoup the initial 550 florin outlay in a turn or two. It helps to have an outpost in the vicinity (like a Crusader state) so you can replace any merchants which get bought out, and send in assassins to deal with any troublesome competition. Don't bother trying to buy out high level foreign merchants, just eliminate them with assassins.

Which particular spots are best varies depending on what faction you are and where your capital is; I tend to go for the spices, silk etc in the Levant as Western factions, and the amber in northern Europe as Muslims. Otherwise, the gold and ivory in the far south of the map is always a good moneyspinner. Don't bother using the resources in or close to your home regions, like wool as England or wine as France, the returns are barely worth it.

[Prussian to the Iron]

there seems to be some odd glitch where you are getting 400+ dollars 1 turn, then for the rest of the game merchants only pull in a max of around 260. not sure if it was fixed with kingdoms, but last i checked it still worked like that.

if you send them out to africa, they are money factories. you know the settlement all the way south under the moors, with 1 road in and out? there are a few gold mines down there, plus ivory, that get you like 340 a turn depending on skill(the 340 is with a 5-star)

also, in the mid-east there are alot of ivory and silk spots. put them on those and you are set.


if you are playing a game where you want every lst man you can get, then you want merchants. if you are just trying to lay low and conquer a few here and there, they are a unneccessary hassle.

[Owen Glyndwr]

I don't find them so useless once you get a nice monopoly going. I find that if you put enough of them down, you can get a decent income from it.

I just get tired of constantly having my assets seized by those damn Milanese/Venetian merchants!!

[Maltz]

For some reason their income reduce significantly after a while.
I make merchant just to rob other merchants. A smaller opponent gives 500, while a major gives 1000 or more.
So a few merchants will certainly make you money.

[NodachiSam]

Merchants aren't useless but they certainly can be incredibly annoying, enemy merchants that is. I find it quite a lot of work to have to micromanage them all and protect them. I lack the will to always watch out for them and raise them up high enough to sieze other merchants' assets.

One trick I did learn is simply to surround an enemy merchant (and its possible this works for any enemy character) with military units, I think 8 at most, and then move a nineth on top of him and he'll die like he deserves. You don't always need so many units if you can corner the buggers by some impassable terrain like mountains, rivers, or whatever. I think of it as hunting the agent down and executing him as an enemy of the state.

That is if my assassin's can't get him. Often my best assassin's are busy at the borders and I don't find it worth it to waste 4 or 5 turns getting them down there so that they can possibly kill a high level enemy merchant. Surround and pound is just easier, and actually quite satsifying.

If that wasn't bad enough, allies will seize the assets of my merchants aswell. With my assasin's I will usually kill any merchant I can that even goes near my borders regardless of who they belong to. If you use the surround and pound technique on an allied unit I don't know if it lowers your reputation.

Not that my kingdoms ever end up having a salvagable reputation anyways. I never ever betray allies but any of my princes who become king eventually get the master of assasin's trait anyways, their chivalry always takes a hit or two. My subterfuge networks are possibly as important as the navy afterall.

So there you go, more info on how to kill merchants than to actually use them :)