Merchants; I have an idea!

[Toorstain]

I don't know if the team know what to do with the merchants, but here is my suggestion:

Merchants are turned into "colony starters".

As far as I have understood from EB, colonies were very important in those times. You can build a colony in just about every city, but they will not show up on the map. But with my suggestion, The Colony starter can travel to other regions and establish colonies. The colony could be represented by a fort-like structure on the map.
Enemy colony starters can not take your colony, but enemy armies can occupy them and take over the trade from there. Therefore you should have some soldiers stationed in your colony.

Long story short: Merchants will still gain money, but in a completely different way.

This is only an idea though, and there are still some questions I have no answer to:

• Will you have a cap on how many colonies you can have? Only one per region?
• Will some factions start with colonies?
• Will you need some sort of military access to establish a colony in a region?
• Can you only have colonies by the sea?

So please tell me what you think of this suggestion, and sorry if this problem is already solved (And english is not my first language, so..yeah...)

[Belisarius II]

I don't believe this idea will work, because the team is already using PSF's (Permanent Stone Forts) to represent other towns within a region. So instead of colonies factions will be starting out with towns they owned at the start of the game. Generally speaking, your colony idea is already what is being used, just that merchants will not be creating them. And, iirc, the team said they already have a purpose for the agents in the game.

[Toorstain]

I don't think it would be exactly similar. The colonies wouldn't be permanent, they would only be there as long as the merchant was there. And when I said "forts" I didn't mean it would be completely similar, but it was the closest thing i could think of.
But if they already have an idea for merchants, then i guess it doesn't matter anyway.

[bobbin]

Something almost identical to this was proposed by a fan on EB's TWC forums last month, I'll give you the link to the thread as I posted the various reasons why such a plan wouldn't work there.

http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=423039

[B-Wing]

What a lot of fans don't seem to realize is that you can't simply mod agents to do whatever you can imagine. Each agent type only has the ability to do what it can do in the vanilla M2TW game, right? So merchants can do two things: sit on resources to generate income and attempt to take out other merchants; that's all. They can't perform any functions other than these, to the best of my knowledge.

[CashMunny]

What a lot of fans don't seem to realize is that you can't simply mod agents to do whatever you can imagine. Each agent type only has the ability to do what it can do in the vanilla M2TW game, right? So merchants can do two things: sit on resources to generate income and attempt to take out other merchants; that's all. They can't perform any functions other than these, to the best of my knowledge.

What if you made them sit on a 'colony' resource?

[Horatius Flaccus]

Three problems with that: 1. Colonies would suddenly disappear after 40-50 years (when the merchant dies), 2. Colonies can 'attack' each other and 3. Colonies would have character names.