Upgrade Market to Rice Exchange? An objective analysis

[Maltz]

Let's compare Market vs. Merchant Guild:

Market
- Provide +5 town growth bonus in the province
- +200 commerce in the province

Rice Exchange + Merchant Guild
- Provide +20 town growth bonus in the province
- +1000 commerce
- Consumes 2 food
- Costs ~4750 koku (again, this value varies by the level of the Developmental Commissioner, etc.)

So essentially upgrading a Market to Rice Exchange is about:
(1) -4750 koku
(2) +800 commerce in the province
(3) +15 town growth in the province
(4) -2 food surplus

So we can simply make a few changes of the equation and make the same plots.

Extra Profit = -4750 + 800 x ET% x T + (1-RS){[15-2P] + [15-2P] x T} x T x ET-AVE%



(1) With Good Metsuke (32-36% Effective Tax Rate)

We can indeed see that there is an improvement of profit across the board. Actually, in all situations we are still earning extra profit 100 turns after the completion of the Merchant Guild. If we stay small, our extra profit could go into tens of thousands! This is great.

But if we expand rapidly to 22 provinces, upgrading to Merchant Guild makes just less than 5000 extra koku 60 turns after its completion. Maybe we can invest that money somewhere else where we can see a big difference sooner.