Merchants

**easytarget** · 05-18-2014, 16:16

Yeah, it's not that major of an issue, not remotely game breaking as it is in Rome 2 (where due to agent spam and the refusal after 12 patches to fix it by CA I've stopped playing the game altogether).

Here you just have other Nation's merchants often just appear out of nowhere and buy out either your merchants out in the field or inside your own provinces right under your nose.

I've taken to killing them, which leaves my leader with a bit of a reputation. ;) And I suppose I could just ignore it, it's not like merchants are my main source of income, but I don't know why, but I just can't seem to ignore having this happen, I find it particularly annoying that merchants from my allies poach up all of my merchants.

So, figured I'd hit the forum and see how others handle it.

**Myth** · 05-18-2014, 22:59

Just park a unit on them. And don't place more than one merchant on a resource with a unit or fort on top of it. It's called merchant fort and it's a very game-breaking exploit.

**easytarget** · 05-19-2014, 00:21

Hmm, so you can plop a single unit next to the merchant or on top of them and that prevents rival merchants from closing them down?

Interesting, but as you said, an exploit, so I'm not likely to put it to use.

Short of an exploit what does everyone tend to do?

**Myth** · 05-19-2014, 13:38

Cut off access to the province. Have assassins roaming around. Also, I've found that killing the Ai is the most effective method of stopping its agents.

**easytarget** · 05-19-2014, 18:29

Ok, cut off and assassins, that's the ticket then, been doing plenty of the latter already.

Not sure I follow on the killing off of the AI, every nation is doing this, so while I suppose killing them off is indeed the solution, but that's the same solution for preventing them from doing just about anything, haha

**Myth** · 05-20-2014, 07:54

Originally Posted by easytarget

Ok, cut off and assassins, that's the ticket then, been doing plenty of the latter already.

Not sure I follow on the killing off of the AI, every nation is doing this, so while I suppose killing them off is indeed the solution, but that's the same solution for preventing them from doing just about anything, haha

Hehe, that was a joke. Also, try to recruit them all from a city with a Mercahnt's Guild. The stronger they are when recruited the lower the chance of them losing to an AI merchant.

**Gregoshi** · 05-24-2014, 06:22

Last night one of my merchants actually fought off a buy-out attempt. In fact, he did so well, he put the attacking merchant out of business. Not that I really did anything to assist this miracle, I was just surprised as it seems like the attacker has the advantage in buy-outs.