Trading

[Blodrast]

Hi, and welcome to the Org !

I'm pretty sure that if you spend a bit of time in here, you'll realise this is anything BUT elitist, and all of our members here, who range from teenagers (youngest poster I can remember was 10 years old, and a girl at that !) to ...*cough* ancient *cough*, will confirm that !

As a general rule, since you don't have the manual (which I've looked through, but didn't really do much for me), I would highly recommend Frogbeastegg's excellent guides:

The beginner's guide to MTW
and
The Complete Total War Unit Guide

They are both great lectures, and everybody can find useful tidbits in there from time to time.

Anyway, to answer your question more directly, in a brief manner - since you'll get more thorough and complete explanations in the beginner's guide:
You can trade with any neutral countries (i.e., that you're not at war with).
To trade from your province A to foreign (i.e., not yours) province B, you need:
- a port in both province A and province B
- trade post or better in province A
- an uninterrupted "chain" of ships on sea "squares" from province A to province B; a chain is interrupted if you either don't have any ships in one of the squares, or there are enemy ships in any of those squares. If you have VI (the Viking Invasion expansion pack), you can check for this by holding "Shift", IIRC (I may confuse it with "V").
- also, your province must be exporting some goods, at least some of which province B should not export (but usually this is not a concern).

Like I said, this is a somewhat incomplete and very brief answer. There's more, but this should get you started. And I'm sure other members will fill in the gaps.

Once again, welcome to the Org !

edit: Gah, ColdKnight was not so long-winded, and he already answered to some of your issues before I hit the submit button...