How to build a trading fleet ?

[gelbert]

Hi,
I am new to MTW. I would appreciate advice to to build a trading fleet ?

[Don Corleone]

It's not very tough.

1) You have to build to the Keep level. Pick a province that has a tradeable good.

2) Build a port, then a dockyard.

3) Now you can build ships. Start queing them up.

4) As each ship goes out, slide the ship to an adjacent water space towards foreign ports.

5) In the meantime, in your provinece, build a trading post.

6) When your ships form a line between your port with a trading post (or higher) and a foreign province with a port that does not have that trade good as well, you get the income for selling them that good.

7) Keep building more ships to increase the number of foreign ports you reach.

8) Keep building more domestic ports and trade buildings (and link them with ships too) to increase the number of goods you have for trade.

Every province you have that has a good will sell that good, even if it's multiple times. Example: The Danish build a port in Denmark. You're England. You have ports & trading posts in Wessex, Mercia, and North Umbria, all linked by ship to Denmark. All 3 provinces will sell wool to Denmark, not just 1.

[Roark]

Try to remain peaceful with your trading partners, Gelbert. Enemies of your faction will not trade with you.

If you want to check out a province's trade details, click on the coin/economy icon in the bottom left quadrant of the strategy screen. Then click on the name of the province you want to see the details for, and it will show all of your domestic and foreign trade, and how much it is worth.

[ichi]

Use the V key to look at which sea regions you control (=green), and which are blocked by enemy ships (=red)

ichi

[edyzmedieval]

Also, try to conquer or tech up the provinces with many goods..... It's gonna bring monstrous incomes...... 17000 florins per turn in Constantinople isn't easy (well, with 2 more trade goods added and a 9 acumen governor)

[King Henry V]

Can you get money from trade between 2 provinces you own?

[ichi]

Can you get money from trade between 2 provinces you own?

You earn money from trading with other factions. If you build merchants in landlocked provinces they'll earn a little cash from internal trade, but I don't think you make any money trading between two of your own provinces.

ichi

[Martok]

Can you get money from trade between 2 provinces you own?

Yes, possibly, maybe, although I can't be sure.....

When you click on the money symbol and the click on a province with trade goods, it will bring up a 2nd parchment on the left side of the screen. This 2nd parchment will give a breakdown of trade income from the various provinces belonging to other factions. At the top of that parchment, you'll see the income you're getting from "local trade".

At first, the income from local trade will only reflect trade within that province itself. Now I can't be certain (as I have no idea what the numbers encoded into the game are), but it does seem as if the more provinces that province touches, the higher that province's Local Trade income goes up. I think it increases even more if it's connected to other provinces with trade goods (and those other provinces have built a Trading Post, Merchant, etc. as well).

Ultimately, however, it doesn't really matter if my surmise is correct or not. In the end, maxing out the trade income in all your provinces (even the landlocked ones) is never a bad thing--they usually pay for themselves in a relatively short period of time.

[mfberg]

Can you get money from trade between 2 provinces you own?

No. Internal trade is the value of the trade item times the trade building multiplier, external trade is that number for all neutral and allied provinces that are connected by an unbroken shipping link. You cannot trade an item to a province that has the item as one of its trading products.

mfberg

ps. There are extensive discussions in the econmics in MTW (Economics 101) thread, including which provinces to own and what buildings to build for your economy.

[EatYerGreens]

Use the V key to look at which sea regions you control (=green), and which are blocked by enemy ships (=red)

ichi

Fool that I am, I'm determined to complete at least one vanilla V1.0 campaign before putting in the VI expansion. I bought the two as a pair over a year ago but a HDD fault since then meant I've had to start from scratch.

This keypress does not work in MTW v1.0, as I recently discovered.

Just thought I'd point that out for the benefit of anyone who has recently bought MTW but not VI, as one of many reasons to do the upgrade.

[ichi]

Gah!, I keep forgetting that not everyone is running 2.01.

As I said in another thread, VI is worth the cash, short of that run 1.1.

ichi

[littlebktruck]

Fool that I am, I'm determined to complete at least one vanilla V1.0 campaign before putting in the VI expansion. I bought the two as a pair over a year ago but a HDD fault since then meant I've had to start from scratch.

This keypress does not work in MTW v1.0, as I recently discovered.

Just thought I'd point that out for the benefit of anyone who has recently bought MTW but not VI, as one of many reasons to do the upgrade.

It does work in 1.1, however.

[edyzmedieval]

VI is definitely worth the upgrade...

New units, fixed bugs.... But most of all, improved trade....

[EatYerGreens]

Thanks for the follow-ups, guys. Nice to know even 1.1 has the fix.

But did I read somewhere that the v1.1 patch is inappropriate if you're intending to install VI right after MTW?

Or put another way, what is the correct install sequence?
Is there a different patch which I need to apply after an install sequence of MTW, <don't apply v1.1 patch>, then VI....?

[EatYerGreens]

Improved trade is something I certainly look forward to. Not just for my own benefit but to stabilise the AI sides against one another.

So far, I've only tried the English, Byzantines and Almohads. In-game glitches and HDD crashes have thus far prevented me from finishing any of them. Twice when I was the English, the Byz totally collapsed and get holed up on Rhodes. When I was the Byz, the Almos wiped the floor with Egypt, the Turks, Spain, France and UK and were busily coming east to meet me across Europe instead of from the south. Now, as the Almos, the Byz are thriving on a diet of Novgorod, Poles, Hungarians and HRE. It never makes any sense.

I hope they added a feature whereby the landlocked territories with things to trade can at least export to all neighbouring land provinces where the neighbour is neutral or allied - that would make so much more sense.

I still find it peculiar that you cannot trade with other territories belonging to your faction. Common sense says that this intra-empire trade is going on but the game regards it as 'tax-free' transactions and your treasury is unable to take advantage of it.

I would have to suppose that it's entirely in the interests of game balance in that once one side gets a slight lead in trade capacity, the snowball effect would mean that they'd just get totally out of control and be unbeatable. Or, if the player is 'winning', the endgame becomes far less of a challenge.

When you think about it, trade - and the protection of it by military means - is what the whole game is about. The trouble was that people weren't so neighbourly in those days. Once suitably tooled-up to defend what was theirs, there was an awful temptation to give them something to do other than sit around getting paid for doing nothing...

That commandment about 'not coveting thy neighbour's ass' has always struck me as a bit off the wall. So much so that, in the context of what I've just written, I can't help thinking that it was originally about his lands. Only they had to reword it in later centuries so as not to make sinners out of all of Christian soldiery as it could be taken, figuratively, to mean nations as well as literally the person owning the farm next door.