Hi. This my first post at TotalWar.org First off, please forgive me if I am not posting the following question in the correct place. While I have attempted to familiarize myself with the forum's regulations and general etiquette (being that I am a newcomer and want to be warmly received and continue to avail myself of the forum's resources), I must confess that my examination of the rules has not been exhaustive (and I may have missed something). I also hope that you will have a bit patience for my basic questions. Anyway....

I've only been playing the single-player MTW2 for about a week and exclusively as the HRE (I'm assuming this is the commonly used abbrevaition used here for the Holy Roman empire). I used the forum's search function, but could not find much about the specifics of strategy for effectively utilizing merchants. In my relatively short playing experience, I have found it enormously difficult to use them advantageously. I quickly learned that sending 'rookie' merchants to far-flung lands is ineffective; they are almost invariably rubbed out by the competition (this was not surprising to me). "No problem," I thought to myself, "I'll just build my merchants up for success by having them develop experience through plying their trade close to home and on comparatively small return resources (5 to 10 florin per turn). Then, when they are more seasoned, I'll send them progressively farther away and to seek out more valuable resources" Simple plan for success, right?

Wrong...I've found that even merchants deployed in regions adjacent to my territory (either friendly or neutral faction controlled land) are routinely and frequently scythed down within the first two turns of their existence. There is precious little opportunity to 'groom' my merchants; rather I suspect their initial deployment is more akin to the landing craft doors being opened up on the beaches of Normandy: rapid and unavoidable annihilation (I mean the comparison only in a figurative sense and don't mean to offend anyway). This phenomenon is all the more perplexing and frustrating, because this happens even to 'graduates' of the first-level merchant guild (that I am invariably offered pretty early in the game though I do little to attract one. And granted, I realize that the benefits of an initial guild are likely modest, but I would expect them to have some impact on merchant peformance). I find that out of five to seven merchants that I deploy, I am lucky if a single one survives to build up a decent amount of experience (several filled in circles on his attribute card). In my best case scenario, once I had a merchant live to earn 117 florin per turn working in Polish territory. This was a rare exception, though. And I should note that even in this case, the merchant was well into middle-age by the time he accrued enough experience to the point where it was presumably unlikley he would be rubbed out. And he died not to much later:(

In short, as a new player, I have not found that using merchants passes the proverbial cost/benefit test. At five hundred apiece, and the conservative/highly optimistic assumption that one in four will survive to bring back one hundred and fifty florin per year for twenty turns, that's still only a total return of three thousand florin for my initial investment (and a profit of a lousy thousand florin). I can better invest my funds into building troops, developing infrastructure; things that I suspect will help my overall cause more, especially in the early stages of the game (I know, duhh.....) In short, merchies offer too much risk for too little reward.

It's really a shame, because unlike what I've read in some forums/reviews (the criticism that merhants are a dull and boring addition to gameplay in MTW2), I really do like their concept! I don't mind doing the busywork of checking up on them/doing the legwork for turn after turn. The problem is that they just don't help me:(

Maybe, I'm just an idiot and other players have had more success using merchants? I don't know where I'm going wrong. Maybe someone will write a guide/primer on 'Merchant Startegy' here on this forum someday. But if most players think that merchants are as lackluster as what I've heard, I doubt it. But one can only hope, right?:) Thanks for your time and ideas!