Help me trade >_< !

[Kobal2fr]

In RTW, flashing trade icons meant "this is the value of trade next turn" or "when the building you just ordered is complete" or even "when those new trade rights kick in", while faded icons meant "you just lost that much income for some reason".

I thought it worked the same way in M2, but I now believe that the flashing part actually means "this is the most income you can possibly expect from one more building", i.e. if you can build merchant warfs, paved roads, great market and bigger port, the flashing part will show what the better of those options will do (without telling you which one it is) should you build it.

Othewise, trade works pretty much the way it worked in Rome/MTW : each province has a number of ressources available, and each ressource has a base value you earn whenever it can reach another province without that ressource. That base value is modified by distance, ownership of the province, trade rights and so on. You also get a fraction of that value when you're on the receiving end of trade.

In my experience, domestic sea commerce soars up considerably when you have a "fragmented" empire, i.e. not only are the provinces far from each other, but not connected because there's a rebels/factions betwen them. So you'll get muchas pesetas crusading, because those Levant provinces will trade with your home provinces and the distance alone makes it worthwile, even though admitedly you'd probably make more by trading with another faction. I expect domestic trade between Europe and the New World to be extreme for that same reason.

I also believe that buildings which improve trade values affect the income from merchants sitting on ressources, but so far I haven't been able to determine wether only those building in your capital affect this (since ressource values are based on distance to your capital) or if it's a grand total factor from all of your settlements.

As to your second question, well, early and high units do not differ that much in defense stats, and the gap is pretty much closed with armor tech (although, of course, high units can be upgraded further) so that, statwise, a fully upgraded early unit is equal to a later unupgraded one. I believe late units are a different story though.

That said, apparently stats alone do not tell much in M2 (see other threads on this issue) so maybe later units still come out on top in some as-yet unknown way. Also, and this bothers me, you can't know how far you can upgrade one unit's armor - some can go all the way from nothing to heavy chain, while some will only accept one upgrade if that, so without knowledge of the game you can't know which early units are keepers, and which will soon become obsolete :/

[andrewt]

I also noticed that they rebalanced land vs. sea trade. Land trade has been buffed by a lot. In RTW, I've only gained around 200-300. Now, Venice was trading at 400-500+ with Vienna. Also, sea trade isn't as lucrative. Constantinople traded for around 1k, maybe more, back in RTW. Now, it's around 700. The range of sea trade is a lot lower, too. I took Cyprus and it wasn't trading with Rhodes and Crete. Its range was limited to the provinces close to it.

There seem to be fewer trade resources in the overpowered RTW provinces as well. Corinth and Smyrna don't have resources at all. The Greek part of the Med isn't as lucrative as it was in RTW. It's still really rich, but nowhere as high as RTW.

Those are the examples that currently come to mind.