Merchants: I'm confused again.

[Didz]

I thought I'd more or less got a handle on merchants and how they work but I've just noticed two things that I don't understand.

1) I created a Merchant in Iraklion on the island of Crete and when I collected him from the city he already had 4 stars plus the traits Mercantile Genius and Legal Nouse. Yet, all I have in Iraklion is a Grain Exchange and the only Merchant Guild I own is in Venice. I don't understand that.

2) I'm using patch 1.1 but when this same 4 star merchant went to trade the timber on Crete it only came up as 23 florins per turn and the Wine on Rhodes as 24 florins per turn which seemed a bit low given the distance they are from my Capital of Venice. I tried the capital switching trick just to make sure but it makes no difference. This might be perfectly normal, checking round the map the silk in Asia Minor is valued at around 143-285 florins for the same merchant which seems about right I was just surprised at how low the value was on wine.

I still don't understand why I got a 4 star merchant though, unless grain exchanges are better than Merchant Guilds.

[FactionHeir]

LegalTrader comes from town hall. The other thing is NaturalMerchantSkill which is random on creation 1-3.

As I posted in your other topic, the distance is irrelevant. What is relevant is which town your capitol is, as this affect the base price for all resources.
I.e. a capitol in Danish regions (or ex-danish) gives you high returns on wine but in HRE regions it does not.

[Philbert]

I understood that it is important how far the closest instance of a commodity is to your capitol. That would explain the low value of wine and timber and the high price of Silk, when your capitol is Venice. Plenty of wine and timber there.

[Didz]

@FactionHeir: So, basically I was just lucky and managed to get a natural born merchant. Plus Town Halls provide useful merchant skills.

@FactionHeir & Philbert: Thanks, that makes a lot more sense so wat I need to look for are large concentrations of resources that Venice can't obtain locally. Like Silk obviously.