Unrelenting Psycho Merchants

[nafod]

I always play H/H and have pretty decent success using merchants as Spain, Sicily, Byzantine Empire and the Turks. With the French and English the wine resources in france seemed to provide the most bang for the buck and chance of monopolist. However the unrelenting psycho merchants mentioned by the OP had field days with my merchants.

So in came strategy #2.

Assassins. A skill 3 assassin generally has 95% success rates against all merchants. 2 of them were able to keep western europe clear of any rough competition.

[ReiseReise]

The AI merchants may get an advantage on H or VH but I doubt it is very much, maybe 20%. A level 5 merchant probably has a 60-70% chance of acquiring a level 3. IIRC if they have the same skill, the 'attacker' has 40% chance. Your observation of every AI merchant defeating yours almost every time is a classic symptom of gamblers (players of games with random elements). Very common among poker and backgammon players. Google "FIBS random dice" and read the thousands of complaints from backgammon players who swear up and down that the dice are rigged against them, or that too many doubles are rolled, etc etc. People make the same complaints about GNUBG (a backgammon trainer/analyzer) but it is OPEN SOURCE and anyone can view the dice code and see that it is in fact random. Also, the definition of a good backgammon player is one who creates positions where the largest portion of the 36 possible rolls are good for them, and the smallest portion is good for their opponent, thus making them seem luckier because the good player might have 18 rolls that they can use effectively, and their opponent only has 5. Next turn comes and 50% of the time the good player 'gets lucky' because they made 'the roll' that allows them to hit some blot, make some point, escape some back man, when in fact they set their checkers up to be able to do any one of those several things depending how the dice fell. I am rambling WAY off topic, so.....

To the point - the human mind likes to play tricks on you when it comes to random events, remembering all the times when you had stressful emotions due to a bad run of luck, and forgetting all the 'normal' times and good runs. I'm not saying its not possible the AI doesn't cheat, but if it does, it is a set advantage and not "the AI wins 90% of the time no matter what"

Sorry about the ramble.

[Zarky]

To acquire Monopolist line traits you must have 2 identical resources in province, but if other one of them is used by foreing merchant, then you don´t get the points.
That´s why France is excellent: there are lots of wine and within province they´re all under 1 turns reach, and some visible without watchtowers.
So you need 2 same resources, and be only merchant within province to trade that resource.