Quote Originally Posted by Didz View Post
The thing that surprises and disappoints me most about these results is that, even when the player deliberately restricts his own expliotation of the trade zones, the AI is completely incapable of making proper use of the opportunity.

In theory, up to five AI controlled factions could and should have been able to match Britains performance in terms of trade revenue, and yet the only one that comes close is Portugal which manages to make 1,682 per turn, compared to my 11,727.
The part of the AI that deals with trade nodes is REALLY crappy... Whenever I fight a stack of AI's ships on the nodes I find out that most of the ships there are war ships not earning any revenue.

AI factions lose trade ships while auto-fighting pirates/other AI factions. On several occasions I've fought AI's 5-10 ship stacks near Europe/in the Mediterranean, which were composed entirely of Indiamen. For some reason, AI fails to send these to the trade theaters and rather uses Indiamen stacks as warships whereas real warships end up sitting on trade nodes. I guess, sloppy
AI logic (lack of it) is behind that absurdity.

Another factor that does not help AI build economy is abundance of fishing and war ports, severely limiting AI's trading capacity and making it's trade very risky since a single boat can destroy/block the entire trade of a faction owning a single trading harbor.