The best way to raise merhants experiense?

[Wallas]

Anyone know what is the best way to raise merchants experiense?

I have a master merchant guild in my capital and I get 3-4 skill merchants from there.

If I sit them on resources that are rather safe from other merchants it seems that they don't get any experience.

Trade wars are not an option since the AI merchants seems to level much faster and against evenly experienced merchants the trade wars are almost impossible. Even if I manage to take over AI merchants business my merchants rarely level up.

[Rothe]

So far I have found 3 ways to do it:

- Monopoly in a region: Just make sure that one resource type in one region is manned by your merchants only. For English, wine works ok, but you have to use two merchants to tackle the 2 wine resources per region. This seems to get you some positive virtues over time.

- Travel: By traveling a lot and stopping on some foreign resources for a turn on two, I seem to develop the "Knowledge of customs" chain of virtues.

- Acquisitions: Whenever you defeat another factions merchant, you are almost surely going to get more of the finance rating.

[dismal]

A question of clarification:

A "region" would be like Bordeaux?

I get a merchant on both wines in Bordeaux and I have a monopoly?

[Quillan]

We don't have access to the VnV file yet, so can't know for sure, but that sounds right. Playing Byzantium, there are two silk resources in the region with Constantinople and two in the Nicaea region. Those are all mine, and that's where I train my merchants. That particular line of traits is a 3 trait progression, so I usually park a new merchant on the silk for a while, until he gets to the +3 skill Monopolist trait, and then move them out to foreign lands.

[VAE VICTUS]

playing as denmark i have 2 merchants on the silk beside constantinople, each are bringing in 600 a turn, whats the limit to what they bring in?

[Somec]

playing as denmark i have 2 merchants on the silk beside constantinople, each are bringing in 600 a turn, whats the limit to what they bring in?

with cheats + trade rights with Byzantium (I'm playing as Russia) I have each of my 4 merchants on there bringing in 1197 per turn.
An interesting thing I noticed: Finance continues to increase the amount that merchants give even after the 10th finance level. So even though it shows only 10, having additional +finance bonuses do help. Maybe it's the same for other agents/generals?