How do I stop merchant pwnage?

[Vasquez]

I think I am focusing more on replacing merchants from hostile take overs and hunting down the perps with my finest assassins than building an empire. Much of the reason is my merchants graduate from community colleges where the AI merchants have MBA's from Yale school of business.

How can I correct this imbalance.?:hmmm:

[Wolfgrin]

You're right. The AI merchants apparently went to Donald Trump University while your own barely graduated high school.

I went into the character traits file and bumped the "Good with Money" trait to a +2, just to get my merchants off on the right start. In the early game, when merchants can make or break your economy, it's death to send a zero or one star merchant into the world. Worse is that they seem to collect mostly negative traits in SS 6.1.

[Serious J]

Do what I do and skip the pain in the arse that is the merchant system and just add_money an honest approximate amount of what a few decent merchants would gain each turn. Save yourself the trouble.

[Quark]

Vasquez
Only build your merchants from your best city, with a town hall in it, this gets you a Merchants Guild, and so Merchants start with 3-6 points, if the Ai can do it, and it gets no aid in this from the files btw, players can.

Or as Serious J says, cheat, its down to playing style and house rules I guess.

[Vindahl]

I am not certain if this old trick works, but you can try and build a fort on top of the ressource, or just simply place your merchant together with a group of peasants or whatever low-class unit you have, and march the army over the ressource...
Then you will not be thrown away by enemy merchants...

Another thing that is more "tactical" is to move your merchants to africa and the middle east. There are better ressources there, and a lot less merchants than in Central France for examble...

[Maniacal]

Do what I do and skip the pain in the arse that is the merchant system and just add_money an honest approximate amount of what a few decent merchants would gain each turn. Save yourself the trouble.

Pretty much what I do, managing an economy is too annoying, all I want to do is fight. As well I'm sick to death of having my merchants travels stopped for a turn by a princess or one unit army. It's even worse with ships >_<

Wish there was an option to dismiss/execute crappy stat merchants, spies, etc.

[Darviathar]

Quite honestly, as a faction such as England, I don't even bother with merchants early on. The AI is *going* to hunt them down, and at 550 gold per merchant, with 1 or 2 star ratings and "farming" crappy resources, they simply aren't cost effective. I wait until I've upgraded my economy to the point I can afford them.

With Byzantium or Venice, I don't have this problem as much. Wealth flows into the capital city, and the merchants seem to learn their trade quickly. I rarely lose on to NPC aggression.

[lesterthenerd]

Quite honestly, as a faction such as England, I don't even bother with merchants early on. The AI is *going* to hunt them down, and at 550 gold per merchant, with 1 or 2 star ratings and "farming" crappy resources, they simply aren't cost effective. I wait until I've upgraded my economy to the point I can afford them.

With Byzantium or Venice, I don't have this problem as much. Wealth flows into the capital city, and the merchants seem to learn their trade quickly. I rarely lose on to NPC aggression.

well i always build merchants early on in SS as any faction. i remember in vanilla i never did this as 99 percent of the time they would get hunted down lol. but in SS the chances of merchants being hunted down is reduced, at least that has been my experience so far. if you manage to get a high level merchant early on make sure to hunt down other merchants who are easily able to take over your lower merchant's resources.

when theres a 24% chance of my merchant succeeding in taking over another merchants assets and he fails i i just reload lol xd.

[jetlee81]

edit descr_campaign_db.xml
find merchant_min_survival_acquire change it to 99
they wont attack you any more
or find acquisition_chance_max int and lower it.

[spotlight2001]

to reduce hostile takeovers:

mod this file: descr_campaign_db.xml

reduce this two values

<acquisition_base_chance float="xxx"/>
<acquisition_level_modifier float="xxx"/>

this works for ALL factions

---

or if you like high level merchants:

mod file: export_descr_character_traits.txt
add: (replace hre with whatever faction you play)


;------------------------------------------
Trigger wm-merchant1
WhenToTest CharacterTurnEnd

Condition AgentType = merchant
and FactionType hre

Affects GoodMerchant 22 Chance 100
Affects NaturalMerchantSkill 22 Chance 100
Affects Monopolist 22 Chance 100
Affects LegalDealer 22 Chance 100
Affects SecureMerchant 22 Chance 100
Affects WorldlyMerchant 22 Chance 100
Affects HighPersonalSecurity 22 Chance 100
Affects MerchantsGuildMember 22 Chance 100
Affects MerchantsGuildTrained 22 Chance 100

;------------------------------------------

[murph]

What really annoys me is that when I get my 2 coin merchant to seize another 2 coin merchant I have a 1/5 chance to suceed. This is nonsense, it should be a 1/2 chance if both merchants are of the same skill. It's the same with priest vs heretic. How do I fix this sort of thing?

[tup]

Vasquez
Only build your merchants from your best city, with a town hall in it, this gets you a Merchants Guild, and so Merchants start with 3-6 points, if the Ai can do it, and it gets no aid in this from the files btw, players can.

Or as Serious J says, cheat, its down to playing style and house rules I guess.

Town Hall? Really? I got my guilds without Town Halls being built. And about the guild I don't like that in the early game I get lots of 0-1 star merchants anyways, despite having guild and some market thing. It only starts to kick in when I have the headquarters and a large market like bazaar. In my experience there's quite a gap in merchant quality.

What really annoys me is that when I get my 2 coin merchant to seize another 2 coin merchant I have a 1/5 chance to suceed. This is nonsense, it should be a 1/2 chance if both merchants are of the same skill. It's the same with priest vs heretic. How do I fix this sort of thing?

That really sucks, but I don't think it's bad like that with priests... at least my priests have a reasonable chance to kill a heretic even with only say 33%.
I can have quite a high merchant, if I try to acquire a low star merchant, it says 40%, despite mine having double times the skill and the acquisition backfires anyways. But I guess it's the same for the AI, because in older versions AI merchants own the player ones. With 6.1 I can move my merchants on resources and the AI ones just move away, no more ninja acquisition.

[Quark]

tup
Perhaps I should have used a semi-colon; building lots of merchants from a city with a Town Hall, aquires you better merchants and points towards a Merchants Guild, which leads to better Merchants.

murph
The title implies the poster wants a reduced chance of merchants aquiring each other, so 20% is better from their point of view. As said the Ai does not have the magic of reload, so plays it safe and moves away, hence less Ai merchant wars.

[lesterthenerd]

well i just reload.

[s0meguy]

I built a lot of merchant buildings in my advanced cities, and cheap ones in my other cities (they only add 1 merchant slot until you upgrade them like 4 times). So I'm getting 8-10 star merchants from my advanced cities. They're good for income, some resources go over 1000 a turn.

I really recommend not to cheat, it makes the game so much more boring.