Help with merchants..

[chinkecheese]

all of my merchants SUCK partly because i have 1-2 finance... I even have the fairgrounds, but they're still bad compared to the AI merchants who have 6-7 finance.

How do I fix this?

[dr_guerra]

Let them generate on some cheap resource for a bit, they'll gain some finance over time, then use them to acquire foreign merchants, which will increase your skill, AND give you a merchant's guild later on, so you can produce better merchants off the bat.

[Lunes]

Again. This is not the place. This is the home of the democracy game. Sorry.

[Strom]

Every time you train merchants in a particular city it gets points towards a merchant's guild, but these points decay over time. So in order to get a merchant's guild as soon as possible you want to try and train all of your merchants from one city, and a moderately large one at that and build as many merchant-style buildings as you can too. And have a lot of cities with merchant buildings in them so you can support a lot of merchants...

Once you have merchants they gain skills whilst sitting on resources. If you have merchants covering all of the resources in a region (e.g. on every Ivory resource around Timbuktu) then they normally get the monopolist skill pretty quickly which gives them (I think) +2 finance.

They also get better attributes when they are further away, in foreign lands, and (again, I think) when they're sitting on more valuable resources.

I honestly don't know how the AI gets such good merchants but I try not to engage in merchant wars if I can avoid it. Killing three enemy merchants generally isn't worth losing a good merchant of your own, and generally I'd rather lose an assassin or two than a veteran merchant. The opportunity cost of having to tran up a new merchant is huge. However I think that acquiring an enemy merchant gives all of your cities a boost towards the merchant's guild so if you like doing it, there is some benefit to be had...

[The Noble Lord]

all of my merchants SUCK partly because i have 1-2 finance... I even have the fairgrounds, but they're still bad compared to the AI merchants who have 6-7 finance.

How do I fix this?

Hi,


First send your merchants to the far away places like Timbouktue, Islands in Baltic, and Northern Russia. Send them there with 2 or 3 assassins. Because those places are so isolated you merchants should work unmolested, but in case if other merchants approach you unleash your assassins at them. If one misses, the other two will get him. Even though the place itself is isolated, it is very important to have round the clock protection. That way your merchants will make income and gain experience, which in turn will allow you to build merchants guildfrom which you can get much better merchants. Then the drill is pretty much the same, you send them to those isolated places again and the assassins too. They will be able to work and make income which in Southern Sahara can come up to 2-3.000 florins per turn. And nobody can touch them because of the "bodyguards" that they have and because of their experience.


CHEERS