effects of multiple gentlemen or multiple trade ships?

Really this is 2 questions -

Gentlemen - I have 3 of em now in England and so I park them all at Oxford. My research proceeds at one item at a time but it doesn't seem to speed up production time to have 3 gents at the school. What can I do with my extra gentlemen if they can't research more then one thing at a time?

Trade ships - when I park more then one trade ship on a trade node do I make more money? How much money am I making? Do larger trade ships make more money then smaller ones? I can't figure out how to calculate this.

Thanks for any answers.

You should see the effects of these yourself. Take out all the gentlemen from the school. Look to see how long a particular tech takes to research. Put them back in; you will see it will decrease in time to get that tech. The more the merrier.


Mouse over the trade route coming from the node. It tells you the value of the goods on that route. Sometimes though, the route contains a few nodes... in that cae:

Mouse over the trade node itself. It tells you how many units the trade node is shipping. Multiply that by the value of the commodity as found on the trade tab of the government pannel. Add more ships and watch the commodity value drop... but watch the number of units go up. Do the math to determine cost/benefits.

3 @ $3 = 9.
4 @ $2 = 8.

gentlemen- different gentlemen can have different effect on research speed (some are good at military, industrial, and social research ) if you don't need those gentlemen you can steal your rival technology, duel, boost the town repression

trade ships-you make more money if you park more (trade) ship. the amount of income from trade nodes will determined by
* number of trade ship
* trade material
* the price of the material at the market (check often as the price will occationally change)

Originally Posted by UdiHrant

Trade ships - when I park more then one trade ship on a trade node do I make more money? How much money am I making? Do larger trade ships make more money then smaller ones? I can't figure out how to calculate this.

Not necessarily, its not as simple as that.

First of all Trade Ships don't make money at all, all they do is provide imported goods to the trade ports of your home nation.

In order to turn these goods into money you must sell them on to other factions through the negotiation of Trade Agreements. The amount of money you make from them being determined by the amount that you manage to sell (which is determined by the level of demand from your Trade Partners) and the value shown for that item in the Trade Panel (which is determined by the amount of that type of goods being traded worldwide).

Secondly, the amount of any trade goods imported by each ship of a trade fleet drops according to the size of the fleet. A single ship carries more than the same ship in a maximum fleet of 14 ships. The reduction does not dimish evenly but in steps,

So taking the Ivory Coast for example:

1 Ship will import 20 x Ivory per turn with a unit value of 26 gold, which if realised by selling it will net 520 gold per turn, for a cost of 48 gold in maintaining the trade ship. Return on Investment = 98.3%

10 ships on the same trade port will import 137 x Ivory per turn (only 13.7 per ship), the unit value will have dropped to 21 gold, so the maximum income you will recieve is 2,877 gold assuming you manage to sell it all. Less 480 gold in maintaining the fleet. Return on Investment = 49.9%

Nor, is every trade theatre of equal value. Quite apart from the obvious differences in the value of Ivory, Spices and Sugar (Note: Spices and Sugar have competition from plantations meaning that the price tends to drop as colonial trade expands.) But also ships trading with Madagascar tend to carry slightly more cargo than ships trading with the Ivory Coast.

So, taking a fleet of 10 ships as the mean size of fleet the return on investment varies as follows.

Ivory Coast = 49.9% per turn
East Indies = 51.3% per turn
Madagascar = 64.3% per turn
Brazil = 35.6%

As you can see the most profitable trade theatre is Madagascar (all other things being equal) and the least is Brazil. Shipment loads from Brazil are low, and the price of Sugar drops rapidly once the Sugar Islands begin exporting, though the extent this has an impact depends on the choices made by you and the AI for plantation crops.

Note: That income will drop significantly if your goods cannot be delivered to your trade partners because their ports are no longer open as a result of a blockade by their enemies.

So, ideally one would trade with peaceful nations that do not go to war, or with nations that have powerful fleets and can avoid being blockaded. Importing goods is pointless if you can't deliver them to your trade partners ports despite having a Trade Agreement with them.