Merchants, religous men, agents in general

[ageboy20]

Seems sort of silly to post this as i sort of know the answer but easiest way to boost merchants and agents in general?? what has worked for ppl??

[Djangoo]

IN General: only recruit in cities with master guild (imo especially improtant for merchants)

For merchants:

If I get a bad merchant later in game (<4 or 5 stars) I kill him of by sending him to a strong AI merchant to take over

For Assasins/spies:

use rebel stacks to train them

For priests: as christian faction, sending them to a 100% controlled islam region has worked great for me, they usually get almost max piety and will get ordered to be cardinals. 5+ of them in the holy land and you will be able to select next pope guaranteed

[AGaming]

Getting a Master Theologians Guild in your city seems to spawn off almost max pious Priests straight away.

[Mr. ZAP]

Cathedrals + Master Theologians Guild (HQs are even better) will generally mean a base of five or six piety for every recruited priest in the city because they get lots of nice ancillaries. If you keep them in one spot for awhile they also get the Monk ancillary which increases piety. And as already mentioned if you send them to high heresy/opposing religion areas they'll get missionary traits.

Train spies and assassins on captains and low level enemy agents.

Training from a guild is always better regardless of agent type. Makes me a bit annoyed that they don't have one for Diplomats. An embassy or something.

[junglist5]

Just wanna add in some info for merchants.

The best way to get good merchants is to develop the Merchant Guild line (Build Markets, Merchant Wharf, Spam Merchants from a particular town), the Market line, the Town Hall line, and to avoid building any churches in that settlement. In addition, you can try the "reload prince" strategy and keep reloading your saves until your agent manages to take over another Merchant's business.

[ageboy20]

avoid churches?? never heard of that. interesting.

[Landtuber]

Check out the merchants guide in my signature. It's old, but still has some good info!

[Mr. ZAP]

avoid churches?? never heard of that. interesting.

This is because provinces with high religion levels will sometimes give the merchants the "Quite Religious" trait which lowers their finance level. I usually build churches anyway because the advantages to having high religious levels usually outweigh the disadvantages. IMO Merchants aren't that important until the late game anyway.

[Harakan]

This is because provinces with high religion levels will sometimes give the merchants the "Quite Religious" trait which lowers their finance level. I usually build churches anyway because the advantages to having high religious levels usually outweigh the disadvantages. IMO Merchants aren't that important until the late game anyway.

in another thread i read something similar about diplomats. I cant recall if it was a guide like Lantuber's (nice1 btw) or just a thread. It was said you shouldn't train diplomats in a city with an important religious building.

so the advise was to have one city for recruiting diplomats focussed on buildings like city halls without churches and aonther one for merchants with markets (obviously) and a merchant guild.
I actually dont do that, i build churches to the highest level whenever possible. I feel that at some point one or two stars for an agent arent that important..