Trade companies

[Firstround]

When making a trade company should you include all provinces in the state or just one with a high price like spices or gems?

[Totally Innocent Chatbot]

First priority on where you set up trade companies should be how much Trade Power the provinces have, such as from Centers of Trade, Estuaries, or high Production development, rather than the value of the trade good present there. It is worthwhile to TC the entire area, as Trade Company provinces are significantly better than basic Territories, and you cannot fully state an area that has a Trade Company province without removing that province from the Trade Company.


A common strategy is to simply dump every single province outside of the subcontinent where your capital is into TC's. However, in some cases it may be more effective to strike a balance between TC's and full states. Specifically, aim to put enough provinces into Trade Companies so that over 51% of the trade company region's Trade Power is in Trade Companies - this is the threshold at which you gain an additional Merchant from that Trade Company, and you can view how close you are to it in each trade company region in the Subjects tab.

One of the less often talked-about features of Trade Companies is that they give a scaling Goods Produced bonus to every single province in their trade company region that is NOT part of a Trade Company, regardless of province ownership. The value of this Goods Produced bonus scales with the percentage of the Trade Power in that trade company region that is within Trade Company provinces, as well as how many Institutions the Trade Company owner has embraced, meaning it grows stronger the later into the game you are. Because of this, it may be possible to get a higher overall value out of a region from selectively TC'ing a couple areas where the bulk of the Trade Power is located and full stating the rest, rather than simply TC'ing everything indiscriminately.

[cayenne_spicy]

I usually select a specific state as the "primary target" state for a TC in a given trade region based on the following criteria:

1. Every province in the state will yield a base of 4 trade power before modifiers and development, due to a TC building you can (and should) build there. That means the state will yield 8-20 base trade power depending on how many provinces it has.
2. You can have only one Tier 3 Center of Trade (COT) per state, so if there's more than one COT in the state - which is great if so - one of them will yield 25 trade power and any others will yield 10 (the amount a Tier 2 COT gives).
3. Estuaries give +5 to +10 per instance, and a few places have other transferable effects that give +10 or more. Most effects you can see on the Trade Map aren't transferable, though. For example, if you see a Trade Post, it'll be giving +10 to the province owner, but it isn't transferable, so if you conquer that province it'll disappear.

Using those basic numbers you can figure out what the best state for a TC may be in the trade region, provided that you can secure the entire state under your control. Even then, you may still not be able to reach 51% with just the one state. It will depend on how many COT there are in the trade region, what their tier is, and who owns them. It'll also depend on your own other trade power development in the region outside of the TC. For example, if you have a COT that isn't in that TC and it's Tier 2 with a Marketplace on it, that's helping your overall control of trade power in the region - good - but it's also causing a greater ratio of the overall trade power of the region to NOT be located in your TC - bad - and so you may be able to raise the TC's share by downgrading other COT you control in the region, removing Marketplaces, etc.

You could also just add a second state to the TC, in which case you'll want to do the math again to determine which one would be the most potent addition. Ideally you want as few states as possible in your TC, though, because of that goods produced benefit. If you can make proper states out of those non-TC states to reap the most benefit of the extra goods produced, you'll start swimming in ducats.

[Marquoz]

One benefit of provinces in TCs that hasn't been mentioned yet is their GC cost. A province in a TC with a town hall (the courthouse upgrade) costs the absolute minimum in GC, 1%. This is the same as your capital.

If you play a broad game (and I almost always do), that added benefit is more than enough to tilt the scales in favor of TC'ing everything but gold.

[cayenne_spicy]

Originally posted by Marquoz:

One benefit of provinces in TCs that hasn't been mentioned yet is their GC cost. A province in a TC with a town hall (the courthouse upgrade) costs the absolute minimum in GC, 1%. This is the same as your capital.

If you play a broad game (and I almost always do), that added benefit is more than enough to tilt the scales in favor of TC'ing everything but gold.

Note though that under normal circumstances, the GC cost of a TC province is the same as the GC cost of a half-state province, but the half-state province has 50% base minimum autonomy compared to 90% for the TC province. The effect of a courthouse or town hall on the GC cost would therefore yield the same GC cost but the half-state province would be more productive in all respects.

[Marquoz]

Except that half states don't give you bonus merchants. Or benefit from the superb TC buildings. Half states are the worst of all worlds.

[Jean-Maurice Nya]

The only reason I don't build a trade company is having to expand on places that are not on your continent early. If you make a trade company, it won't give as much land force limit and manpower which could cripple your army a bit. So, I state those places until I'm strong enough to take more lands on my continent and then change those early states into trade companies.
Other than that, I don't see why I shouldn't make a trade company to get richer.

[Totally Innocent Chatbot]

Originally posted by cayenne_spicy:

Originally posted by Marquoz:

One benefit of provinces in TCs that hasn't been mentioned yet is their GC cost. A province in a TC with a town hall (the courthouse upgrade) costs the absolute minimum in GC, 1%. This is the same as your capital.

If you play a broad game (and I almost always do), that added benefit is more than enough to tilt the scales in favor of TC'ing everything but gold.

Note though that under normal circumstances, the GC cost of a TC province is the same as the GC cost of a half-state province, but the half-state province has 50% base minimum autonomy compared to 90% for the TC province. The effect of a courthouse or town hall on the GC cost would therefore yield the same GC cost but the half-state province would be more productive in all respects.

TC's, however, halve the effect of local autonomy on Production income (so a stated autonomy of 90% actually works as though it were only 45%), and eliminate it entirely on Trade Value/Trade Power. Tax is virtually irrelevant beyond the early 1500's, so unless you're desperately hurting for manpower, Trade Company provinces are going to be significantly better for you than half states. Once you're able to dump thousands of ducats into their local investments at your leisure, they may even come out better than full states.

The one advantage of half states is to get some early benefit out of land you plan on full stating, but just don't quite have the Admin mana or governing capacity yet to do so.

[cayenne_spicy]

EDIT: If you read this already when originally posted, the conclusion has been amended.

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Once you have a bonus merchant for a trade region and have a comfortable threshold so as not to lose the merchant (~60%), adding other provinces to that TC doesn't get you more merchants.

In the game I'm currently playing, let's look at the TC province Gulbarga (a 4/4/2 province) as an example and do some math. We'll look first at Local Production, since I have a Company Depot and Broker's Exchange building in that TC, and the province has a Workshop and a Farm Estate (the trade good is Grain - I didn't build it, the AI did, I just didn't remove it).

Trade Value in the province is 5.98, due to the value of the trade good (grain) being 2.00 multiplied by Local Goods Produced of 2.99. Divided by 12, that gets a rounded Trade Value of .498 per month.

Production Efficiency is a total of +198%, which includes the 50% from the Company Depot and 50% from the Broker's Exchange both contributing, so we multiply that .498 by 2.98 to get 1.484 as what our monthly Production Income should be, except it's further depleted by 45% due to 90% Autonomy, so we have to multiply that by .55 to get the final result of .8162 per month, or .82 which is what the UI shows as Production Income for that province.

Following the same math in the same province as a half-state, we have Trade Value in the province of 5.11 (it's less due to not having the .30 base goods produced from the TC building), giving a monthly Trade Value of .426 per month. Production Efficiency drops to +.98% after we lose the two TC buildings, so we multiply that .426 by 1.98 to get .844 as what our monthly Production Income should be, depleted by 50% due to 50% Autonomy, so the final result is .42 per month. So the TC province earns an additional .40 per month compared to the half-stated province.

Let's look at Tax Income next. In the TC, with a District built, we have a yearly base of 4.00 and Tax Income Efficiency of 180%. There's no Temple built here, because it'd be silly to build one on a TC province. 4 multipled by 1.80 (unlike Production, there isn't a base 1 to add to this, it's not +180%, it's just straight 180%) is a gross annual Tax Income from the province of 7.2, but 90% Autonomy hits that directly for 90% loss, so the net Tax Income annually is only .72, or .06 per month.

Following the same math for a half-state, we'll also add 40% to the Tax Income Efficiency because if this wasn't a TC province, we'd build a Temple instead of a Marketplace. But we also lose 50% because we don't have the District anymore, so Tax Income Efficiency becomes 170%. That results in a gross annual of 6.8, cut in half for 50% Autonomy is a net annual of 3.4, or .28 per month. That's a difference of .22 in favor of the half state province.

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EDIT: - I've removed my original conclusion since a point I hadn't noticed regarding TCs halving the malus to production from Autonomy made a significant difference in the total income of the TC province versus the half-state province. It's never bad to be wrong if you learned something from it. That said, I originally noted that achieving the results in a TC state requires an investment of a base cost of 1200 ducats into that state for the TC buildings, and so it's not cut-and-dry as to whether the return on investment will be profitable over time.

To explain that if you're not sure what that means, if the total improvement in the entire state by spending the 1200 ducats in a TC state (versus 0 ducats spent in a half-stated state) yielded 2 total statewide ducats per month, divide that into the investment cost of 1200 ducats to see that it'd take 600 months - 50 years - for that investment to repay itself. Prior to that point, you'd have actually lost money. After that point, you're actually earning that 2 ducats per month. If the swing is greater than 2 ducats per month you'll be in profit faster, and slower if it's less.

It's also worth noting that until such time as you've actually made those investments, the half-stated state would only yield very slightly less production income, and a bunch more tax income, so it's probably best to keep the state in half-stated form until you have the 1200 ducats stored up to drop into those TC buildings right away before switching it to a TC state, unless you happen to need it as a TC state sooner for the sake of securing your merchant in the trade region.

[cayenne_spicy]

Originally posted by Totally Innocent Chatbot:

TC's, however, halve the effect of local autonomy on Production income (so a stated autonomy of 90% actually works as though it were only 45%), and eliminate it entirely on Trade Value/Trade Power.

This bit I actually hadn't noticed before. But I admit I tend to end up having gobs of GC and so I don't lack for having full states most of the time. That'd definitely swing in favor of a TC if the player invested hard in that TC state with manufactories and TC buildings. But I'd still think that a low-investment state would be better off as a half-state than a TC, particularly since you could still toggle that into a TC later without having wasted any admin power.

Originally posted by Totally Innocent Chatbot:

Tax is virtually irrelevant beyond the early 1500's

This bit also depends heavily on choices made by the player. It's often the case, agreed, but I regularly see it stated as if it's a hard rule of fact, and it isn't necessarily. It's possible to build for tax, although it isn't for every country or every playstyle to make that work.

[RCMidas]

There's a certain irony to that the fact that, if you are able to minmax the right bonuses, a Trade Company can actually be MORE productive than a full state.

[Marquoz]

Originally posted by Totally Innocent Chatbot:

Originally posted by cayenne_spicy:

Note though that under normal circumstances, the GC cost of a TC province is the same as the GC cost of a half-state province, but the half-state province has 50% base minimum autonomy compared to 90% for the TC province. The effect of a courthouse or town hall on the GC cost would therefore yield the same GC cost but the half-state province would be more productive in all respects.

TC's, however, halve the effect of local autonomy on Production income (so a stated autonomy of 90% actually works as though it were only 45%), and eliminate it entirely on Trade Value/Trade Power. Tax is virtually irrelevant beyond the early 1500's, so unless you're desperately hurting for manpower, Trade Company provinces are going to be significantly better for you than half states. Once you're able to dump thousands of ducats into their local investments at your leisure, they may even come out better than full states.

Yup. With the exception of gold provinces, which follow their own rules, TCs are potentially the game's most productive. Stating your home subcontinent and constructing the correct buildings there should give you all the manpower (important for the first third of the game) and tax income (less meaningful, but it matters early) you'll ever need. TCs do the rest--production, trade, bonus merchants, minimal GC.