Question about Trade routes...

[shaosc3]

I love this game and played it extensively many years ago, but always had been slightly bothered by how Eurocentric the trade routes system works, basically trades only flow from East to West but never the other way around.

Is that still how the game works, and is there any mod that provides more varieties on trade routes?

[Mason]

The name of this game means "Europe Everywhere".

..And if Beijing or Hangzhou was an end-node they'd have to figure out a plausible way for the chesapeake bay node trade to end up in China.

[BlueBangkok]

This is how the game works. It's an abstract simplification of trade routes which work reasonably well in the game. You can imagine that West to East trade is represented by routing and collecting trade income in Asian node(s) in the game itself.

AFAIK there are no mod that would change the trade system and make it more realistic. Trade node mods usually focus on revamping and re-structuring current flow - i.e. there might be some mods with Asian end points, but trade system fundamentally stays the same.

[Elendir Blue]

The unchanging (except total conquest) advantage of countries sitting in some trading nodes over others has long been known.

Howevere, the way trade was implemented did not allow any upgrade. I am hoping, that EU5 will prepare more dynamic trade, so you will be allowed drag trade to your country if you become the hegemon.

Eurocentrism, by the way, is not a very precise term. There is a lot of places in europe of EU4, where you are totally screwed trade-vise and you need to conquer and move trade center to better trade nodes. So trade nodes and their unbalancing is more about historical trade winners, than about europe.

[grognardgary]

Between 1500 and 1900 almost all ocean going trade was being done by European. Japan had sealed itself off from the outside world and China was content to rely on the increasingly defunct silk road for external trade what little they did. The ascendance of England as a trading empire and it's primary policy of making sure every other European was too busy jacking with each other then with them under the Pitts and their predecessors pretty much guaranteed that Britain would dominate the sea lanes while everyone else was busily engages in one form of fratricide or the other.

[Malvastor]

Originally posted by shaosc3:

I love this game and played it extensively many years ago, but always had been slightly bothered by how Eurocentric the trade routes system works, basically trades only flow from East to West but never the other way around.

Is that still how the game works, and is there any mod that provides more varieties on trade routes?

Unfortunately it is; I believe the devs said at one point that it wasn't really feasible to rework the trade system to something more dynamic.

Originally posted by Mason:

The name of this game means "Europe Everywhere".

Doesn't mean the game can't reflect history. The timeframe covered is Europe's ascension to dominance; it shouldn't really start out hardcoded as dominant.

Originally posted by Mason:

..And if Beijing or Hangzhou was an end-node they'd have to figure out a plausible way for the chesapeake bay node trade to end up in China.

Shouldn't be a problem. It could flow to Ivory Coast (maybe to Europe first) and then Cape, or to Panama then Polynesian Triangle then the Philippines.

This would even be somewhat realistic as a lot of the silver the Spanish took out of the New World wound up in China in exchange for Asian goods- that was the importance of Manila and the Philippines for them, it was a critical stopover for galleons full of silver from Potosi.

Originally posted by grognardgary:

Between 1500 and 1900 almost all ocean going trade was being done by European. Japan had sealed itself off from the outside world and China was content to rely on the increasingly defunct silk road for external trade what little they did. The ascendance of England as a trading empire and it's primary policy of making sure every other European was too busy jacking with each other then with them under the Pitts and their predecessors pretty much guaranteed that Britain would dominate the sea lanes while everyone else was busily engages in one form of fratricide or the other.

The Europeans were doing most of the trade, but a lot of the trade they were doing involved dumping currency in Asia to get goods for the markets back home. Arguably this would be better represented by the major trade lanes ending in China and all the money flowing there. It wasn't until pretty late in this 1500-1900 period that European merchants finally managed to reverse this trade deficit and actually achieve a net inflow of silver (basically where the whole opium thing gets its start).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_silver_trade_from_the_16th_to_19th_centuries

[grognardgary]

Malvastor while you could argue that it is a complete bassackwards vies that doesn't refliect the fact the excess gold did China almost no good while it was Europe most notably England that became ever richer top to bottom Money, you see isn't actually wealth. You can't eat it you can't wear it it doesn't shelter you from the storm, it is only a convenient yard stick with which to measure wealth. It can measure wealth and act as a place holder for wealth but it is not in and off itself. Spain, floating on a sea of gold in the late sixteenth century nearly went bankrupt. Midas nearly starved to death. Somalia instead of food for the locals started growing entirely cash crops to sell the the world at large and was soon engulfed in a famine.

[Malvastor]

Originally posted by grognardgary:

Malvastor while you could argue that it is a complete bassackwards vies that doesn't refliect the fact the excess gold did China almost no good while it was Europe most notably England that became ever richer top to bottom Money, you see isn't actually wealth. You can't eat it you can't wear it it doesn't shelter you from the storm, it is only a convenient yard stick with which to measure wealth. It can measure wealth and act as a place holder for wealth but it is not in and off itself. Spain, floating on a sea of gold in the late sixteenth century nearly went bankrupt. Midas nearly starved to death. Somalia instead of food for the locals started growing entirely cash crops to sell the the world at large and was soon engulfed in a famine.

You're correct if we're talking about a much broader view of how trade benefits society- raw cash flowed into Spain and China and ultimately did little for them, while the industry and commerce that Britain and other nations had to do to get some scraps of that cash ultimately built much more robust wealth-generating systems for them.

But in EU4 trade really does just boil down to raw cash. The endnodes of the trade system really are just the points where all the money flows to. In real life being the destination for huge sums of gold and silver ultimately wasn't that great for Spain or China, but that's because of economic complexities that EU4 simply doesn't simulate (be a lot cooler if it did though...). So in that simplified system, I'd argue it really is incorrect to have Europe hardcoded as the endpoints. First, because being the end destination for currency isn't really what made them wealthy. Second, because automatically being the end destination for currency from game start flies in the face of what really made them wealthy: the systems of wealth creation they built entirely because the money was never going to flow to them otherwise.