Merchant Positioning

[Moose]

Playing as Portugal

Colonies in Brazil transferinf 0.71 trade (No Merchant)
Ivory Coast Currently colonizing the Gold Coast transporting 1.22 forward (Merchant steering Trade)
Mauritanian Coast Cape (Cape Verde and Maderia) 1.76 forward (No Merchant)
Sevilla collecting at 5.75

I mean the set up seems ok but Do I leave my Merchant in Sevilla or move him to the Mauritanian coast? I saw it on a video on lets play Portugal.

If you need to know my modifiers then:

Trade Efficieny is 30%
Trade Range 650
Trade Steering 26.5%
Trade income 30%
Mercantilism 11%

Im making a good income but Castile have just started to colonize so I'm looking for the upper hand. Thanks

[Dumpster]

i usually dont keep a merchant in my home trade node since it auto collects

[Thyriel]

Hard to give specific tipps w/o knowing the trade nodes current status ;)
In general:
you most likely want the trade from overseas routed to sevilla, so
- look where AI keeps a good portion of the money on the routes
- look where forwarding isnt already done by the AI
Place yours on those nodes.
It often makes no sense forwarding trade somewhere if AI already does the same.

And if you cant decide between two nodes to place, or how to route your ships, test it out and see where you get more income from

[JayTee]

Unless you've managed to nab a number of provinces in the Mauritanian coast trade area to give you more trading power there than in Sevilla, you're probably better off collecting in Sevilla. Especially if you start colonising the Carribean as you can forward the trade from there into Sevilla, boosting your Sevilla collection nicely.

[cz]

Simple answer: Switch it for a month and see which gives you more gold, total.

[Triggerhippy]

In your home trade node (the one your capital is in) you automatically collect from trade if there is no merchant.

In trade nodes that feed into your capital (or eventually feed into your capital somewhere down the line) upstream nodes, you automatically forward trade if there is no merchant.

When you forward trade without a merchant, you forward equally to all the available routes out. This is reason one for having a merchant, it allows you to tick the box for the forwarded trade to go in the direction you want. Example Ivory coast, which has three routes out, and you really don't want to be forwarding trade upto Timbuktu,

As others have said, if the node is just one route out (Mauritanian Coast) then you don't need a merchant.

The second reason for a merchant is to collect from trade in somewhere other than capital. When you collect from trade other than your capital you lose 80% of your trade power in that node, so it's not worth doing in contested nodes. However if you get 100% or near to 100% control in an overseas trade node then collecting from it and losing trade power won't matter since you are the only one there.

Good examples of places you can do this are Hudson bay, Australia, even Brazil as long as no one brings light ships along. However the absolute master is Timbuktu, it's entirely landlocked and therefore no one can get light ships to it, if you own all the land provinces you can tax here, further if you totally dominate the Ivory Coast you can steer all the trade coming around Africa from India and the far East up to Timbuktu and tax it there before any of the other European powers get their cut of it :)