Install Steam
login
|
language
简体中文 (Simplified Chinese)
繁體中文 (Traditional Chinese)
日本語 (Japanese)
한국어 (Korean)
ไทย (Thai)
Български (Bulgarian)
Čeština (Czech)
Dansk (Danish)
Deutsch (German)
Español - España (Spanish - Spain)
Español - Latinoamérica (Spanish - Latin America)
Ελληνικά (Greek)
Français (French)
Italiano (Italian)
Bahasa Indonesia (Indonesian)
Magyar (Hungarian)
Nederlands (Dutch)
Norsk (Norwegian)
Polski (Polish)
Português (Portuguese - Portugal)
Português - Brasil (Portuguese - Brazil)
Română (Romanian)
Русский (Russian)
Suomi (Finnish)
Svenska (Swedish)
Türkçe (Turkish)
Tiếng Việt (Vietnamese)
Українська (Ukrainian)
Report a translation problem
The author of this topic has marked a post as the answer to their question.
Discussions Rules and Guidelines
Report this post
producing from high pop, high market, merchant guild cities help alot in getting good starters, some cities are better than others also for producing them
finally, they lose skill reasonably quickly once old
http://www.twcenter.net/forums/forumdisplay.php?314-Stainless-Steel
someone like me coming along is the best you can hope for anywhere
as for trait issue, we would have more luck trying to convince you to have a bit of a gander, though i suspect everything is working as intended
The traits are listed with their levels and text description for each level which shows when you examine the merchant, and effects for each level (such as +/- finance or movement or security) and then later on in the file are the triggers for those traits.
One of the main things about SS merchants is losing finance as they age. This is the OldMerchant trait line. It starts OK with a +1 finance at level 1 but -2 movement and then at level 2 it hits another -4 movement and then -1 finance and -6 movement at the final level. OldMerchant is generated when the merchant is created. If the game generates a merchant age 32 or older, he gets hit with the OldMerchant trait line. Nothing you can do about it except kill off the merchant by having him attempt a takeover of a much high-skilled merchant from another faction.
There are also lines of bad traits which cause increasing hits to finance as the trait levels up.
BadMerchant shows in the game at level one as Daft Dealer, has a couple of possible triggers mostly involving being idle, i.e. on the same resource for many turns, and may also start if you fail an acquisition of another faction's merchant.
Others are SelfServesMerchant (another idle-triggered trait), ReligiousMerchant (caused by having a religious building of any type in the merchant creation settlement), and ShadyDealer (no town hall or higher law building in the settlement and/or a brothel line of building and/or a thieves guild in the settlement).
Getting any of these negative trait lines will result in an increasing loss of finance over time. The triggers are all found in the above .txt file by doing a search for the trait name, i.e. BadMerchant.
Obviously, the best place to create a merchant is in a town with at least a town hall and even better also a merchant guild and no religious building at all and no brothel/inn etc. and no thieves guild. But you can also just get unlucky just from sitting on a resource for 5+ turns. Since you also get a chance at good traits sitting on a far away resource over time, it's a toss of the dice, really.
If you see an initial level one bad trait on a newly created merchant, like Daft Dealer for BadMerchant or Slightly Crooked for ShadyDealer, then the easiest thing to do is send him off to die trying to acquire another merchant and create a new one.
Each of the negative traits has a positive opposite with similar triggers. Getting one will remove the negative.
Everything you need to know is in the export_desc_character_traits.txt file. It can be a bit confusing, though. I hope the above helped.
TradingExotic appears to be simply having a merchant on a resource which you don't have in the regions you control, but could be more complex. Only experimentation or access to the internal coding in the game engine itself can discover more. Not really worth it for a trait which either gives a flat +1 or -1 to finance. Monopoly can go up to +3 and has no negative opposite, so I experimented with it over the years since the game came out.
And then after achieving all of that, they die of old age!
But when your merchants are weak, the AI will come after them. Typically i will cheat by attacking them with different merchants and reloading. Its only fair since they cheetingly knew my merchants were there in the first place!! but i prefer to use assassins, and it is very handy to have good assassins in this game as they will 'solve' a multitude of problems around the place.
this guy was still cranking at 71 np too, and is fairly tipical of my merchants
they can even finance you through the great plague rather well
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1219653874
True about the age and I use assassins as well. It's the only way to get the monopolist trait lines, since you need a province with 2 of the same resource in it and a merchant on each to get and advance the trait. So, that means Constantinople, and every other faction wants those silk spots too! A well-trained assassin or two to keep interlopers away from my merchants while they level up, unless a faction gets stupid and sends a lowbie.
In some games, I've modded the desc_strat to add two of a resource for each faction's starting capital province. Makes it fairer for the AI, but the AI still goes for the Silk in Constantinople too, even from as far away as Kwarezm. Makes the AI more aggressive with merchants since they can get a local monopoly on a resource and generate more high-level merchants.
Nice! You're taking a hit with the ReligiousMerchant trait there though, -1 finance at that first level of Quite Religious. It comes from creating the merchant in a town with a religious building. It has a small chance of going away each turn (or decreasing if higher in the trait level) if the merchant is in a province you don't own, however.
Hope you head isn't hurting anymore.
The only way to achieve what you (most likely correctly) describe is via traits (or ANCs).
I did a follow up after your uncalled for way of dismissal of my observation:
There is a whole section in the mod's EDCT dedicated to merchants, conveniently headed "MERCHANTILE TRAITS"
The third trait in there is already a negative one (BadMerchant) followed by the fourth (ExoticTastes), then there are custom (mod specific) traits like SecurityMerchant and ServesSelfMerchant.
Do I have to continue proving my point or was that enough of my gander that everything is working as expected?
True about the age and I use assassins as well. It's the only way to get the monopolist trait lines, since you need a province with 2 of the same resource in it and a merchant on each to get and advance the trait. So, that means Constantinople, and every other faction wants those silk spots too! A well-trained assassin or two to keep interlopers away from my merchants while they level up, unless a faction gets stupid and sends a lowbie. [/quote]
Are you sure it is the silk they want? Put a low level merchant on a resource and suddenly the AI wants it bad! .... Geez, i wish i magically knew where all the weak enemy merchants were accross the map, even when i have not even surveyed the resource they are on!!!
I'm fairly sure they're hardcoded in the game engine to prioritize the higher value resources like gold and then silk and so forth. But it's also almost certain that they're hardcoded to seek out low level merchants to acquire, too. Sometimes you can see it in action when a lowbie merchant is sitting on a good resource and suddenly 2 or 3 or more merchants from various factions appear heading straight for the poor guy.