How do I use merchants ??

[Maxim M1910/30 enjoyer]

Do i have to put a merchant near every resource I find on the map ??

[Bazookah]

There are two uses:
1-)Put them on resource to get gold. I think this also levels up your merchant.
2-)use them on enemy merchants to sieze there resources and level up yourself.

[Odin]

Merchants are somewhat pointless and I wouldn't worry too much about them unless the financial gain is worth the cost of recruitment and the value of a particular resource. For example, there's little point spending 150 gold on investing in a new merchant and then placing that merchant on a low value resource worth maybe 10 gold per turn (for example). In that case, it would take roughly 15 turns worth of trading before you break even and then make any kind of profit. A resource that pays only 10 gold per turn is just not worth the effort so why bother.

Merchants can, however, be highly profitable if used properly. It's just a matter of putting them in the right places with the highest value resources. In no particular order these are:

1. Spices
2. Sugar
3. Cotton
4. Gold
5. Silver
6. Silks
7. Ivory
8. Slaves

Once you get to the New World, there's also:

1. Chocolate
2. Tobacco
3. Lots and lots of gold.

There's also some lesser value resources worth looking out for:

1. Marble
2. Textiles
3. Wine
4. Tin
5. Amber

As for the rest, it's probably worth avoiding these:

1. Coal
2. Iron
3. Wool
4. Dyes
5. Timber
6. Furs
7. Fish
8. Grain
9. Sulphur

Take this list as a general rule though as some trading spots on the map are more lucrative than others. Like how some regions share a particular resource, one may be more valuable for trade than the other. This is highlighted by the trade income of some of the most lucrative cities on the map, like Antioch which is surrounded by high value resources and is able to trade with distant cities via the sea trade. Another valuable city (and potentially the most valuable in Northern Europe) is Stockholm, it's situation is similar to Antioch; High value resources and trade via the sea.

[EnemigoDeLaMafia]

Merchants are completely optional. In the vanilla game the gold they bring could maybe amount to an extra army in the mid to late game, but rarely more. In the kingdoms expansions they yield significantly more money.

The way the amount is calculated based on a tier system but also it is based on the distance of the first instance of the resource in relation to your capital. So, for example, as france you simply aren't going to get a big yield out of the wines. Whereas if you are playing as the moors for example, you might be bringing in 50 - 100 gold per merchant.

This way if you look at the map you can more or less know whether a resource is going to be valuable or not without necessarily needed to travel all the way to timbuktu.

Training merchants synergizes well with simply trying to get a merchants guild running (pretty much the standard guild you'll want on any cities not devoted to a particular role, and training governors for extra trade income)

[Mile pro Libertate]

Originally posted by Disciple.:

Merchants are completely optional. In the vanilla game the gold they bring could maybe amount to an extra army in the mid to late game, but rarely more. In the kingdoms expansions they yield significantly more money.

The way the amount is calculated based on a tier system but also it is based on the distance of the first instance of the resource in relation to your capital. So, for example, as france you simply aren't going to get a big yield out of the wines. Whereas if you are playing as the moors for example, you might be bringing in 50 - 100 gold per merchant.

This way if you look at the map you can more or less know whether a resource is going to be valuable or not without necessarily needed to travel all the way to timbuktu.

Training merchants synergizes well with simply trying to get a merchants guild running (pretty much the standard guild you'll want on any cities not devoted to a particular role, and training governors for extra trade income)

I see them as totally optional as well.

Pasting in from another thread:

Originally posted by Mile pro Libertate:

Merchants can be ignored altogether, imo.

They are, in theory, supposed to generate additional incomes by sitting on map resources. In reality, the vast number of the map resources are too low yield, especially with low rank Merchants, while those resources that are high yield will come too late game to really matter for the campaign anyway (e.g. New World gold, African slaves).

A high rank Merchant should be able to make decent incomes from even moderate yield resources, but again, that's in theory: in actual play, that won't happen because the AI Merchants will always do "hostile takeovers" of your Merchant before he can get decent xp.

Now, there are ways to improve the Merchants right at recruitment, by way of Guilds and such. The thing is, this is also A) a later game thing, long past when you actually are desperate for additional incomes, and B) you have to factor break-even costs: by the time you add up the outlays for that infrastructure, the opportunity costs investing in such rather than other stuff, and the costs of recruiting, maintaining and using other agents to protect the merchants, then even those buffed up "Guild Merchants" aren't generating actual profit for quite a while, which brings us back to (A).

So yeah, as far as Merchants go, imo they're honestly pretty pointless, outside some silly cheese stuff, like making a bee line for sub-Saharan Africa. And on that note, the best way to cheese Merchants was nerfed anyway when the game came to Steam ("Merchant fort").

[AleaIactaEst]

Trick for when you have a lot of merchants and Timbuktu as one of your towns: Make a fort right over gold, and you can put all of your merchants in the fort and have them generate all of that gold, stacked x times for the amount of merchants you have. For 20 merchants this will carry your economy for the rest of the game.

[Usagi]

Originally posted by AleaIactaEst:

Trick for when you have a lot of merchants and Timbuktu as one of your towns: Make a fort right over gold, and you can put all of your merchants in the fort and have them generate all of that gold, stacked x times for the amount of merchants you have. For 20 merchants this will carry your economy for the rest of the game.

I know this conversation is long dead but holy molly I didn't know there is a exploit like that. Now i am gonna download the game just to try it. I've long known that the best way to use the merchants is to send them all to Timbuktu area early game and leave them on gold. Even without conquering the area they will bring in a lot of money as they level up.

[Hark]

Originally posted by AleaIactaEst:

Trick for when you have a lot of merchants and Timbuktu as one of your towns: Make a fort right over gold, and you can put all of your merchants in the fort and have them generate all of that gold, stacked x times for the amount of merchants you have. For 20 merchants this will carry your economy for the rest of the game.

Lmao that is an absolutely filthy exploit. Hilarious!