Please automise merchants

[Stelly]

So merchants are pretty awesome. They are a very considerable source of income and they fix the low net income of the original game. But the big problem with them starting from mid-game, it becomes very tedious to keep going around all your settlements to see if they can recruit more.

At the start of the game it is no problem but so is selecting your building upgrades for each city. Later on you just want to auto manage including recruitment of merchants and automatically setting them to auto manage.
Auto recruitment isn't really an option because then you get tons of useless units everywhere.

There should be an extra checkbox in the city management screen to recruit all possible merchants and automatically put them on auto manage.
Or ofc just increase the existing incomes so the whole merchant mechanic didn't need to be added.

[Enigmatic]

In the bottom right of UI you can pick a fast mission for them.

[The Tomekeeper]

i mean just recruit them

[General Idea]

The merchants are absolutely useless unless you have assassins covering every place to eliminate any rival merchant including your own allies, they always seem to be producing merchants with a higher skill level than you. If you do not have assassins in place then your merchants that are always at level 1, even though the trade buildings have been upgraded, get eliminated. The trade buildings do not increase the level of skill for the merchants and you are always stuck with poor merchants.

Edit: The only time you get to have better quality merchants is when you capture a settlement and inherit the enemy merchant or if your merchant miraculously survives the attempted take over by a rival. Their next attempt will most probably eliminate it in the following turn though, unless of course your assassin comes to its rescue.

I am forever been told that I have committed a transgression against my ally even though I have no other choice because my merchants are absolutely useless.

[Stelly]

Originally posted by General Idea:

The merchants are absolutely useless ... my merchants are absolutely useless.

Not sure what's going on with your merchants then. Middle and late game when I recruit them they come out as rank 2, 3 or 4. Depends on the academy I think.
Sometimes the enemy buys out my merchants and sometimes I'll buy out theirs. Especially early game it is pretty much impossible to keep merchants yours for very long. But enemy merchants won't penetrate very deep into your territory so once you grab some land, they become viable.

In one of my late games I have 676.077 revenue, 377.762 expense giving 298.315 income.
My merchants are giving me 143.082 of that revenue. That's 20% of my total revenue and it doubles my net income.
It's a very considerable amount of money to put towards all those very expensive late game buildings. That's the only reason I do the horrible micromanagement going through every city recruiting them to replenish their population numbers and clicking their auto trading on. But fun is the last thing I'll call it.