Mercantalism, Sea Transport, and CaeserIII: A model for trade and supply

[Symmetry]

So, I'm not sure if this model is too big and far reaching to be incorporated at this late date, but here goes anyways. The short of it is I'd love a system where you invest in your merchant marine, and then you see you're little ships carrying their cargoes between ports and from your colonies to your home country.

Goals:

1: Visual Feedback. If you're playing a conquest oriented game its nice to see a big blob forming around your nation, but what if you're trying to be more trade oriented? I like to see the bustle of the economic activity in my realm, and the one thing I really liked about Caeser was being able to see lots of stuff happening, telling me I'm doing a good job.

2: Historical Accuracy:
A: The ability to simulate merchantalism
B: The ability to meaningfully simulate piracy and privateering.
C: The ability to simulate blockades.
D: The ability to simulate naval trade routes, the origonal driving force behind European exploration.

Implamentation:
Colonies:

Consider an English colony in, say, Roanoke. The colony depending on its size produces a certain amount of tobacco. The tobacco accumulated in a warehouse by the docks, and eventually a mercant ship comes by and picks it up. The ship fills its hold with tobacco and sets sail accross the atlantic to England. There it sells the tobaccoo, and a profit is made.

As I understand it, few colonies made money for their home country in the form of taxes, but instead the colonial country profited by either monopolizing the trade of their colonies, or in less merchantilist countries by just charging a duty at the ports of the colony.

The idea is that colonies and other provinces without a non-hostile land connection to a CoT need ships to bring the goods they produce to the CoT before the country producing them can make any profit off of them.

CoTs:

Each CoT has a price associated with every trade good. When a ship offloads its cargoe there the owner of the ship makes a profit equal to the price of one load of that good, minus the taxes of the owner of the CoT province if they aren't the same as the owner of the ship. The CoT has a certain amount of each good there, and depending on the population served by that CoT a certain amount of that good is consumed every month. The price of the good is some function of the supply at the CoT and the demand there. Its very important that as the price goes up, the amount of the good consumed falls off so that an equilibrium is reached.

If CoT A is able to provide all the goods the provinces it serves need, but CoT B has too high a tax so nobody goes there, then provinces on the border between the two will leave B and go to A, eventually eliminating CoT A.

Trading:

Merchants can also travel between two CoTs. If a good is expensive at one CoT but cheap at another one, they can buy a good at one CoT, transport it to another, and sell it there. Pretty simple. The rules and diplomatic functions in EUII for who can trade in which CoT can probably be imported wholesale.

CoTs with land adjacencies can have some sort of overall goods migration based on goods price difference divided by distance.

Piracy:

Where there are merchants, pirate ships appear every once in a long while. If a pirate runs into a merchantman, they have a fight and the pirate usually wins. When the pirate wins it gets gold equal to the value of the cargoe, and when it has enough gold another pirate ship is created (or it could just be a random chance per interception maybe weighted for cargoe value). Basically, pirates tend to increase in areas where there are large amounts of undefended and lucrative merchant ships.

Nations can also dispatch ships on privateering missions, where the naval ships act like pirates to the merchants of any nation the home country is at war with or on the "To Pirate" list (works the same way as the "Embargoed" list).

Nations with navies can also send them on anti-piracy patrols. I imagine that any time a fleet is in the same sea zone as a pirate there will be a chance of interception based on fleet size. Navies should probably usually win against pirates.

AI

Ideally, the player should seldom have to do anything to manage all this. There should be pop-ups for merchnat sinkings and if you don't have enough merchnat ships for your colonies, telling you to send your navy on patrol or build more merchnat ships.

If the player doesn't give any orders, merchant ships should probably first be sent to get goods from the colonies, then extras can be sent setting up trade routes between CoTs. Sending each ship to the optimum place appears to be too hard a computational task, but handing things on a trade-route level should be doable. If CoT tax is applied to net profit of a trip rather than the price the good sells for, then restricting trade to adjacent CoTs would be less distortionary, but it would probably be best not to allow nations to set their own CoT tax rates in that case. Once routes are set up its easy to compare profitability and reasign ships accordingly. In a competative environment, the per-ship profit from a trade route should be a very good approximation of the marginal profit for assigning another ship to the route. In deciding profitabilty, the computer should take into account ship losses on that route.

Attrition and Routes

Ships are lost to pirates, but they should also probably suffer from attrition if they try to make long voyages at low naval tech levels. The Calcutta to Tago direct run would probably be very lucrative, but also very dangerous to make in just one leg. I suppose it would be nice to have trade routes use general naval attrition system, and let merchant ships resupply at colonies along the traderoute. Alternativly a maximum distance system could be used where a ship can only go so far without stopping in port.

In any event, its really important that the Ottomans be able to control the trade between Europe and Asia through Egypt until someone manages to get around Africa.

[Emre Yigit]

I loved the little traders in Caesar, and the ones in Pharaoh even more. I do hope, however, that you are not suggesting animating to the same degree? I seem to remember issues about the game slowing down.... Consider: 150 countries, each possibly trading with 140. That's 21,000 trade routes; with, say, one trader going in either direction, 42,000 sprites. Apart from the processing power needed both to nudge the sprites across the screen and to calculate their loads etc, imagine your situation if you were a minor principality in the HRE. You'd hardly be able to see the screen for traders.

In a more general sense, however, I do agree with the broad thrust of your argument.

[George LeS]

I've never seen Caesar III, so I can only go by what's in the post. It sounds like way too much micromanagement. You (the player) buy merchant ships? And decide where they go? If this is what is entailed, I doubt it would be either workable or popular.

However, as a model of the interaction of goods, cots, & trade routes, it seems OK, so long as the game engine does almost all the work. I.e., rather than the players deciding it's profitable to trade between cots to take advantage of price or tax differentials, the mechants were automatically drawn to do so, that's fine by me. I'd limit player control to certain actions encourageing or discourageing them, e.g., the Navigation Act, encourageing English shipbuilding, & seafaring by their populace, or penalizing those who trade in certain cots, while encourageing others.

[Grosshaus]

I´d love to see little ships sailing automatically from CoTs to homeland. It truly would make the game more intuitive and appealing and act as a reward for non-conquerers. Provided that there are CoTs, then melikes. Alot.

[boehm]

sounds like a great system ...but maybe too many calculations who will slow the game too much.... ?

[Rythin]

Won't be very original - excellent idea. But showing it all on the screen will kill the PC

[Symmetry]

Originally Posted by Emre Yigit

I do hope, however, that you are not suggesting animating to the same degree? I seem to remember issues about the game slowing down.... Consider: 150 countries, each possibly trading with 140. That's 21,000 trade routes; with, say, one trader going in either direction, 42,000 sprites.

No, I certianly don't think there's any need to animate to the same degree as in Caeser. What I envision is little ship sprites exactly like the current colony ships but with different colored flags.

I certainly don't want trade between every two countries, but mostly only between a fixed number of CoTs, like the current 30 or so. Maybe each CoT will connect to all 30 of the others, or possible each will have only 5 that it connects to for a possible 150 different routes the AI has to deal with. There would also be the connections to the colonies, with each one getting a ship between 1 and 5 times a year or so depending on how big the colony is.

If the number of sprites is too big, the programmers can always reduce the number of ships needed for a given amount of inter-CoT trade or to get stuff from the colonies, and so reduce the total number of ships in game.

Originally Posted by George LeS

I've never seen Caesar III, so I can only go by what's in the post. It sounds like way too much micromanagement. You (the player) buy merchant ships? And decide where they go? If this is what is entailed, I doubt it would be either workable or popular.

I'm hoping that the only management required for a normal country is to buy a merchantmen if they're interested in trade. Big colonial powers like England and Spain would have to also patrol for piracy (like they already do), have to buy merchant ships to benefit from their colonies, and could have the option of creating new trade routes that allow them to profit from their discoveries, like a route to Asia.

However, as a model of the interaction of goods, cots, & trade routes, it seems OK, so long as the game engine does almost all the work. I.e., rather than the players deciding it's profitable to trade between cots to take advantage of price or tax differentials, the mechants were automatically drawn to do so, that's fine by me. I'd limit player control to certain actions encourageing or discourageing them, e.g., the Navigation Act, encourageing English shipbuilding, & seafaring by their populace, or penalizing those who trade in certain cots, while encourageing others.

Simulating merchantalist policies like the Navigation act is one of the main reasons I'm proposing this.

Originally Posted by Rythin

Won't be very original - excellent idea. But showing it all on the screen will kill the PC

Thank you. I understand the concern about showing it all, but I think that the Paradox team can skimp on the ship graphics and reduce the number of ships for every route until its something that most computers can handle.

To tell the truth there are still several unsolved problems with this idea, but I hope that none of them are insurmountable.

First, how to prevent overinvestment in trade as occurs now in EUII. Right now nations in EUII are happy to invest $10 in a trader for a CoT, even if that trader only makes $2 back before its destroyed. How do we prevent the AI nations from building so many ships that prices equalize and each ship makes little marginal profit? If there is a way to calculate the marginal profit of building a new ship the AI can use that to decide if there are better uses for its money, but is there any easy way to figure out marginal return on shipbuilding?

Second, how to handle inland CoTs like Paris. One option would be to avoid them in most cases, but that seems ahistorical to me. I'm actually ignorant of how trade moved to Paris in real life. I assume that the oceangoing merchantmen unloaded their cargoe at the mouth of the Seine where it was put onto barges to be carried up to Paris. How do we model that? What about ships that want to dock at Marseille?

Whatsmore, the Spanish were able to get the contents of their treasure ship across Mexico or Central America for shipment to Europe across the Atlantic. I guess that that should be modeled as both the Atlantic and Pacific coasts being connected to the Mexico CoT, and let the normal routefinder worry about it. Just tell the routefinder that land provinces are 10 times costlier than water ones and it should do the right thing like sail directly into London rather than unloading in Wales for shipment overland. The ships can be paid when they dock, and otherwise it would be just like a normal run between CoTs. Of course, ships can only land in provinces served by their destination CoT. Ok, I think thats a satisfying solution.

[King of Men]

I'm not a naval historian, but I suspect that ocean-going ships would be able to sail up the Seine for most if not all of the EU3 timeframe. Those old cogs just weren't that big.

[George LeS]

Originally Posted by King of Men

I'm not a naval historian, but I suspect that ocean-going ships would be able to sail up the Seine for most if not all of the EU3 timeframe. Those old cogs just weren't that big.

The problem wouldn't be their size, but the wind & river currents. I expect they just transferred their cargoes to craft more suitable to the river.

[dcharles]

Originally Posted by King of Men

I'm not a naval historian, but I suspect that ocean-going ships would be able to sail up the Seine for most if not all of the EU3 timeframe. Those old cogs just weren't that big.

What do you do with bridges?

No, much of the french colonial goods shipped to harbors on the atlantic coast, such as Nantes and Bordeaux, and maybe Rouen or le Havre at the mouth of the Seine river. Those cities were truly the angle of the french version of the triangular trade.
Much of the french trade with the ottomans (in the Levant) was done in Marseilles,.. Paris, a the beginning, had little commercial importance, and they are right in the AGCEEP to place the COT at the beginning in Lyons. But, with the spectacular french centralisation under almost every ruler, Paris gained importance financially, and with all the consumers of colonial goods in Paris (court, aristocrats, rich burghers), Paris had still an importance.

[Registered]

Originally Posted by King of Men

I'm not a naval historian, but I suspect that ocean-going ships would be able to sail up the Seine for most if not all of the EU3 timeframe. Those old cogs just weren't that big.

Apart from the other problems pointed out. Cogs were ever so slightly out of fashion by this time. (except for the early part of the EUIII timeframe)

[Jinnai]

Originally Posted by Grosshaus

I´d love to see little ships sailing automatically from CoTs to homeland. It truly would make the game more intuitive and appealing and act as a reward for non-conquerers. Provided that there are CoTs, then melikes. Alot.

As long as its done in such a way that doesn't overwhelm the cpu.

[merlin2199]

I like this idea. As for the Merchant Marine a system similar to Imperialism 1/2 would be nice. The trade side of EU1/2 was so abstract that being a merchant power was really litle fun thus making it always conquest driven. As for the ships something like that is in place where it comes to setlers. Maybe instead of a ship for each contry to each route just show a randome litle boat moving either direction. Throwing ideas out, I think it would be good for the game, especially managing the Merchant Marine

[Symmetry]

It occurs to me that it would probably work out fine for a finite number of trade routes to exist in the beggining, with new ones being created by event or automatically when an existing CoT disapears. And if trade routes exist as objects in the program, it should be easier for the AI to track profitability on a per-route basis and rearrange its merchantmen accordingly.

[Registered]

As for the Merchant Marine a system similar to Imperialism 1/2 would be nice.

Yes, yes it would. With different ship types for different traderoutes perhaps.

[Quift]

About the shipping, this off course could be abstract. ie not showing boat by boat but more the general stream. Thus is will be easy to spot the heavily traficked ones, without havng literally 247 vessels going west and 279 going east.

Also I very much enjoy the importance of ports this would create.

[George LeS]

Originally Posted by Registered

Yes, yes it would. With different ship types for different traderoutes perhaps.

Do you mean different graphically, or functionally?

If graphically, I'd question whether they should be large enough to matter. Reading these posts, I've been envisaging something more like the way colonists are represented, & at that level, visuals would be pretty minimal.

If you mean functionally, well, much as I'd love to see as much nautical detail & realism in the game, I don't see this happening. The furthest I can see Paradox going might be a generic merchant fleet size, perhaps distinguishing coastal/fishery/seaborne, but doing it all abstractly (you wouldn't actually have or build the ships.) Depending on geography, policy, etc, it might grow or shrink, & get more effective with higher tech. Anything beyond that, I'd doubt we'd ever see; in fact, I doubt it would go even that far.

Still, it's worth discussing.

[Registered]

Originally Posted by George LeS

Do you mean different graphically, or functionally?

If graphically, I'd question whether they should be large enough to matter. Reading these posts, I've been envisaging something more like the way colonists are represented, & at that level, visuals would be pretty minimal.

If you mean functionally, well, much as I'd love to see as much nautical detail & realism in the game, I don't see this happening. The furthest I can see Paradox going might be a generic merchant fleet size, perhaps distinguishing coastal/fishery/seaborne, but doing it all abstractly (you wouldn't actually have or build the ships.) Depending on geography, policy, etc, it might grow or shrink, & get more effective with higher tech. Anything beyond that, I'd doubt we'd ever see; in fact, I doubt it would go even that far.

Still, it's worth discussing.

Functionally ofcourse.
What i meant was that the player could construct ships in different sizes, tonnages is what i mean. Once constructed a ship would go into the merchant pool of it's class. (similar to HOI2 convoys). The player could then assign these ships from the pools to any traderoutes he has going. The more distant the route the larger the ship needed.
Still, it's just something that popped into my head, might be a bit too much detail for EUIII.

[Symmetry]

Originally Posted by Registered

What i meant was that the player could construct ships in different sizes, tonnages is what i mean. Once constructed a ship would go into the merchant pool of it's class. (similar to HOI2 convoys). The player could then assign these ships from the pools to any traderoutes he has going. The more distant the route the larger the ship needed.

Its not a really bad idea, I think, but not one I would use either. From a programming perspective each ship is going to have to be its own object anyways, so adding a bit more infromation to the class shouldn't be problematic. It would mean another multiplication step to compute profitability for each run of a traderoute, but that isn't too horrible.

On the other hand, it decreases the simplicity of the interface quite a bit for not too much gain in visual appeal or accuracy. It would mean at least one more click both in creating a ship and in assigning a ship to a route, probably bringing it up from 2 clicks to 3.

[George LeS]

Instead of individual ships, why not just a number representing the size of the merchant fleet as a whole? If you want to get fancy, it could be divided up by assigned trade routes.

Even if this level of detail were used, I'd question how much direct access the player should have, since many of the ships would be privately built & owned, why should he build them? Government owned ships might be a special case, but again, I don't see why they'd need individual representation. If any merchants were to be so handled, it should be the big Indiamen. Remember, the most noted US victory in the Revolution, was fought by one of them.

But I'd lean toward the pool method, myself.