Reworked Trade mechanics

[Shoo]

I feel like the trade mechanics are starting to show their age, they're essentially unchanged since release, and especially with the changes to Africa and Asia and the fact that there is a lot more reason to play ROTW nations the limitations are really starting to be felt, especially how it basically railroads what a ROTW nation has to do, which is basically to conquer Zanzibar and beat the Europeans to the Cape and steer all trade that way which limits player choice and is generally a bad thing. As well as at the minute the best way to dominate trade is to just full conquer the trade node and every other trade node, which isn't very historical.

My first two suggestions should be pretty easy to implement and I think would make good stop gaps:
1. remove downstream trade power, or at the very least seriously minimise it, it's a bad system and means that to control ANY node outside of the med and channel you have to ALSO blob every node it leads into which is just unfun.
2. Make centres of trade have a far larger percentage of the power in a node, Portugal managed to completely dominate the Asian spice trade with a minimal number of cities on the coast of India, they didn't have to annex huge swathes of land to do that.
3. make it so that trade routes are more dynamic, it should be quite a large endeavour, and quite expensive for a country to do this, maybe the total value of the trade node over 10 years to change it but it should be possible

In the long run I think the whole system could do with a complete overhaul however;
One system I devised was to not have production turn into money but to actually stay as goods, provinces would then require goods and it would actually be case of getting what you need to make sure your country doesn't starve/produce guns/keep people happy, countries would then be able to set tariffs on specific goods as they feel like they can, if a country has 100% control of all spices they could set tariffs on it as high as possible until other countries would no longer pay for it, (since unsold spices make zero ducets) and vice versa if Spice production is split evenly between a few producer countries then it would be a case of countries trying to lowball one another until they can go no lower. Trade nodes could possibly be done away with under this system, instead, nations that actually want the goods that are produced would get/charter a trade city and do business from there, effectively using that as their trade base, they would then transport it as they please.

I think this would be a lot more dynamic, fun and realistic, after all IRL the declining power of the Ottomans was due to Europeans taking control of the spice trade, something which is impossible in the current system.

My idea isn't perfect obviously and it might not even be very good, so obviously feedback is appreciated, most importantly I want people to discuss what they would like to see in the trade system and if people think it even needs to be changed.

 

[cristofolmc]

1. remove downstream trade power, or at the very least seriously minimise it, it's a bad system and means that to control ANY node outside of the med and channel you have to ALSO blob every node it leads into which is just unfun.
2. Make centres of trade have a far larger percentage of the power in a node, Portugal managed to completely dominate the Asian spice trade with a minimal number of cities on the coast of India, they didn't have to annex huge swathes of land to do that.

You first complain you have to blob to control it and then you complain you dont have to blob to control it?

3. make it so that trade routes are more dynamic, it should be quite a large endeavour, and quite expensive for a country to do this, maybe the total value of the trade node over 10 years to change it but it should be possible

Yeah thats not happening sadly. Theyll need a new engine I reckon to be able to change trade routes dinamically so there arent end nodes and such. But maybe they could still change ingame the direction of some routes without making end nodes disappear?
But no, I dont think thats gonna happen at all. I think upgradable trade nodes is the biggest trade upgrade we are going to see

 

[Runite Drill]

Yeah thats not happening sadly. Theyll need a new engine I reckon to be able to change trade routes dinamically so there arent end nodes and such. But maybe they could still change ingame the direction of some routes without making end nodes disappear?
But no, I dont think thats gonna happen at all. I think upgradable trade nodes is the biggest trade upgrade we are going to see

Last year I wrote my own small-scale simulation of the EU4 trade system to try out multi-directional trade.
From memory, the only difference to the current unidirectional system was a bunch of zeros in one line of code.

But I agree that it's not a change they would do (or even should), as it would require a rework of almost every other in game system... especially the economy (which needs it anyway tbh).
Save it for EU5 or Eu4's Holy Fury

 

[Shoo]

You first complain you have to blob to control it and then you complain you dont have to blob to control it?

Both of my complaints are about forcing blobbing

 

[Shoo]

I had another thought concerning this idea so here it is.

Here is how I think trade goods should be categorised for a potential reworked trade system to work; The first 6 goods I think should be "essential" goods, which means that all provinces would require an adequate amount of them or said province will face a huge unrest penalty and maybe even development loss to represent people leaving that place/dying. The next 21 goods I think are luxury goods and hence any province shouldn't get negatives if they don't have them but if the country was to provide that province with an adequate amount of those goods then the province should get a buff, the current per-province bonus would be a good set of bonus's to use here. However I don't think all provinces should want every good, for instance some backwards nomadic 3 dev province in central Asia isn't going to want many things so a lot of the "Luxury" goods should only be desired if the province is of a certain development (Potentially other factors could be considered such as the provinces culture/religion/parent country.) Finally slaves are a special case and should be used by provinces that produce certain goods (Sugar Cane, Tobacco, Salt) or maybe any province for a goods produced buff on that province (I guess that makes them not completely different to a "luxury" good but oh well.)

- Essential Goods:
> Fish
> Grain
> Livestock
> Salt
(Food goods)
> Wool
> Cloth
(Basic clothing goods)

- Luxury Goods:
Desired by 10+ dev provinces:
> Tea
> Glass
> Sugar
> Tobacco
> Spices
> Cocoa
> Coffee
> Wine
> Spices
> Coffee
> Fur
> Copper
> Iron
> Naval supplies

Desired by 20+ dev provinces
> Ivory
> Chinaware
> Dyes
> Silk
> Tropical wood
> Incense
> Gems

- Slaves

Feedback would be appreciated, I'm not sure on my categorisation of some of the more abstract goods, for instance maybe Fur should be a basic clothing good.

 

[Thorum]

I agree that trade needs a rework.
However, my idea about how to solve it, is already being implemented into Imperator Rome. So my suggestion would be to wait till after the Europe DLC and the release of that other game before copying the best parts.

 

[Xetfield]

I miss EU III where I could create new trade nodes and destroy existing after meeting prerequisites.

 

[Bearjuden]

I think if you want plausible trade in EU4, then you need to have pops of some sort. I don't want to sound like a cliche but EU4 really should be a trade game first and foremost, given how this era of history went, so it's important to get it right, and I think that for all the whining on this forum about how development isn't population, there's a lot of people missing that it should be population. Events can show how demand and supply shifted around in history (which is all they do now, by fixing prices at a certain level), but the game doesn't follow history, which means you need a system that can showcase how demand and supply are shifting around dynamically...and to figure out where the demand and supply is, you need to work out where the people are and what they're doing.

I think:

1) that keeping production as goods is a good idea (I posted a big rethink of it before and this was one of my thoughts as well)
2) turn manpower development into the "population" of a province, which when multiplied by the base tax determines how much money you make directly and when multiplied by the production gives you how much goods that province makes of its good
3) add up all the pops in a node to determine demand for that entire node (under the rough assumption that proportionately, your demands are going to be similar. ie a province with 10x the population will need 10x the goods but the amount of wheat they need will still be, say, 20x as much as the amount of silk, regardless of population), and based on how much goods are being made in that node then determine the price of goods
4) surplus gets traded around from node to node with a fixed increase in price (which diplomatic tech reduces as you go along, to make overseas routes that connect more distant nodes cheaper and more viable)
5) pops that don't get all their goods get uppity and upset, building unrest. if your pops are making enough goods that they get all their needs and still have money leftover, then unrest goes down.

In that case then your division of luxury goods and essential goods isn't done by development, since all provinces want it a bit. The luxury goods just have lower demand (since peasants can't reasonably expect to have them) and cost a lot more.

 

[Shoo]

In that case then your division of luxury goods and essential goods isn't done by development, since all provinces want it a bit. The luxury goods just have lower demand (since peasants can't reasonably expect to have them) and cost a lot more.

I mostly agree with your thoughts and I agree that really eu4 would greatly benefit from a population system, especially to work with the trade system, however I disagree that every province should want every good, since things like silk are only really wanted by advanced cities and not really by backwater towns

 

[Bearjuden]

since things like silk are only really wanted by advanced cities and not really by backwater towns

But some of the nobility will have estates and castles ruling over those backwater towns, no? This was my reasoning. I guess you could lock it to provinces of above certain populations if that'd be more accurate, though.

 

[Shoo]

But some of the nobility will have estates and castles ruling over those backwater towns, no? This was my reasoning. I guess you could lock it to provinces of above certain populations if that'd be more accurate, though.

Yeah that's a good point, I think either system would work really.

 

[Shoo]

Another facet of this system would be how the navy interacts with with trade; You would have to add light ships, or a potential new class of trade ships, to trade routes to carry the goods you want to transport, this takes away the abstraction of ships adding "trade power." This would potentially give multiple nations a chance to get in on any large trade en-venture if one can't build enough ships to transport all the goods as needed. This would also make pirating far more immersive as Pirates would actually raid transport ships for goods and need to be defended from, rather than the bland abstraction privateering currently is.

Another cool thing that could be added in a potential trade system rework is more dynamic and interesting trade companies, currently trade companies are bland (there's a bit of a theme of my opinion of the current trading system) but they don't have to be, trade companies and the similar Joint-stock trading Company's were incredibly interesting entities and could be reflected in game by a sort of subject nation that the overlord would give charters to and in turn the trade company would actually perform the trading it's chartered to do.

 

[Shoo]

A lot of the current events and mechanics could be reworked with an overhauled trade system instead of completely scrapped, to take the Price change events as an example;
- "Protestantism Entrenched": just make Protestant provinces demand less fish, this will naturally lower the price, especially for European produced fish, because as it stands it makes very little sense that just because Europe is eating less fish this affects the price of fish produced by Sunni Malays on Borneo.
- "Coffee Boom": increase demand of Coffee in European/ European culture provinces, again this will naturally increase the price.
- "Johann Friedrich Böttger": This one is a bit tricky, either it could change Dresden to produce Chinaware or make it so it unlocks a building that produces Chinaware
- "Coldest period of the Little Ice Age": Potentially make it so that Grain, fish, Wine and Livestock provinces get a malus to production, this makes more sense than a global decrease in the price of those goods when really the price should increase.
- "Uniform regulations": If it was made so that Units actually required goods to be built than this would be a simple matter of changing how many and what type of goods are required.
I've given some examples here but I think that the examples could pretty easily be expanded to give an answer to how every event could be changed to match with the proposed overhaul, it's even possible that new events could be added to further simulate the changing prices of goods in the time period.