Before you ask, no, it doesn't involve Ireland.
Firstly, a couple of points:
So is there anything that can be done?
Sure. Instead of having "boost" increase the value of trade as it is steered, have steering merchants collect the boost profits immediately.
If you're steering $10 of trade with a merchant, instead of dropping $12 in the next node, he drops $10 there and collects the $2 that would've been added in transit.
Here are the benefits as I see them with this change:
If you care about things being thematic, this change makes even more sense. On a local level, you're steering trade to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities, which you can collect on if you have merchant presence to organize it. If you don't, those gains are captured by others' merchants or the local populace. Additionally, there's no artificial inflation of trade goods from a base value standpoint. Californian wood isn't suddnely worth a bazillion dollars; that money is being taken out of the system incrementally.
What does everyone else think? Does anyone know whether this would be as straighforward to implement as it appears it may be? Are there side effects I haven't thought about?
Firstly, a couple of points:
- Exploiting the "boost" parameter in 1.1 led to unreasonably unrealistic incomes, leading our illustrious devs to tweak its influence over the next couple of patches. This is all well and good.
- However, making "boost" weaker has the side effect of decreasing the incentive for steering trade; it's now often better to collect in an Asian node and drop a veritable armada to combat the trade-power malus for doing so.
- Trade is more interesting with more steering and less collecting. Moreover, the AI rarely collects in non-home nodes, so this change makes it easy for a player to take advantage of the AI's suboptimal play. It would be really hard to design an AI that can combat this.
So is there anything that can be done?
Sure. Instead of having "boost" increase the value of trade as it is steered, have steering merchants collect the boost profits immediately.
If you're steering $10 of trade with a merchant, instead of dropping $12 in the next node, he drops $10 there and collects the $2 that would've been added in transit.
Here are the benefits as I see them with this change:
- You don't have a problem with obscene trade income because you're not "compounding" the boost parameter. The most valuable any trade node can possibly be is the combined value of all trade goods in the world, but obviously that's never going to happen
- Steering trade is optimal in more cases. Even if you can't get trade all the way back to your home node, you can make decent money on the entrepot. This encourages more flowing trade, especially when you get closer to exit nodes. As a bonus, since the AI can be stymied by a crafty human, giving profits for steering prevents all the AI's hard work from going to waste.
- There is an inherent balance between adding a merchant to steer a smaller chunk of huge late-chain trade and steering a large chunk of early-chain trade. This adds a dimension for strategic decisions, and naturally should string international merchants and ships out along the length of the chain.
- Collecting trade can still be beneficial "in the chain", but it's more clearly hostile with this change. If you're taking capital out of the system, downstream players won't be benefiting from the transit profits they otherwise would.
- It's a bit more intuitive for new players, as random multipliers aren't added on the way.
- Every merchant would pay you directly, in addition to the more advanced indirect effects of steering merchants. This makes more merchants better, as without a merchant, you can't collect the transit profits. Allowing the AI to steer or "use" your trade power (as in one-exit nodes) would still move the capital, but all the profits would go to people with merchants there. This adds a strategic decision that doesn't currently exist: do you place your merchant to take advantage of your TP, or is he better used further up the chain to get more capital into your route?
- You don't have to blob to make money in trade. Because of the boost reduction, you have to be 80% in a node to make steering profitable. With the malus, this can only happen when you control a huge amount of land, like all of Africa. Portugal didn't have to control all of the continent in real life in order to effectively steer East Indian trade.
- Obviously I don't work for Paradox, but it seems like this could be a not-terrible change. You still use all of the same modifiers, but it's a matter of changing where the profit goes. If I were implementing it I probably would do away with the diminishing-boost of multiple merchants; just calculate each country's contribution to the steering and calculate independently (portugal is steering 50% of the $10; their transit profits are 20%*steering * $5). So hopefully limited impact on other aspects of the game
- The AI seems like it could deal with this change successfully; it might even be better dealing with this change than it is right now in the current system.
If you care about things being thematic, this change makes even more sense. On a local level, you're steering trade to take advantage of arbitrage opportunities, which you can collect on if you have merchant presence to organize it. If you don't, those gains are captured by others' merchants or the local populace. Additionally, there's no artificial inflation of trade goods from a base value standpoint. Californian wood isn't suddnely worth a bazillion dollars; that money is being taken out of the system incrementally.
What does everyone else think? Does anyone know whether this would be as straighforward to implement as it appears it may be? Are there side effects I haven't thought about?