Looked at it.
well with mercantilism you get cheaper merchants.
sorry i dont get it. why is that?
yes but thats not the kind of trade that Zheng He was concerned about. plus even counting that in, free trade still dont absolutely favour external trade because you get cheaper merchants percentage-wise which is a big incentive to place merchants in very expensive overseas CoT. This answers your last question.
Yes, but that is neither here nor there. Free trade refusals, on the other hand, very clearly speaks to inwardly focussed trade.
Unless I am mistaken, the game is specifically hard-coded to do this.
Non Zheng He himself perhaps, but surely a navally oiented China.
Granted, but with fewer merchants you will have a hard time maintaining a presence in multiple CoTs. But I'm willing to grant that the merchant effects (cost and quantity) are basically a wash. They don't argue strongly one way or the other for external vs. internal trade.
And remember they still have a large land base to worry about, even if it is sparsely settled. Managing such a large country and an overseas empire isn't the easiest task as France found out, and france is hardly the size of china.
These are great arguments for why China took the historical route, and why the "a" choices should increase mercantilism, but they do *not* suggest that a China that decides to keep its radical naval expansion would move toward mercantilism.
Absolutely. So the slider should move toward free trade, but not all the way to zero. No argument there.
That is the most likely outcome, but it should be modeled by subsequent historical events, much much later than 1436. "The closure of China" is one such event.
These arguments, at very best, seem to imply that naval China would be as mercantilistic as historical China. While domestic CoTs would surely be naval China's "most important" priority, they would be the only priority for land China.
i already said why this is not necesssarily the case.
perhaps it is because of your presumption which i have already dealt with above, but if i have not been clear enough, the argument towards more mercantilism was simply that part of the reason Zheng He was sent out was to increase China's control of domestic CoTs. The 'distinct arguments' i already explained why they don't equate to free trade.
of course, this is the only issue left with those events.Originally posted by doktarr
I think given the somewhat contentions nature of this debate, it's nice to point out that we've come to an agreement on 95% of the reworking of the "strategic decision" event. So, that's nice.
2-2, anyone want to break the deadlock?
more participation from outside is appreciated.
I disagree with most of this. The fact that Chinese provinces are more likely to trade in Chinese COTs if China is mercantalistic, and that overseas provinces are more likely to trade in Chinese COTs if the Chinese are free trade is the crux of the matter reagrdless of how difficult it is to keep merchants in your COTs. But I'd expect exactly this to be the outcome of an outward looking China, more Chinese merchants overseas, more foreign merchants at home. And surely a goal of Zheng He would have been to have more of SE Asia trade therough China, i.e., increasing the scale of Chinese COTs.
Well, the main mechanism for controlling foreign markets in the game is sending merchants, which has little to do with mercantilism vs. free trade. The only other ways foreign trade can be controlled are through expanding the coverage of your CoTs, which free trade does.
Again, this is a later event and doesn't belong in this discussion (although I agree with you).
So, the 1436 and 1525 events can drop mercantilism in your opinion?
So, the Chinaexplore AI should be set to mostly put down TP's, I suppose.
Well OK, but one way or another more colonists make sense. During the Zheng He period we have a wave of colonists (which, admittedly, could just be modeled by the existing colonist bonuses in events). Afterwards, a naval China would tend to put down more TPs.
No, i meant that events out of the control of the central government should shift it to more free trade. However, if a human player never touches mercantilism/free trade slider it should never drop below 6 under any circumstance.
Yes its at 95 right now and so it shouldn't be dropped below that.
IMO deoending on certain factors outside direct player control it should be lowered, otherwise the 1436 and to a lesser extent 1525 event should raise it. the 1424 event shouldn't do either as the benifits china gained in trade deals was quickly eroded.
Sorry, i went out of order
Hmmmm.....Well that makes them able and wanting to conquer those 8 territories easily, but what about the rest of China.Surely an unstopped horde wouldn't have been content with China's most backward area.
They can still release them as a vassal....
That's not too far fetched...
Well as far a warfare goes, in the area they were fighting they'd be quite advanced and much easier to adapt than china, but as far as trade and infrastructure go....I would go with China tech, but have evets that fire to give troops increase land investment say about 200.
Can you post those events here? Its hard to wade through multiple threads on a 56k...and phonelines built during the Eisenhower adminstratiom.
True... but they'll never get all eight of those as long as China moved their capital. You could make a special event (in case China left their capital in Shanghai) that gives the Mongols cores on most of China if they get the northern eight. But this is mostly fantasy, not a big gameplay concern. The only time I see this being an issue is if a human player re-loads as the Mongols.
Yes, but if a Chinese player is willing to cede their entire northern border to the Mongols just to eliminate the invasions, I don't see this as much of an exploit. The way I imagined the events working, you would still get some Mongol invasion events as long as you owned any of the northern border provinces. I was thinking that the invasions could be province-triggered (and possibly random).
Well, I don't have any problem with making such an event, but I don't think it would be necessary, since I don't expect the Mongols to be a persistent nation. I see mongol invasions being modeled by large revolts, and any time the revolts are successful, the Mongol nation springs up and China now has to deal with a greater threat. As long as China manages to periodically annex the Mongols, each successive Mongol invasion will have tech-parity with China.
I could, but I'd rather wait for Sun Zi to tell us what he's actually written already, so I know what's worth relating and what isn't.
