Merchant Republic - Awesome Potential?

[DDRJake]

Also - Trade Rights, thats awesome +66% production bonus. So it's always worth to take them, because it cuts only 25% of trade value, so in the end we gaining more income.

Oh really? -25% trade value means -25% production value too because production is based on trade value*production efficiency.

If your trade value is 10 and your production eff. is 50%, then without trade rights you get 10*0.5 = 5 ducats production income.
With trade rights you get (7.5*0.5)*1.66) = 6.22 ducats...but you're also losing 2.5 ducats of CoT value which, at 50% TE is another 1.25 ducats.

Be careful not to overstate the value of trade rights. If you're a heavy trader and have low production eff, they will actually lose you money.

If you are playing as a Merchant Republic they are great for squeezing enemy CoTs to death though, check my sig for everything you'll ever need to know about Merchant Republics.

 

[DDRJake]

A lot of good info in your post, but the not a lasting problem thing isn't necessarily true. If you have over a certain number of provinces--100 or so maybe?--you will never have enough magistrates to build them all up. If you have a large country, you will still be hurting for magistrates on 1/1/1821.

If you have over 100 provinces, you won't need all those magistrates. Heck if you have over 40 you've probably already hit critical mass unless they are all siberian and australian wastelands. Granted you'll be stronger with more magistrates, but for what purpose?

Yes, there's competitive multiplayer, but I can't see being a Merchant Republic for any reasonable length of time helping out there. In Single Player, the ability to economically vassalise a country and dominate trade without needing to expand far outweights a couple of magistrates and a little admin efficiency.