Push button - get reward (again).

[DarkBlue]

I agree fully with the OP. But Paradox wants to provide instant gratification to its players because most of its player base are casuals rather than min-maxers and hardcore RP players. And I agree with that too. It's just common business sense. It would also make EU4 far more complicated and leave stuff like trade and development upto luck.

That being said, implementing a system of dynamic development while keeping the current development method by button would solve both issues. It allows you, the government, to invest in developing a province, and also accounts for natural development by the passage of time.

But it isn't that complicated to have to court your merchants, build a great fleet or protect your trade route...?

It seems simple enough and quite fun in SP, in MP making CoT dynamic could be revolutionary to gameplay

 

[Mackus]

In the last DD you can improve some CoTs so they will not only give you more Trade Power, but, also, buff the area. It is pretty nice idea, until we see how it is implemented - you need to spend gold. Yap. Building strong and stable trade routes? Nope. Protecting your trade fleets and undermining your rivals trade efforts? Nope. Push button and get upgrade? Yap.

Yap. It's the same problem with adopting institutions. At least with institutions, there is strategic choice involved. You might spend money to adopt them instantly, or you wait until they spread so far you can adopt them for free. Would still make more sense to pay monarch mana, or suffer debuffs like stab hit, or loss of legitimacy, or corruption.

 

[hwoosh]

*scratching in the back of own head*
Hell. I'm sure, I'm definitely sure I saw this discussion somewhen.
Aha! Got it! It the same thing that spending monarch power on development in 2015!

That, too, was a huge mistake, and along with forts it was the beginning of the end for my interest in EU4. Now I do play the game from time to time... but always on 1.11.4 (the last version before development and forts).

 

[cuendillar]

I fully support the idea to require CoTs to be held by burghers (or flavour equivalent) to be upgraded.

Having a large control of the node makes much less sense and would possibly be counterproductive. My preference is instead the "opposite", that a node needs to have a certain number of merchants and autocollectors active in them to be upgraded - say 7 for L2 and 15 for L3.

From a historical perspective, this means that CoTs in trade nodes where merchants from many different nations come to trade and have an interest in grows far larger than monopolized nodes that works almost as a "trade flow: turn left" sign.
Looking at gameplay, this actually encourages keeping weak local nations around for trading partners instead of immediately annexing them as the bonuses for a higher level CoT might exceed that of owning their land outright. It also means that you can only build a building improving your share where there is actual competition and that it's possibly to compete for trade supremacy by holding only a few select provinces as opposed to needing to blob.