State Edict Questions

[Heindrich]

Has anyone done the maths on how to calculate whether certain state edicts are worth their cost? Specifically Protect Trade and Centralization Effort.

I tested Protect Trade in all states containing Centres of Trade at the start of a Ming campaign, but the difference it made to trade income was negligible, and nowhere near worth the maintenance cost.

Similarly, is it worth using Centralisation Effort to reduce autonomy? For me it seems to be too expensive unless there was a developed gold province in the state.

Under what conditions are these edicts worth their cost?

 

[Juggernaught]

Haven't done the math or anything but.. most of them are great considering you can disable after one year.

%50 Trade Power from Protected trade is Op.
I always enable the one that gives %10 dev cost reduction when I'm going to invest.
Used once or twice the %33 institution spread. It is fine when you lack the money to buy it from one province.
Rest like %1 conversion, %25 manpower, etc, are also fine depending on what you need and how you managed the development on your states.

 

[Octavius Antony]

Protect trade is worth it for CoT bearing states in highly contested high value nodes. This would be something like London or Genoa. Centralization effort is just not worth it most of the time, as you'll be aggressively reducing autonomy once 1610 rolls around anyway.

On the other hand, making huge recruitment centers of manpower out of the grain fields of Ruthenia with the Nobles estate and the state edict can be quite decent. And for that extra little boost, the missionary strength edict is pretty alright as a temporary measure.

 

[Splax77]

99% of the time, edicts will not return a profit. So in general, I would advise edicts to be used when you need them for a specific purpose, not because they make money. In order of how often I use them, these are the ones I use:

• Missionary strength: Makes conversions go quicker, can help give you that needed boost in a high dev province
• Defensive edict: Makes hostile sieges take an extra few months, which can make all the difference in a close war.
• Institution spread: Can be a nice little boost if you have some money to spare and don't want to waste monarch points
• Manpower boost: if you've got a bunch of high dev provinces in a state, this can be a nice boost that'll give you a little bit of extra manpower.

 

[shivan]

I wish they would remove the - 10% development one. It's a total no brainer and just adds tedious micro management to the game.

 

[Splax77]

I completely forgot about the development one! That's definitely on my list as well, saves a ton of points when developing for an institution.

 

[Badesumofu]

Protect Trade is rarely worth it. If you own a state that consists only of the CoT province then it probably is if the node is at all important. Keep in mind that 50% only multiplies base trade power so it's nowhere near as good as it sounds. It could be worth it in a node where there is a ton of value and you're getting a lot of money per point of trade power. I generally ignore it since it's so marginal.

The development one is great, you should use it any time you're going to develop a province.

Maybe the manpower one if you're trying to avoid using mercs and have loads of money. Again important to note that it only increases base manpower, though.

Basically they are not very useful. The trade power one is problematic because it's literally spend some money to get some money - it's either going to be free money or worthless. In the majority of cases it's worthless. Maybe there could be edge cases now where you need that little bit more trade power to activate the +1 siege trade policy, that's probably going to be worthwhile but still very marginal.

 

[bly08]

For protect trade, you can get an estimate by looking at how much total trade power is present in the node how much the +50% edict would bring. For example if Constantinople has 250 total trade power with 10 ducats of trade value remaining in the node, and running Protect Trade in Hudavendigar increases trade power by 25, you would make 10% (25/250) of 10 ducats, or 1 ducat extra every month from collecting. If that's more than the maintenance cost then the edict is profitable. It doesn't matter how many countries are in the node, only depends on the node's total trade power, how the trade power is distributed, and the total value present in the node.

As a side note, provincial trade modifiers are generally much worse than they seem, which means mercantilism is generally overvalued and you should avoid paying mana for it.

Also keep in mind that the displayed trade power in provinces is the modified amount, the base value is usually much lower.

 

[schondetta]

i use the manpower one to convert money into manpower when needed. The trade power one seems to make very little difference in money. the dev one of course for spawning institution than using the inst spread soon after until i embrace it.

 

[Badesumofu]

I will say with the manpower one - I'd dismissed it previously due how it made more sense to just use mercs if you wanted to convert money to manpower. Now that using mercs has potential downsides depending on your approach to your campaign, I'll have to take a second look at that one.