We all know how powerful lightship spam in end nodes is. Who has more ships, gets a bigger piece of the pie. All this massive trade power then gets propagated in upstream nodes to suck the nodes dry. But at least you could DoW your opponent using Trade CB, kill his navy, force him to share trade power. It's something that you could proactively engage.
And then you have inland nodes, where the current formula favors multiple small nations over a big one in order to pull the trade downstream.
Your provincial trade power means nothing when you are facing 20+ merchants from HRE princes, most of them armed with trade ideas and together mounting a massive trade power with the inland node steering bonus.
I cannot get arround the concept that multiple smaller nations should be able to pull a greater total amount of money than a single big one.
As princess begin to cannibalize each other, you will notice how they are able to pull less from nodes outside of the HRE.
My recent experience with Venice has lead me to believe that Constatinople, despite not being an end node, does have some serious advantages over Venice.
The problem is Ragusa and it's connection to Wien, which is an inland node. A dozen of HRE princess will pull the trade to Wien easily. You will need to park half of your naval force limits in order to be able to steer half of it towards Venice, your home node.
Steering from Wien -> Venice is a futile attempt at best. You could even conquer the entire austria and you would still be lacking money.
The same HRE princess will have less power to steer from Constatinople -> Ragusa however. Because it's not an inland node and it's not being steered towards an inland node either.
This makes the swarming with merchants tactic less useful for HRE members as they don't have lightships to in mediteranean.
As I said, i cannot get my head around the idea that multiple small nations should wield a greater trade power than a big one. It just doesn't make any sense.
It's like if all the 50 states of USA where separate countries and they managed to do better economically than unified USA.
And then you have inland nodes, where the current formula favors multiple small nations over a big one in order to pull the trade downstream.
Your provincial trade power means nothing when you are facing 20+ merchants from HRE princes, most of them armed with trade ideas and together mounting a massive trade power with the inland node steering bonus.
I cannot get arround the concept that multiple smaller nations should be able to pull a greater total amount of money than a single big one.
As princess begin to cannibalize each other, you will notice how they are able to pull less from nodes outside of the HRE.
My recent experience with Venice has lead me to believe that Constatinople, despite not being an end node, does have some serious advantages over Venice.
The problem is Ragusa and it's connection to Wien, which is an inland node. A dozen of HRE princess will pull the trade to Wien easily. You will need to park half of your naval force limits in order to be able to steer half of it towards Venice, your home node.
Steering from Wien -> Venice is a futile attempt at best. You could even conquer the entire austria and you would still be lacking money.
The same HRE princess will have less power to steer from Constatinople -> Ragusa however. Because it's not an inland node and it's not being steered towards an inland node either.
This makes the swarming with merchants tactic less useful for HRE members as they don't have lightships to in mediteranean.
As I said, i cannot get my head around the idea that multiple small nations should wield a greater trade power than a big one. It just doesn't make any sense.
It's like if all the 50 states of USA where separate countries and they managed to do better economically than unified USA.
