What effects merchants?

[unmerged(6147)]

Txs DYE. And txs for the language lessons as well. I enjoy them and often find them instructing. I was not long ago among them who spelled "lose" as "loose". But now I know better

 

[unmerged(29041)]

Has not been mentioned yet, but ownership of CoT means a big bonus on placement there.

 

[unmerged(15337)]

Has not been mentioned yet, but ownership of CoT means a big bonus on placement there.

Is this really true? I've never noticed any such effect (note correct spelling). If there's competition, my guys are just as likely to get wiped out from my COT as well as any other. As far as I have seen the only advantages in merchant placement to having a COT are that you get more merchants and you are unlikely to get embargoed in your own COT.

 

[DSYoungEsq]

Is this really true? I've never noticed any such effect (note correct spelling). If there's competition, my guys are just as likely to get wiped out from my COT as well as any other. As far as I have seen the only advantages in merchant placement to having a COT are that you get more merchants and you are unlikely to get embargoed in your own COT.

Cost, too.

 

[unmerged(15337)]

Cost, too.

This is plainly false, unless you are just being witty, for I have seen personally several times that the cost of merchant placement may INCREASE after I gain ownership of a COT, all other conditions being unchanged.

 

[unmerged(6147)]

The cost algorithm is bugged and has always been. Mostly it is quite realistic, but now and then weird things occur.

 

[unmerged(3931)]

Merchant placement cost is substaintially lower in CoTs where your capital trades. The cost reduction is more than the cost reduction for owning a CoT. If you take ownership of a CoT and that causes your capital's trade to shift, merchant placement cost in your new CoT can go up.

 

[unmerged(29041)]

I still believe that placing in your own CoT is favored (increased chance of success or decreased chance of being competed away) I have not done, neither I will do, testing on it, but if you own a CoT at the beginning of the game when competition is stiffer and you send merchants to several CoTs you always get more into your own CoT than in others, that is my observation, and it does make sense. Also you almost always see the CoT owner quite well placed even if his TE is nothing to write home.

 

[DSYoungEsq]

I still believe that placing in your own CoT is favored (increased chance of success or decreased chance of being competed away) I have not done, neither I will do, testing on it, but if you own a CoT at the beginning of the game when competition is stiffer and you send merchants to several CoTs you always get more into your own CoT than in others, that is my observation, and it does make sense. Also you almost always see the CoT owner quite well placed even if his TE is nothing to write home.

The CoT owner (if AI) is always quite well placed because it is the most efficient use of money, duh. Says not one thing about the relative ease of success.

The plural of anecdote is never data.

Which isn't to say your suspicion is incorrect, mind you...

 

[unmerged(3931)]

AFAIK, technology level doesn't effect it. It's the trade efficiency that comes from technology as well as DP settings and refineries that does.

Trade technology does affect merchant stickiness at least. Perhaps this is not true in the 1.08 betas. However this is true in the 1.08 vanilla and at least one other 1.07 beta version. I did experiments to provide conclusive evidence. You can find a link in my signature. Of course this evidence requires independent verification. Read about the experiment and you can easily do a similar experiment. Please post how you ran the experiment and the data you generate. That should be good enough. I can do the analysis if need be.

 

[unmerged(31425)]

Trade technology does affect merchant stickiness at least. Perhaps this is not true in the 1.08 betas. However this is true in the 1.08 vanilla and at least one other 1.07 beta version. I did experiments to provide conclusive evidence. You can find a link in my signature. Of course this evidence requires independent verification. Read about the experiment and you can easily do a similar experiment. Please post how you ran the experiment and the data you generate. That should be good enough. I can do the analysis if need be.

Sigh. Alright man, I'll expound on how I know that trade efficiency is the predominant factor in merchant success as well as a bunch of other things I know about merchants and how they work. And I'll also explain why I am all but certain that raw trade tech is not a factor. But I got to go to be real soon and this will take a long time to type all of it, so I'll do it tomorrow, time permiting.

 

[unmerged(31425)]

Alright let me just start off by saying that I'm trying to remember alot of things that I've observed about this matter before, and so if I miss something important, go right ahead and ask me how I know this or that, if this post doesn't make the matter clear enough.

Trade technology does affect merchant stickiness at least.

I technically don't disagree with this claim. What I disagree with is the claim that if affects it directly. And I'm at a loss as to figure out just why you seem to think that it does. So if you don't mind my asking, where exactly did you get the idea that raw trade tech directly affects merchant success in the first place? As before you said this, excluding of course what the manual is unclear on, I don't recall ever hearing anybody say, nor reading anywhere, about raw trade tech affecting merchant success myself.

Perhaps this is not true in the 1.08 betas. However this is true in the 1.08 vanilla and at least one other 1.07 beta version. I did experiments to provide conclusive evidence. You can find a link in my signature. Of course this evidence requires independent verification. Read about the experiment and you can easily do a similar experiment. Please post how you ran the experiment and the data you generate. That should be good enough. I can do the analysis if need be.

OK, now please bear with me on this one. I don't agree with your claims here, and if at all possible friend, I'd like to be able to disagree on this matter with out anyone making light of the other side or mocking the manner in which they make observations, etc. So if at all possible can we keep this debate civil, even if the end result is just that we bitterly disagree on the matter? Let's let bygones be bygones, agreed?


I don't think that your expirement conclusively shows anything about trade tech or TE. But I by no means mean that as a slight against you or it for that matter. It's just that I don't think that that type of expirement, with as few samples as you have, is capable of conclusively showing anything on TE or trade tech. I mean if you look at the range, even for the same settings with a mere 4 tests, you see that it varies quite a bit. Take for example this part here.

Case Study: 1.08 vanilla

Here is data from the Xhosa trials on stickiness:

-------------------------------------   Lost merchants
Trial Variables ---------------------   four trial sets
-------------------------------------   ordered data
Mercantilism 10, TE 30%, Trade tech 2:  55 65 68 69
Mercantilism 10, TE 45%, Trade tech 4:  55 57 57 59
Mercantilism 10, TE 50%, Trade tech 2:  53 59 60 61
Mercantilism 10, TE 65%, Trade tech 4:  41 49 49 50

The first group, M 10 TE 30 TT2, has a spread of 14 between a mere 4 samples. I think that if you increase the amount of samples, you will see even bigger ranges than this too. So one thing we can deduce from your expirement is that what is being tested does indeed have large ranges. I mean let's be practical, the amount of possible affecters for your expirement forms a colossal list. Thus I think in order to make some definitive claims about whether TE does or does not affect merchant success or whether raw trade tech does or doesn't affect merchant success, you are going to need a heck of alot more samples. I don't mean to belittle what you've done, but to me, it is an enormous stretch to make definitive claims about these 2 factors here, based on your results so far.

You also claim that the 1.08 regular test group shows that raw trade tech does indeed affect merchant sustainance. But this untrue. And I'll explain why. Take a look at these two parts of the 1.08 test.

Mercantilism 10, TE 45%, Trade tech 4:  55 57 57 59
Mercantilism 10, TE 50%, Trade tech 2:  53 59 60 61

and

Mercantilism 0, TE 45%, Trade tech 4:  62 63 66 66
 Mercantilism 0, TE 50%, Trade tech 2:  58 66 67 69

These are the only two parts where a lower trade tech but with higher TE is really being matched up against a higher trade tech with lower TE. The first part here has an average of 57 vs 58.25. The second part has 64.25 vs 65. Anotherwards, you are claiming that a mere 1.25 and .75 spread clearly indicates that trade tech is a factor. Now how can you call a spread that small definitive, when you, in 4 numbers per sample only, have a range even as high as 14, especially when you consider that the TE has a mere spread of 5% between both the sets of 2?

Now it could be that trade tech, if it has a direct affect, could cause results like that. But guess what? If it doesn't cause any direct affect, results like that are easily in sync with the ranges inherent even in every other group you tested. So I think that either, you are making a deliberate colossal exaggeration or you aren't analyzing the math as meticulously as you think you are.

Now let's even take a look at your 1.07 beta claims as well. At full mercantilism you got nothing that would indicate trade tech could be a bigger factor than TE. But with full free trade, you have a spread of 7.25 between the 45% TE TT4 and 50% TE TT2.

 Mercantilism 0, TE 30%, Trade tech 2:  46 49 51 53
 Mercantilism 0, TE 45%, Trade tech 4:  38 40 41 46
 Mercantilism 0, TE 50%, Trade tech 2:  47 48 49 50
 Mercantilism 0, TE 65%, Trade tech 4:  37 38 38 42

Now I freely admit that that is a much larger spread than the mere 1.25 max you had with 1.08 regular but the problem is and evidently you even figured this out too, is that you are reduced to claiming that only free trade enables trade tech to be a bigger factor. Now to me that is an awfully hard pill to swallow. Trade tech surpasses TE in importance when triggered by low mercantilism? Where the heck have we ever got the slightest hint of that? Also once again, it is the mere 5% TE difference that has produced the awkward results. That hardly dissallows a good deal of randomness in the results.

Furthermore the 1.08 test has trade tech 4 TE 45% with a 1.25 spread between it and TT2 TE 50%, NOT when at full free trade but when at full mercantilist. At full free trade the spread is only .25. And even furthermore in the 1.08 beta test, the spread of all groups lines up in proportion to TE with the highest TE losing the least merchants in all circumstances.

Now I realize that it is very easy for a reader of your merchant expirement, and perhaps this post as well, to get lost in the math and technical terms, so I'm going to put this part in bold print so everyone can see clearly what is neccessary for your claims to be correct about trade tech being a larger factor than TE or even a factor at all. In order for Ws2's claims about trade tech's effects on merchant stickiness to be correct, based on his expirement, trade tech would have to have been programmed to have a bigger influence on merchant stickiness ONLY when at full free trade in the 1.07 beta. The 1.08 vanilla, would then have had to have had this reversed with the full mercantilism causing trade tech to be the larger factor than TE, or at least the effects were neutralized since the difference between the two was meager. And then finally trade tech would then have to have been reduced in importance to less than TE in all circumstances in the latest beta. And yet all of this would have to have been programmed without a single notificantion, to EU2 users by the EU2 makers, of it's being changed or even being like this is in the first place.

Ws2, originally you claimed "My(Ws2) understanding of the ability to keep merchants in CoTs is not based on trade efficiency but rather trade tech level and owning the CoTs," in post #39 of the chief judges thread. Then you ran your expirement and concluded that both trade tech and TE were affecting merchant stickiness. Then you changed it even further, and said that one has more impact over the other in various circumstances in various releases.

I'm sorry my friend, but your claims are changing very rapidly based on newly surfacing contradictory information, again and again. I think it is time you simply accepted, that as noble an effort as your expirement was, it does not conclusively show that trade tech affects merchant stickiness one way or the other. Furthermore, the one thing you can say about your expirement is, that by and large, TE seems to have a noticeable affect. Anytime you compared sizeable spreads in trade efficiency between two groups, the higher TE lost a substantial amount less of merchants than the low TE groups. Even if you minused or added the largest spread you found of 14 to one group or the other.

Now I don't know where you got the idea that trade tech affects merchant stickiness, but the manual also does not say what you claim it does. We analyzed two passages, both of which say trade tech level affects it, but had problems with meaning that literally. The equation given on page 50 of the manual, interprets trade tech to mean .1 times the base trade of trade in a COT per trade tech level. Ironically, this same equation appears to be in the COTs in the game, when you highlight an active merchant, except that instead of that .?? number being trade tech, it is literally the actual trade efficiency. I don't care to go into the bottom passage in question in that page, as we've already done it to death and quite frankly we both agree the grammer there is shockingly haphazard anyways. So whatever the heck it did really meant, it's still not correct in multiple ways.

Furthermore, in the two passages in question, there is no mention, verbatim, of trade efficiency at all. And yet you have conceded already that trade efficiency is indeed a factor, EVEN IF trade tech is too.





I'll add to this post, but am going to send this part already, so any readers seeing just this part but want to read more, please re-check this post again later on.

 

[unmerged(3931)]

I direct the reader to my experimental evidence provided in the link in my signature. In the experiment, many samples of size eight or more are clearly compared. The variance in sample data is not so great so as to prevent conclusions made in a scientifically accepted way.

IDLF mistakenly misstates the history of my experiment and the manner in which the results unfolded. IDLF states that the manual is “unclear”, when the manual must be completely wrong for IDLF’s view of the game to be correct. However, IDLF assumes that other documentation will be accurate. It should be well established by now that the manual and other documentation is often in error.

IDLF’s assumption about how programmers code and inform people of changes does not reflect a complete knowledge of the history of many errors and undocumented changes. It has been verified on various occasions that changes are not documented or are not correctly documented. One case in point involves the recent discovery that there are only two badboy points for a DoW without CB when relations are +100 or more. The change was not documented. Notice that the DIP penalty/bonus received from Aristocracy is in the range –3 to +2 instead of –2 to +2.

For my experiment, more data is supposedly required; IDLF could help with the experiments. The experiment is easy to do. It would be much simpler than all this argument. I admit my experimental evidence does indeed require independent verification. Acting alone, I have done all I can do.

Trade tech does have a direct effect on merchant stickiness in some versions of the game. The effect is noticed even when trade efficiency is held constant.

Anyone willing to perform the experiment or a subset of the important tests (at same TE and different trade tech then at same trade tech and different TE) is encouraged to do so. Please provide the procedure and data for others to see.

 

[unmerged(31425)]

Alright Ws2 I'm through talking with you on this matter. You seem to be incapable or unwilling to disagree without flinging insults.

 

[Araanor]

I've noticed these as factors for merchant success when I've played: monarch ADM, stability, trade efficiency and mercantilism DP. I'm more uncertain about COT owndership. I've seen nothing that indicates that trade tech directly affects performance.

 

[unmerged(6147)]

The importance of owning a COT and the possibility to compete other merchants out
becomes very clear in WC types of games.

Assume you want to kick away other nations merchants in two COTs, one that you own and one that someone else owns, and that you have a very high BB (far away above the BB war threshold) but hugely superior TE (perhaps 50% better than most nations).

Assume you send a merchant to each one of these two COTs and assume there are no free slots when the merchants arrive.

The result in my experience is

1. In the COT you own it is around a 70-80% you succeed in kicking another nation's merchant out.

2. In the COT you do not own it is close to 0%.

 

[unmerged(31425)]

The importance of owning a COT and the possibility to compete other merchants out
becomes very clear in WC types of games.

Assume you want to kick away other nations merchants in two COTs, one that you own and one that someone else owns, and that you have a very high BB (far away above the BB war threshold) but hugely superior TE (perhaps 50% better than most nations).

Assume you send a merchant to each one of these two COTs and assume there are no free slots when the merchants arrive.

The result in my experience is

1. In the COT you own it is around a 70-80% you succeed in kicking another nation's merchant out.

2. In the COT you do not own it is close to 0%.

I've noticed the same. For a certainty ownership of COTs affects the chance of success and sustainance. In fact except for, possibly, and mind you I'm doubtful of it, due to Ws2's finds on the matter, mercantilism, it seems pretty clear to me that everything that affects merchant sustainance also affects their chances for success when placed.

Myself, I'm postive that stab, ADM, TE, BB, and COT ownership/non-ownership all have sizeable and recognizeable affects on merchant success(by success I mean both sustainance and placing).

I don't know 100% whether religion, relations, or having TEs between competing countries in a neutral COT, actually have an impact. But if they do it would not susprise me.

Another thing about TE, is that in the long run it has by far the largest impact. Stab and ADM have a cut off point. And I've definitely noticed sizeable affects by them between competing countries that have small TE spreads between them. But with 1 country has vastly superior TE over another one, like 30%+ or something like that, the ADM and Stab discrepency between the two doesn't seem to be enough to compensate for it.

With BB, it seems to continually have an affect and I don't suspect there is a cut off point like with ADM and Stab. But it doesn't seem to me from what I've seen to be as big of a factor as TE. High TE, particularly very high TE, seems to have little problems compensating for it. For example, I had 80 BB for about 15-20 years in my Portugal game in the AAR, and still didn't lose a merchant for about 70 years. I had much less BB than this for the rest of the time too. But hey, if you're trying to get GTD, ya I've noticed high BB delaying it myself too.

 

[unmerged(9404)]

I don't know 100% whether religion, relations, or having TEs between competing countries in a neutral COT, actually have an impact. But if they do it would not susprise me.

I notice in MP games that I'm rarely competed out of CoTs by my allies (which I thus have good relations with) or compete them out for that matter.
I do get competed out by my enemies (bad relations) a lot.

So I'd say yes relations matter when the game decides which merchant gets competed out by a merchant of a particular country.

 

[unmerged(16441)]

I appreciate the effort ws2_32 put into the study of merchant stickiness and I think it's great someone decided to figure out EU2 mysterious trade mechanism.

May I make a few suggestions though? I have grown too lazy to perform the tests myself but I certainly wouyld be interested to read results if someone takes time to actually run them.

Trade efficiency vs. trade tech level:
I think a more conclusive test would look as follows. Edit db\trade.csv so that tech levels have zero impact on trade efficiency. Ie, TE remains at 30% at all tech levels. Then run several trials with (say) Xhosa at trade tech 10 and at trade tech 0. Comparing the means for lost merchants should say a lot regarding the relevance of raw trade tech levels.

Mercantilism:
I think the evidence presented by WS2_32 is not entirely conclusive because the mercantilism slider may have mixed effects. For instance, it may (or may not) be the case that mercantilism makes it more likely for merchants to stick in "domestic" COTs and less likely to stick in "foreign" COTs. For a clean experiment, samples have to be constructed accordingly. Ie give all European COTs to Portugal and compare how many merchants it loses at merc=0 and merc = 10. Then do the same test for Tuscany (or whatever) who owns no COTs.

 

[unmerged(3931)]

Trade efficiency vs. trade tech level:
I think a more conclusive test would look as follows. Edit db\trade.csv so that tech levels have zero impact on trade efficiency. Ie, TE remains at 30% at all tech levels. Then run several trials with (say) Xhosa at trade tech 10 and at trade tech 0. Comparing the means for lost merchants should say a lot regarding the relevance of raw trade tech levels.

That is an excellent suggestion. Thank you. I have dedicated as much time as I care to for the time being. I am finishing an AAR. Anyway, it would be better for independent verification if someone else could do the experiment.

I think the evidence presented by WS2_32 is not entirely conclusive because the mercantilism slider may have mixed effects. For instance, it may (or may not) be the case that mercantilism makes it more likely for merchants to stick in "domestic" COTs and less likely to stick in "foreign" COTs. For a clean experiment, samples have to be constructed accordingly. Ie give all European COTs to Portugal and compare how many merchants it loses at merc=0 and merc = 10. Then do the same test for Tuscany (or whatever) who owns no COTs.

Mercantilism may have mixed effects, it is true. So it is important to sample at each end of the scale of mercantilism. I did that. However, results might be different depending on how many CoTs are owned by a nation. I did not consider the possibility. Thank you.

However, in the case of a pagan, you can clearly see the impact on trade income since no matter how many CoTs a pagan owns, most of the trade income must come from CoTs that are not pagan owned.