Will we ever be able to steer trade route directions

[cetvrtak]

The best way for Iberia to "control their trade" is to straight up annex Genoa node for themself.

Arguably, the best way for Iberia to control their trade is to not be Iberia, but Genoa.

Why is the Channel and Italy the ultimate end of this supoosed scandalous behavior?

I guess at Paradox they considered The Channel and Italy to be historically in best position to develop trade to such lengths. But who cares about history anyway.

 

[Battlex]

Arguably, the best way for Iberia to control their trade is to not be Iberia, but Genoa.

I guess at Paradox they considered The Channel and Italy to be historically in best position to develop trade to such lengths. But who cares about history anyway.

Repeat steer trade threads is better than repeat CHINA SHOULD BE 1002929K DEV AT GAME STARTZ threads at least

 

[Titanius Puffin]

But who cares about history anyway.

Well... I wouldn't play this game if I wasn't interested in history. It's one of the best historical games out there.
[Edit: spoiler added to hide another tangential topic]

Spoiler: Map Nerdery

I noticed you uses something like a mercator map when demonstrating population... which makes Europe look larger and squeezes India and anywhere close to the equator. Paradoxically, it makes the European population look less dense - and less impressive. India, in particular, gets squeezed. I doubt India would lose the densest population award though. So I don't mean to contradict the point you were making. It's just that 2d maps on 3d spaces can affect how we see reality in interesting ways.

the current trade system is just an old relic of a Euro-focused EU4

Yup.. it's called Europa Universalis. The focus is kind of obvious.
If you're going to become a world power as a South-East Asian Kingdom for instance, you're playing to disrupt historical assumptions (unless you're forming Thailand perhaps). It's completely possible though, just not optimal to the smallest degree. This is where I diverge with the OP's perspective, because I think that's acceptable.

 

[Akela]

Static trade directions makes this entire argument really stupid. The best way for Iberia to "control their trade" is to straight up annex Genoa node for themself. Wealth gets moved by things you have no control over, such as Transfers from Traders Downstream and especially Caravan Power. Why is the Channel and Italy the ultimate end of this supoosed scandalous behavior? The answer is that it isn't, the current trade system is just an old relic of a Euro-focused EU4.

Like I said, I consider the fact that you can't reverse the trade flows to be an obvious flaw in the system - and as you say, it's clearly a relic of a eurocentric design. No argument there at all.

But the way I see it, the fact that the directions are hard-coded is basically the only issue. The trade networks ideally shouldn't have an inherent 'upstream' and 'downstream' built in at all - but I consider the fact that nearby trade power does pull value around to be a feature, not a bug.

Let's be clear here, if you're trading next door to someone like Genoa or Venice early in this time period you absolutely should have to fight to stop them getting a slice of your pie. Same thing if you're anywhere in sailing range of a major power later on. This is not an era where 'trade' means 'mutually beneficial exchange of goods' - it means 'one country's merchants taking someone else's stuff'.

 

[cetvrtak]

Repeat steer trade threads is better than repeat CHINA SHOULD BE 1002929K DEV AT GAME STARTZ threads at least

It's a "historical acurracy vs game balance", or as Philipe Thibaut says "sandboxiness", argument that goes on since the board game more than 20 years ago.

 

[Titanius Puffin]

Same thing if you're anywhere in sailing range of a major power later on. This is not an era where 'trade' means 'mutually beneficial exchange of goods' - it means 'one country's merchants taking someone else's stuff'.

Exploiting sometimes, but also arbitrage. I think that perspective turns trade into a cartoon. EU4 aside, Venice's trade wasn't about hoarding resources - they were the middlemen to much of the Mediterranean and southern Europe. Genoa, the Netherlands, and Britain did something similar (and profited that way).

20 Litres of water is worth far more in the Sahara than in the middle of Lake Taupo - for instance. Magically teleporting water from Taupo to the Sahara would be very profitable (and also attract accusations of ecological plundering). The Leninist interpretation of history emphasises exploitation, but it completely ignores that value is highly contextual.

 

[Akela]

Exploiting sometimes, but also arbitrage. I think that perspective turns trade into a cartoon.

Fair enough - you're right, saying that all trade during this era is 100% exploitation does cross the line into caricature. It's more complex than that, because it's history and it always is.

But I do think that the point is still sound. The nations of the time explicitly treated trade as a zero-sum game - that's one of the core arguments of Mercantilism. So if we're discussing how to create authentic game mechanics for trade in the period from 1444-1821, I'm arguing that any system which leads to the player treating foreign merchants as essentially parasitic is historically authentic, and therefore a feature rather than a bug.

 

[Vohen]

Venice's trade wasn't about hoarding resources - they were the middlemen to much of the Mediterranean and southern Europe. Genoa, the Netherlands, and

The way I see it, EU4 doesn't interpret trade like "hoarding resources", though it's quite unintuitive to interpret any other way, admittedly.
End nodes don't make any sense when you simply consider the flow of cash and goods since, as you said it, the great trading nations of the period were simply middlemen in this system.
However, when you see it as the amassing of civilian wealth, things start to make a lot more sense, as I have exemplified in a previous post:

There's one thing to consider here, aside from simple tariffs.
The merchants themselves are not doing much to develop their home region, they are just transporting goods from place to place, earning money with their fee.
But they do concentrate that earned money in their home region, where they'll be buying clothes, furniture, art, estates, etc etc, all kinds of locally produced items.
This creates demand for those goods, which in turn has the workshops and guilds responsible for them driving up recruitment of artisans to meet with supply, increasing wages.
This will increase urbanization, and those artisans will also get taxed, driving up state income as well (probably the effect we can see in the income tab).

That isn't simulated through "production" income as, even without accounting for the abstraction of only one good per province, that production is largely static, only calculating the (mostly static) trade value and goods produced, while in reality that value would be driven up by that wealth flowing in from merchants, as mentioned previously.
That's how italy became so wealthy in the middle ages, then declining when the Mediterranean stopped being the trade center of Europe, and later on it would be a decisive factor leading to the industrial revolution, as increased wages lead to more expensive labor in comparison to the competition in India, making mechanization more competitive.

I have struggled with this concept for a while as well, but since I started looking at it this way, I felt way more accepting of the mechanic as it is

 

[Titanius Puffin]

But I do think that the point is still sound. The nations of the time explicitly treated trade as a zero-sum game - that's one of the core arguments of Mercantilism. So if we're discussing how to create authentic game mechanics for trade in the period from 1444-1821, I'm arguing that any system which leads to the player treating foreign merchants as essentially parasitic is historically authentic, and therefore a feature rather than a bug.

Thanks for the rejoinder.
I don't completely agree because I think the mercantilist view of trade actually made some kingdoms poorer.

From memory, Mercantilism was all about stockpiling bullion. High-value products were to be exported, and as few products imported as possible. Piles of gold were all that mattered: a principle that would lead to no trade anywhere if taken to an extreme. I believe these principles are seen as strangling medieval European trade by some economic historians.

Spoiler: Economic History Nerdery

Early modern Spain is often cited as cautionary tale, though I haven't done as much reading on Spain as I would like. Imperial Spain certainly was no merchant republic, and I think their trade attitudes reflected aristocratic conceptions that helped drive commerce into the hands of the Dutch. Trade was taxed fairly heavily with few guarantees given to property, while high trade barriers (and social barriers) were erected against non-believers of any stripe. It was a weapon against outsiders, for the benefit of aristocrats, which is what the mercantilism mechanic kind of reflects in EU4. In doing so, Spain reduced both her potential suppliers and consumers, and collected fewer middleman fees.

I do think EU4 nods towards high mercantilism being problematic. Colony independence desire goes up with mercantilism. There's also an event where a choice of trade efficiency (free trade) is balanced against protectionism (mercantilism). Trade efficiency can be more valuable, in my opinion.
Aspirationally, I would like for mercantilism to be more like absolutism is right now: attractive, but also a liability. I actually modded in disadvantages to mercantilism years ago, but the game kept on getting updated, and I lost a bit of patience.

The way you interpret the trade system in EU4 is - to my mind - subjective. You can see trade income as merchants just taking the goods, or you can see this as commercial taxes being levied in your home trade node on merchants who are actually transporting goods further than your own nation; your domestic commercial actors are actually global distributors. Kind of like corporations before they became multinational tax-dodgers.
Of course, that doesn't prevent such corporations/merchants from being horribly exploitative - that definitely happened.

Lastly, mercantilism was challenged within EU4's timeframe. Classical economics arose in the late 18th century. Adam Smith was not a mercantilist. Nor was David Ricardo (he's less famous, but I mention him because I think he had a neat idea). They were (self-interested) free traders.

I don't know if any of this makes much of a difference to you, but thanks for hearing me out.

 

[Akela]

I believe these principles are seen as strangling medieval European trade by some economic historians.

My interpretation of the situation is that it was something of a Prisoner's Dilemma. These policies probably did limit the economy somewhat compared to a hypothetical 'everyone is trading freely' world. On the other hand, if you don't take any protectionist measures and your neighbor does, given the economic and technological situation at the time, if they're any good at it they end up hollowing out your economy and turning you into a captive market.

Spoiler: More economic nerdery

I should probably put a caveat here - I'm only an amateur student of all this stuff. I've read enough to be happy with my conclusions, but I'm not going to be able to give academic-debate level references for any of this.

As far as I can see, the real danger is the effect all this has on investment into capital and infrastructure.

An economy needs to reinvest a certain amount of it's output into maintenance just to keep a steady state, and then even more beyond that if it wants to grow and develop. In order to do that, you need to ensure that enough of the profits on that output are being held and spent locally.

If you are dealing with another economic actor who has some kind of advantage, it's probably financially beneficial to just buy their services rather than trying to do the job yourself - at least when you're looking at things from either a short-term perspective or purely as a private individual whose activities aren't going to meaningfully effect the wider economic landscape.

However, at the scale that trade was starting to occur in the EUIV period, you actually can reshape the economic landscape. The middlemen you're talking about start to skim off non-trivial amounts of the value of local economic activity, and sooner or later you can't keep up with that reinvestment I mentioned up above. The process may provide a net profit in the short term and at an individual level, but at a system-wide level it's a different story.

This is more visible in the Vicky era than EUIV, actually - buying English factory-produced cloth is cheaper than local produce. So everyone does that, and it seems like your standard of living just went up, except now there are fewer jobs around because the local cloth industry just got wiped out. You might end up a bit better off materially, if you've still got something providing local economic value to trade for those manufactured goods, or you might actually get poorer after everything shakes out, but unless you find a way to get serious local capital investment you're going to get left in the dust by the people who are funding their own investments using the profits they make by selling you stuff.

That's the piece that always seems to get left out in discussions of free trade and globalism - sure, it's pretty easy to argue that global GDP goes up if everyone just lets the invisible hand run everything. The pie really does get bigger - but the distribution of said pie also changes, usually dramatically, and the ones who are talking loudest about how big the new pie will be always seem to be the ones whose slice is growing the most.

I don't know if any of this makes much of a difference to you, but thanks for hearing me out.

It's not really changing my views (so far), but I'm having fun either way. And the same to you - thanks for hearing me out in turn.

 

[Titanius Puffin]

That's the piece that always seems to get left out in discussions of free trade and globalism - sure, it's pretty easy to argue that global GDP goes up if everyone just lets the invisible hand run everything. The pie really does get bigger - but the distribution of said pie also changes, usually dramatically, and the ones who are talking loudest about how big the new pie will be always seem to be the ones whose slice is growing the most.

As a critique of modern (or early modern, EU4 era) free trade, I'll happily accept that.
The world globalism can mean a lot of different things - some of them strange. So I prefer to avoid it.
But it seems like we mostly agree.

 

[Battlex]

The way I see it, EU4 doesn't interpret trade like "hoarding resources", though it's quite unintuitive to interpret any other way, admittedly.
End nodes don't make any sense when you simply consider the flow of cash and goods since, as you said it, the great trading nations of the period were simply middlemen in this system.
However, when you see it as the amassing of civilian wealth, things start to make a lot more sense, as I have exemplified in a previous post:

I have struggled with this concept for a while as well, but since I started looking at it this way, I felt way more accepting of the mechanic as it is

You can kind of see the British and Dutch as just protecting trade in Sevilla and sending it back to ivory Coast to be sent home, but yeh the lack of Atlantic powers working in the med is annoying

 

[Don_Quigleone]

And then awkward gits like me pipe up with "what about shipping costs?"

Not especially awkward. You'd have to have a merchant marine to trade, and each ship would have a maintenance cost.

Maybe even have little people that actually consume those goods, and if they can't get their needs satisfied they get a bit militant. But if they do, oh boy, do they pay good taxes on it.

This would also be possible, if only in an abstract sense. For example provinces in trade zones with more "needs" fulfilled contribute to owners receiving more prestige, or having more economic growth etc.