Some questions about EU4 trade?

Question

I am new to EU4 (playing the demo right not) and I am confused about several things:

1) What determines how much money is kept in a node? Can this be changed?

2) Suppose my home port is A, which recieves trade from B, which recieves trade from C. If I send a merchant to C, will he know to transfer trade towards B? What if there are multiple indirect routes from C to A? Will he optimize automatically?

3) Does backflow of trade power work exactly as trade steering, or is there anything different about it? Suppose again that my capital is in A, but now trade flow from A to B to C. If I send back trade power from C to B but I don't have a merchant in B, is it completely useless?

4) If I have trade power in my non-capital node but I do not send any merchant to collect trade, do I get any money from that node?

Thank you.

Possible duplicate of When is it better to collect money from a node instead of transferring it? — Dulkan, Jun 19 '18 at 06:48
Check the answer I marked this question as duplicate of, as well as the question linked in that question. That should answer everything. — Dulkan, Jun 19 '18 at 06:48
check this Reman's guide about trade. It might not be directly related to your questions, but it tell how to trade properly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edjLVFMjPyo — Alien-47, Jun 19 '18 at 12:19
Please limit yourself to one question per post. There's nothing wrong with posting multiple times. — Schism, Jun 19 '18 at 22:41

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 18 '18 at 18:59

3

I can answer 1,2 and 4, but am unsure about 3.

1) Money kept in the node is based on the relative trade power of all countries who have that node as their main trade node compared to all countries trying to steer the money elsewhere. You can decrease the money leaving your trade node by increasing your trade power.

2) If you send your merchant to C, he should optimize to send the trade value to the node that is the shortest distance to your home node, or else to the one that you have the highest trade value in. You can also manually set where the trade will go, but I personally have never needed to.

4) You do not get money from that node, and in fact I find that collecting money from any node except your capital node to be incredibly inefficient. It's much better to steer that money to your capital node, where it gets collected by the merchant you have there.

Hope this helps!

answered Jun 18 '18 at 18:59

Nicolas Budig

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Thanks for the reply! About point 4, do you get some pentalty for collecting at nodes that do not contain your capital? Also, I've never seen an option to choose where to steer trade; do you think it's possible to do in Vanilla/Demo (I believe the demo has never been updated). – Ovi Jun 18 '18 at 19:40
Ah, I actually don't know about Vanilla. I've only played with expansions, which I believe have redone trade to an extant. But in whatever expansion level I played at, you could choose the route via the trade mapmode. As for point 4, I don't think there's necessarily a penalty, I just think that collecting from other points gets you less money than steering does. – Nicolas Budig Jun 18 '18 at 19:43
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One caveat to your point 4: Collecting from two nodes may be useful if both are end nodes or similar (ie Zanzibar as of this comment) and you have a large amount of trade power in both to offset the penalty. – Zackary Murphy Jun 19 '18 at 13:21

Some questions about EU4 trade?

1 Answers1