Or if you're late to node grabbing (let's say playing Russia), you could just grab a few by force. It's really easy to grab half the nodes before anyone else figures thing out, so you should have no trouble having space to send your ships to. Max number of ships is 20 ships per node in 20 nodes, so 400 trade ships active. These are fairly reasonable assumptions most of the time, especially if you eliminate pirates early. Game has some sort of supply and demand model, but I don't really understand how it works.įor some assumption I made here, let's say each ship takes 2 turns from being built to reaching its trade node (and you're paying upkeep at this time while getting zero income), extra ships don't affect prices, and there are no war fleet or other costs in maintaining your trade fleet.
Trade goods price start very high, but they'll drop to about 7-10 if countries are actively trading. Each ship costs 600, has upkeep of 50, and produces 17 goods (20 for the first one in each node). The first type of income to consider are trade ships. And the game doesn't make it intuitive how to do economy well. How to finance your empireĮmpire economics is much more challenging than in earlier games, where you could just loot your way out of anything. Last month I wrote Empire Total War advanced tips but then I realized I have a lot more.
