Getting rid of competition

  • I've been doing some piracy to try and defeat some AI traders, mostly to stop them building factories etc and i've started wondering if it's possible to completely wipe out AI players, like all of them? im not sure but it almost seems like everytime i take all the ships of one trader another trader comes along. Is it just my imagination or does it spawn new AI traders when one loses all of his ships? Is it possible to empty the map of ai traders completely and have a 100% monopoly?


    Best whishes
    /MrBigCookie

  • Hi, MrBigCookie


    In case of starting a game in the year 1300 in standard map,there is a great merchant with a capital of more than one million in each town, that is 24 great merchants in total, gernally being a councillor or even a mayor. Each great merchant has two cogs and two snaikkas, however, great merchant in Novgrod,Torun and Cologne has four snaikkas.The great merchants act as transporters and mediators, but they won’t build new ships and open new offices at all.


    Besides the 24 great merchants, in the 12 blue towns which you can select as your hometown, there is a shopkeeper who has only one snaikka just like you , that is 12 shopkeepers in total. The 12 shopkeepers act as competitors, they trade everywhere and will build new ships and open new offices( max 7 offices for each merchant).


    So, there are 36 merchans and 108 ships except yourself in the beginning,but new ships will be built by the 12 competitors when time run. You may easily catch the white ships,but not easy to completely bankrupt them. Just ignore the merchants in the bank( Money lender), they does not exist in the real world but in another dimension.


    But even you completely sweep all the ships out, Periodically the system will provides a new ship - a crayer or a hulk - in a random town harbour for biding. You may buy the ship in a higher price in the auction or catch it in the high sea when some merchant buy it.


    I have completely wiped out AI players’s ships in the attached save file, there is not one single white ship in my trading world, but the merchants do still exist in the guild. I once bankrupted one of them, but when he completely vanished, a new AI trader appears to replace his position.

  • Very interesting! So that's why those buggers are so hard to bankrupt, they're all sitting on a giant pile of cash to begin with! :tong: in my current playthrough i have something like 170 ships, most of which have either been pirated or taken from pirates, mostly the latter. I have seen many images were players have built towns using the turkish building technique and 100% of the buildings are their own, how have they managed to clear away the AI buildings or do you pirate the entire hanse within the first 6 months to prevent them from building or something? It seems the AI players start building their own factories as soon as the game starts in some places, how do i get those "pristine" towns? I managed also to (actually by mistake) force an AI to auction off one of his factories, i had taken his ships and by not supplying the town with enough iron goods he eventually sold one of his skin/fur plants (but only ONE of them, he had several as well as another competitor all of which had been at "production stopped" for quite some time) and im wondering how to.. *ahem*.. convince them to sell their other buildings as well. I was gonna try and vote for "levy extra tax" in the town hall, perhaps something crazy like 900k after plundering the town and bribe all the council members, do that a couple times and all traders in town would run out of money that way, afterwards i could try and take all the money back through looting the town again. would something like that work? How did you bankrupt your competitor?


    It seems like many usually go for the year 1300, is there a special reason for this or is it simply personal preference? From my understanding starting closer to 1300 means less cannons and bombards but is there another reason?



    Edit: oh my that's a lot of questions, my bad! :crazy:

  • AI traders also contribute greatly to the prosperity of the hanse, especially in the first few years, they are important suppliers and mediators. It is not necessary to kill them all even using the turkish building technique. So it is misleading that you have to catch all the white ships in the ealy stage, in fact , you may have finished the game without catching one single white ship. However, they do build white plants and houses to destroy the "pristine" green land, it is necessary to demonish the white buldings in time to avoid roads creating. It is a bug that solve this problem, firstly you have to at least have a plant/house in the town, left click on your plant/house once and then left click twice on the AI trader’s plant/house, you will be capable to demonish the white plant/house just like erasing your own plant/house .


    Starting closer to 1300 also means less houses which belonged to the town, in other words , more "pristine" green land in each town, that is crucial for turkish building. If you start in 1400, it is apparent that more houses and less green land available in the town than that of the year 1300.


    The bribery did not go to the town coffers . The method that "levy extra tax" to bankrupt a competitor only works in the two new towns which were built by your own effort, you may infinitely levy extra tax to bankrupt the merchant who had opened an office in the new towns in the charge of you, but before that, you have to hide your assets to mininize your share of extra tax. But you do not have to bankrupt them, just for fun.


    AI players start building their own houses as soon as the game starts especially in Cologne, Scarborough, Gronningen , Bremen,Ripen,Torun, Aalborg,Bergen,Ladoga and Novgorod, but it does not mean that you can ignore the other towns. It is very difficult to remain all the "pristine" green land intact because AI traders build houses in some town even before you finally get a permission to open an office in that town, just like what happened in Cologne, Torun and Scarborough. So in my opinon the best hometown for turkish building is Cologne, but it depends .


    A player who named “Zhuzaijianghu” once sweeped all the white ships in the first three months ( in Jul 30, 1300 ) and remained all the green lands intact except scarborough, pitifully he did that in the local language edition so in the save file the towns and ships' names did not appear correctly in the English editon, but it did work in all other aspects.

  • Ahaaaa! That was the "secret trick" to keeping all the green land pristine, just demolish their buildings aye? Hehehe, well you can hire pirates and burglars so i guess it wouldn't be too far fetched if you could hire an arsonist as well? MWAHAHAHAHA!!
    I was taking a quick look through the Tippsammlung the other day and came across the part called "startjahr", since i know a few german words i recognized what it meant and since i had asked here about that i translated it the best i could and learnt a lot, even though google translate is crude at best even a tiny bit of knowledge of german can make one understand the thought behind the text, even though the grammar turns into a dogs stomach. :D


    I will follow your advice and not try the levy extra tax trick, unless one of them tries to build in my new towns i eventually make. I have myself ruined many towns when it comes to turkish building because i wasnt too interested in doing it during the first few years (especially luebeck) and the ai have ruined a couple others but im gonna start small and play around with it, using the trick you mentioned i can save a few other towns but im most likely only gonna go full turkish style on the 2 new towns i can build, endless rows are pretty easy since most of our kameraden here have shared so many pictures about it but it is still very resource intensive.. altough looking at the finished work it looks to be quite worth it!


    I am very thankful for the advice and the time and energy you have given me, i wish you all a great week, clear weather and fair winds my patrician friends! :]