Talk:France strategy
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I really think getting COT's is overrated as an economic expansion strategy, since each non-national culture COT reduces your merchant placement chance. What might be better is to grab shrewd commerce practices and start trying to place 5 merchants in every COT in the world. --Fraese 02:47, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
This is a valid point. I honestly am new to this whole series, but have been playing the demo since the day it released and am anxiously awaiting the arrival of my copy sometime in the next two days. I personally like the violent expansion because I have found that it effectively provides reliable income, and it gives you a semi-legitimate reason to start blitzing your neighbors. Also, merchant placement is a little bit unreliable since they can be "competed" away. Does it really work to try to monopolize the CoT's?--JerryHarris 03:25, 29 January 2007 (UTC)
Best practice is to increase your competitiveness by adopting the right ideas (first shrewd commerce practices, sometime later national trade policy). This should raise your competitiveness enough to allow you to place 5 merchants (1 short of a monopoly) in every COT while probably losing less than one placed merchant per year to competition. This is the fastest and most powerful way to increase your income in the game, and seems to be the way to go unless you absolutely can't risk taking a national idea that doesn't improve the effectiveness of your military (ie. in some multiplayer situations). France *can* afford to take non-military national ideas precisely because it is such a powerhouse already, so expanding trade would seem to be a natural and relatively easy way to quickly grow income to levels needed to finance further military expansion. My suggestion is only that one avoids capturing COT's or farms them out to vassals, so that the devastating competitiveness penalty of owning non-culture COT's is avoided. If your merchants are being competed out quickly, and you own one or more non-culture COT's, well... there you go. --Fraese 06:26, 30 January 2007 (UTC)
Sounds good to me. My copy hasn't even shipped yet. I don't really want to write anything more on here until I can get my hands on it. If you'd like to update the page, please go for it, if not I'll fix it sometimes this weekend.--JerryHarris 01:46, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
