Everything You Need To Know About Trade 

It only has influence on the first trip, after that no change, and the devs confirmed that it is purposely working

It's a minimal efficiency that only works on the first trip anyway. It's definitely good but not super duper important in the grand scheme of things.

you dont defend trade, you keep map control and it is usually enough

The best way to protect your trade is to wall the sides and create a choke point in the middle (where your base should be) so the most accessible place for your enemy to fight is always the middle, remember you are not playing bots but rather people, who may know you are trading, so it's all about misdirection, which can be a relic, a sacred site, a forward keep, etc. as long as you keep your enemy busy with some immediate problem they will forget about the real problem, even if you smash some low-level units into their base to their death, when you have a trade going you can keep making units. Remember not to overcommit as your opponent can overwhelm your base, and be sure to have units backing up when aging up. Now if you are at a point where your enemy is reaching your trade it means you already did something wrong. The first thing I'd recommend would be to go with your own army to defend and re-wall asap to cut their reinforcements, have enough army to make sure you can kill their's and some reinforcements that may arrive but have some army in your base to try and raid them to shift the focus, try to not have an all in so close to your trade. Not everyone has the multitasking ability the pros have, so if this is all too complicated at first you can also place 1 tower on each side to deter an early attack from your opponent, that will not last long but again, trade is all about staling, the longer you trade the more advantage you will get. And last but certainly not least, you will be getting a lot of gold so don't be afraid to trade that gold for other resources such as stone to stone-wall the sides.

You can farm gold and food next to a keep with any civ except mongols??

Yeah I tried that and it actually works pretty well

@@BuggyDClown-pc7sc yes you can but you'd waste a lot of stone doing so. The ottomans just have another reason to do so and that makes it cost effective.

He uses cheats here, building markets takes time usually just like any building

my guess is the latter!

It is intended

I think it's been patched now(?)

He literally said it in the video, Ottomans, Malians and French benefit the most

@@chilemetodista1446 maybe strongest trade but I feel that Malians benefit so much more from the gold trickle

@@tutzmeister9446 Exactly, Ottomans seems to have pretty nice trade but I don't think they use intensively gold at any age.

You definitely want to put down a market for your team. It's a minimal expense for what could be an extremely powerful and valuable asset for your team. Plus you can always trade back, too.

@@Murasame13 trust me dog, early trade sucks. Trade after 25 mins if the game is stale. When you trade you lose. Unless the map is easy to wall off. Telling people who are noobs to trade is also a huge mistake. Setting them up for failure. Make units early. Trade later. Only civ that can trade early are mongol. That’s it.

@@Fantasygod19999 Oh yeah early trade is definitely terrible. Even if it's a really good trade, it's just not worth the up-front expense that could be used on unit production. Not to mention if you're not French, the only thing you get is gold... early game gold should be plentiful.

Trade is always recommended no matter the civ. Trade only becomes not so useful for very high level play. Which means for most people, use trades.

I was wondering the same...

not +40gold but +40% gold

Tradebags does make your traders carry 40% more gold not 40 more gold

Ohh I see. Thank you

Would be incredibly broken if it was 40 gold base haha

Well you can evaluate it yourself. A trader cost what,120 ressources (60w, 60g)? So you made a net return for one-trip trader between 50 and 60 ressources (assuming trade for 170-180g). If you cared less for wood, you make up to 120g net profit. Obviously, deleting before reaching your preferred trader count (or pop max) doesn't make sense. The value of deleting depends now on the distance the soon-to-be-deleted trader has traveled. Easiest case to consider is you delete the trader right after she deposited the last trip and the new trader immediately pops up. Then your gain in term of gold per second is the maximum net profit. The further the old trader is to her home market or the longer it takes to replace the trader, the less you gain from the net profit up to the point where the old trader picks up a new batch of gold. From this point on deleting would be detrimental to you. The gain of course increases with your net profit. So more gold per trip (e.g. team games, civ traits) or less trader costs (Abbasid). So weigh this gold gain against the con of an up-front payment (meaning you first lose gold before you make gold from this transaction) and much more importantly the focus you waste on this intensive micro. I would say: Don't bother in 1vs1... Any corrections of my thought process is welcome :)

That's inefficient, why you delete him? if you play multiplayer game you can try to seek your allies market to do a two side trading, and lets the poor trader being used.

no

It is never good to delete, cause that one trader will get infinite resources but if you continually reinvest you won’t get much value

@@maxmustermann3811 keep in mind that population is finite though ;) From a resource point of view the one-trip gives you roughly 60 resources net of standard building costs. Deleting a two-trip trader for a one-trip trader is then benifitial as you gain this 60 resources only by deleting another trader. Nonetheless, from a total perspective it is too tedious to be really worth it. See my first answer to have a more detailed answer.

Interesting, so it's not technically about distance traveled but only specifically the % of the map traveled?

i think the devs should reduce the amount of gold carried by traders the more traders a player has

You want to balance trade ? Scout and kill the traders. Goddamn not everything needs to be nerfed or buffed. Wall the trades postes, patrol around etc…

trade is difficut to defend on open maps like dry arabia, etc. theres only a few maps where trade is viable, altai is the best atm.

What? It isn’t early access.

Offense is the best defense in that case, been researching many Mongol players this patch and I even see a couple build Silver Tree but not produce traders til a bit after age 3. So it's dark age aggression into castle boom then constant aggression with age 3 tech/MAA-Crossbow

Thing is if you position your army offensively near your opponent's base(outpost/Khan to scout ambush) if the opponent attacks your trade it's likely way more value for you if you react by invading their vulnerable spots. Rather than playing solely defensive you can attack while their army is away, have outpost along the trade too for garrison.

Mehter only buffs speed in formations. I doubt you can have a mehter in formation with a trader

@@Hansjebiertje agree, but could it be. Is there an exploit?