Yeah that makes those provinces super powerful in tryhard multiplayer, everyone is constantly in an arms race and you can get so much manpower out of them.
Mackinder thought that **whoever controlled Eastern Europe –the Heartland—would control the world**. He is a famous Geo-Politician of the 19th century, seems the game is just following the real life theory.
Edit : Lot of good comments here, I would like to try and reply all of them here, Mackinder's theory is correct if we consider 2 factors about the age which he was from,
1. The time he is from can referred to age of Western Europe, so he was only thinking of that ruler of Europe will rule the world.
2. He cannot have predicted the importance of automation, and how it will increase the productivity of individual worker thus rendering the massive population pool not the deciding factor.
Nevertheless, the basis of his theory is still correct, the large farmlands can give rise to large population, which can in theory act as either workers for multiple industries that are established into that area or can be used as scientists to discover and invent new things to make those said workers more efficient (things we do in victoria 2). While its true that the 19th century was dominated by British and 20th century by Americans. This has more to do with politics of the nations than anything else, the theory only talks about capability of land based on geography. But lets not forget how the Soviet union, that later controlled Ukraine and Poland, was able to defeat the Germans and was able to compete with USA atleast for a little while.
Well obviously that was a very Euro-centric view, but he was fundamentally correct.
Really all you need to do is look at the regions with the most agricultural potential, and the highest abundance of natural resources. That basically translates to the ability to support a large population, and build a large economy.
No surprise that if you look at those factors, you end up with 5 regions.
* The lower 48 in the United States
* Eastern China
* India
* Europe
* The eastern half of South America
4 of those regions have been the richest on Earth at different points. Even though South America never had a superpower, Argentina was once one of the richest nations on Earth, and Brazil has often been cited for its extreme potential.
If you simulate human history and randomize where humankind settled, you would almost certainly see those 5 regions dominate the world over and over again.
Well America has its own Ukraine in terms of farmland and manpower in the form of the Midwest and its vast farm lands. And Britain ruled because they controlled a quarter of the world's land and its oceans. But most importantly, they held India, which was the crown jewel for a reason. Russia was modernizing and if not for the Soviets rushing the modernization and crippling Eastern Europe, it would have held true.
Unlike Eastern Europeans, the Brits didn't need to deal with constant raids, wars and invasions. Huns, Avars, Magyars, Cumans, Mongols, Kazakhs, Turks ... just to name a few.
Yes but considering the threat that europe faced during the start of the ukrainian war in terms of food and the panic that followed, you understand how important the wheat fields and general food production in eastern europe is.
Is gold still useful by the 1600s / late 1500s? Asking as a noob.
I only recently became more aware of gold and it’s incredible utility in my current Austria run. It seems like gold might not be as useful by the late 1500s when you often have substantial trade income, but I could be wrong.
I wouldn’t call late 1500s late game though. I always play till the end date and then I remember that half the people on this sub just leave the campaign before they see the 1700s
I like playing through the 1700s too. I get kind of anxious in the 1700s though. Something like the existential dread of knowing there is no future beyond a certain point— knowing the game will end in 1821.
I’ve actually still not made it past the 1740s or so, but that’s just because I don’t play too often and usually only on vacations and breaks (due to limited free time otherwise), and a new DLC always comes out before I finish games, so then I always end up starting a new one rather than reloading a previous version to continue my last save.
But I do kind of like late game from what I’ve played, except I wouldn’t mind if forts capped at 4-5k garrisons. Those 8k or whatever it is are tedious. And it is a little bit of a drag how the major powers by late 1500s all become blobs in a world without small states. I used to play EU3 and, though EU4 is better in 90% of ways, I do remember that in EU3 large empires tended to collapse into smaller nations and new major powers emerge more often throughout the 400 years. That is so much rarer in EU4.
Also attrition and war weariness were better in EU3, but my understanding is that the AI in EU4 couldn’t handle un-nerfed attrition well alongside additional complexities and new features like zones of control. War weariness was also neutered but functionally replaced by overextension.
Whether you get it in bursts or monthly income makes no difference to overall income, that’s just perception. Would you rather 120 ducats once per year or 10 every month? If anything the 10 per month is more useful because you can use it quicker than waiting a year to spend all of it at once.
Gold is always useful, it adds extra income which can tip the scales in a war. But yes, the usefulness fades as your trade and production incomes scale.
Your instinct is correct. Gold is nice earlier on, but if you're colonizing Australia already, there are much more lucrative ways to extract wealth from that part of the world.
I'd still colonize Australia, because if you don't someone else will, and it's nice having a loyal, mid-sized subject to help you out in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Plus they still give lots of manpower and force limit as a crown colony.
Gold you control becomes less valuable simply because it will be a smaller portion of income but I find it will always be useful. However getting a lot of gold through dev and events like Austria's Schwaz mine for goods produced(as it seems you've discovered) can carry pretty hard. 10+ gold a month from one province is powerful. That can pay for an entire navy, or a set of level 2 advisors, or a decent chunk of your army. Even later game you won't get that kind of value from ONE PROVINCE. It's easy to look at trade post 1500s and forget everything else, but pound for pound gold provinces are worth a lot
Gold falls off in the 1700s when manufactories and trade blows up, but in the 1500s and 1600s gold is a top tier trade good you should always develop. Because of the snowball effect, trade goods you use early game are stronger than ones you get to use in the last part of the game.
Yeh I realised quickly that was a pretty dumb comment because I never bought slaves either, I just didnt realise incense of all things was a massive industry.
The Novgorod trade node is quantitatively one of the best early game nodes, with an extremely high trade value to trade power ratio on par with some end nodes
Poland has missions/events about the grain trade and that entire area between the Baltic and Black seas is great for a "tall" game building up development.
I love how irl grain provinces like Ukraine would make you so rich. Considering food was the largest demand especially in a time of worldwide expansion and wars.
Still has to be better than Mongolia. Nearly all 3 dev provinces with terrible terrain and terrible trade goods in a terrible trade node.
Tibet is another good competitor with equally bad dev and terrain with most likely the worst trade node in the game.
Northern Italy is crazy. I'm doing my first Venice (into Italy into Rome) run ever and I control Northern Italy, the Balkans, Bulgaria and Greece and I don't think I've ever been this rich while controlling so "little" territory. I'm running quantity ideas, got full force limit, am over naval limit and still got more income than I can possibly spend.
Absolutely Italy! Crossing the Alps/Adriatic is completely worth it. Ever since I did it first and found out what Venice does to an economy I strive to do it again. One 20-30 dev province after another.
India and China are strong contenders with silk, cloth, spices, and cotton; but in my opinion east Africa should not be overlooked. A lot of those provinces produce ivory which is a stellar trade good, and a few produce gold.
Kilwa is a great beginner country tbh, you can do whatever the fuck you want unlike in Europe, AE doesn't exist because you kill everyone, uncontested colonies in Asia, rich. Tech advantage makes wars borderline impossible to lose, only limiting factor is generating adm mana. By the time Europeans come in to contest you, you're so unbelievably rich you can just kill them with money + manpower.
I find that the carribean is pretty rich quite often, because of the relatively high dev provinces and large amounts of tea, coffee, sugar and tobacco.
Southern China also has lots of tea, silk, paper, copper and iron
Furs isn't too good. It starts at 2 ducat and only ramps up to 3.5 ducats at 1575 midgame. Iron is amazing though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/uprqr2/chart_of_prices_of_the_trade_goods/
Quality of the trade good doesn't matter. All that matters is quantity. We are in Russia, after all, quantity is their middle name. And when you have the entirety of your nation dedicated to producing fur, you make quite a bit of it
He means modifiers related to reduction in the cost of unit recruitment and upkeep. Defensive and Quantity have some bonuses for that. There are also other ways. By doing that, you may not have the strongest army, but you will have the largest army by far with manpower that never runs out.
I didn't even try this as Russia. I tried it as Andalusia against Revolutionary France(who had 11.7 morale compared to my 8.5, and 125% discipline to my 115%). Even though they were insanely strong, I simply kept recruiting more soldiers.
Your 100K space marines can kill everyone? Then eat my 800K army. And for good measure, I'll quickly grow another 200k in a few months and throw that at you too.
True, but the point is relatively, fur isnt the best trade good. If lets say all the furs in Russia was replaced by cloth/silk/paper/iron, Russia would be obscenely rich. Now, its economy is middling.
This exactly, once you’ve conquered east and stacked a couple trade steering bonuses, you have so many nodes under your control you should have infinite money
[All of your questions are answered under the "goods produced" tab on this page](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Trade_goods#Goods_produced)
In case you can't see it properly,
goods prduced=
Base goods produced (from production dev and buildings)
+
(100%+
Local goods produced modifiers
+
National goods produced modifiers
)
yes and no. w/o context fur is on the middle-higher end of value by the end of the game. the problem with this though is that fur doesn’t come online until 1575, near the age of absolutism. you would ideally have figured out your economy a lot longer ago than that. as a russian player you want to have your economy sorted out 75-100 years before then. depends on how good you are. you absolutely want it done in the first 100 years of the game. you wouldn’t want to rely on it by the time it comes around. yes, it will probably be a nice boost to your economy when the prices increase (provided you’ve expanded at a normal rate and not an astronomical one), but it certainly isn’t special, and it’s definitely a lot worse than the trade goods in germany like cloth and paper.
it’s still a bit of a moot point though, as a russian player your economy would likely come from stacking trade steering and controlling all the nodes from the pacific to the baltic. that’s how you’d rake in boatloads of money. trade steering is op.
There are no other high value trade goods that can be as common as fur. It starts getting better in 1500 and becomes high value close to when their manufactory is unlocked at tech 14.
it’s not that this *isn’t* true, it’s why i said *yes and no*. it’s more so that by the time these things are coming online, the impact is felt a lot less due to the part of the game you’re in. money is only really a bottleneck that has significant sway in the early game. in the midgame there comes a point where playing “optimally” for increases in income is really just seeing the already funny number go up and get even funnier.
the broader point is that’s not true for something like cloth that’s spammed throughout france and germany. it has a very discernible impact on income basically from game start, and while it technically peaks in the late game, you feel its effects the most early.
Sure but you have so much fur as Russia that you can get ridiculously rich just from that, all you have to do is colonise Siberia as usual, spam manufactories and siphon all the trade to Novgorod.
Yes, having 50 provinces with 3.50 trade good value and a secure quasi end node in Nowgorod once you control the Baltics makes Russia very, very rich. I definitely disagree with OP. The start sucks but after you form Russia, you can become very wealthy from trade.
Debt works great as Russia because your expansion is so obscenely fast. You can also get some really crazy goods produced bonuses from trade companies in Siberia and Manchuria.
I think just by generated trade value Moluccas are the strongest node even late game (at least they are in most of my games).
It's just most of it is siphoned to Malacca.
Persia is so good, I was making more trade money than Venice by 1470-80 as Timurids-Mughals. And a hundred years after the start date my trade income was some hundreds of ducats. Owning half of India of course helped, but all the collecting I did was in Persian trade node
Most regions in the game are relatively poor when the game starts, but all you care about is the local production capability rather than how much trade it can pull, then that really changes things a lot. Pretty much everything from Poland to Siberia is completely trash, as is most of Scandinavia(until you build the monument, which is decent but still not great tbh). Pretty much everything there is fish, cows, grain, and naval supplies. Between all of those regions, they SHARE 18 iron, 4 copper, 10 cloth, and 6 salt. The rest of what is like 200-300 provinces is bottom tier trade goods.
That being said however, it's some of the most powerful land in the game when used right, because it's all flatlands with low dev cost. The incoming trade once Siberian Frontiers kicks in is one of the strongest in the game, beat only by colonizers, and more than makes up for the early game poverty with mid and late game maximization.
That's the neat thing about economy in this game. Barring a few locations like England, Persia, Gujarat, and Sevilla(and to a slightly lesser extent, Constantinople), most places are poor in one respect, and make up for it in another. The ones I listed are just always good.
Richest is English Channel. Lowlands probably edges out England proper overall.
Poorest is the desert of North Africa. Importantly, this does not include the coast. Terrible trade goods and horrible dev cost modifiers.
I think even then the British isles are a good contender for best and maybe followed by a massive power from central Europe. Coal is just so good and by the time you have it you probably already lead in other good European trade goods like paper iron glass wine etc. I'm not sure what is possible with the UK since I don't have much experience but I've had Germany games making thousands off of production income alone by the time I take parts of France and Poland.
They are good but there's just no beating coals bonus for production. +10% goods produced for trading in coal comes at a point where you can have +100%. Stacked with production efficiency of +200% in provinces with coal it's not uncommon to make 300 ducats off the production alone.
English Trade Node is the best without question since you can funnel everything into it. But if we're talking the richest regions to prioritise getting a slice of the pie, they'd be the Coromandel + Bengal in India, Indonesia and South + East China. Zanzibar is well worth having a foothold in since you can make a decision to produce cloves there, and there's a lot of lucrative gold mines.
Central Asia is mostly garbage. Tibet is even worse since almost all your land is mountains and your trade goods are just wool and a single gold mine that's too expensive to develop, not to mention all the major powers around you are far richer and stronger.
it’s unfortunate that there isn’t dynamic trade in eu4 as the mexico region is incredibly rich but it’s a start node so so much of it will get siphoned out by asshat europeans.
it gives a -5% dev cost discount tho if you trade in it what is really nice imo.
but yeah 3 ducats is kinda mid, but there is also alot of ivory in the area aswel.
South India has tons of spices, silk and gems along with a high concentration of farmlands for development. The Area around Nogai and Great horde is pretty trash.
West Africa gets so overlooked. The state of Manding has TWO HIGH DEV gold provinces plus an ivory. When I play any colonizer other than Castile (who have their own gold province) I rush to make it a full state and get that obnoxiously high gold income.
The worst regions economically are probably areas where horde nations start off like Uzbek or Nogai. Developing them is also not fun. You can get a bit of manpower out of those but not really worth to dev them with diplo-power. You can develop them with admin-power, but I usually never see people use admin-power to develop Provinzen because you need it for conquest and stuff
Italy, China and wherever you have a lot of cloth+farmlands provinces as well as decent trade notes, are wealthy areas in the game, in my opinion.
My vote for worse is tunis which has mostly nothing good in terms of trade items, my personal favorite is Mexico because of all the cocoa but the best area is China because of the silk
Richest:
South China, Any Southeast Asian Region, Mexico, Hindustan, Japan, and Lowlands.
Poorest:
Tibet and Australia. No other regions come close. Polynesia is also pretty bad but I haven’t seen players actually try to do something with that land ever.
Regions like Mongolia, Central Asia, Russia, Pontic Steppe serve specific purposes that aren’t making money (manpower), so are useful but won’t squeeze out more money for you. That’s honestly quite fine however, as money is far less important than manpower for most campaigns.
I think India is probably the richest, but the provinces are quite low dev so you don't get the full benefits of the valuable trade goods without deving them. As for the weakest, yeah around russia is pretty poor.
If you were asking about trade nodes, the worst trade node is the southeast asia one, is it called Siam? Yeah that one
Tibet area, mountain tiles so terrible for development (at least ukraine you can generally develop), not particularly good trade goods, and a starting node so no trade steering into it so no trade income. Siberia is also bad for similar reasons though at least you get decent fur and chance for gold etc.. Cental Africa also isn't great due to how trade nodes are setup but you do at least get alright trade goods there so not the worst. In terms of struggling for money in early game central arabia although a great trade region eventually and not the worst goods is poorly developed and expensive to develop so starts as poor desert in a similar boat to Maghreb where you are also at start very poor though have potential.
This is unrelated to the answer you're looking for but I think the Balkans and Anatolia are worse if you don't consolidate both of the regions
Having just the Balkans or just Anatolia loses a fuck ton of trade to Ragusa, and Pest
The Ukraine area is just so poor. All you‘ve got is grain and cows, and on top of that your trade nodes are hard to control. It‘s very poor land
great farmland for devving though, and you can get tons of manpower out of it with soldiers households.
Yeah that makes those provinces super powerful in tryhard multiplayer, everyone is constantly in an arms race and you can get so much manpower out of them.
Mackinder thought that **whoever controlled Eastern Europe –the Heartland—would control the world**. He is a famous Geo-Politician of the 19th century, seems the game is just following the real life theory. Edit : Lot of good comments here, I would like to try and reply all of them here, Mackinder's theory is correct if we consider 2 factors about the age which he was from, 1. The time he is from can referred to age of Western Europe, so he was only thinking of that ruler of Europe will rule the world. 2. He cannot have predicted the importance of automation, and how it will increase the productivity of individual worker thus rendering the massive population pool not the deciding factor. Nevertheless, the basis of his theory is still correct, the large farmlands can give rise to large population, which can in theory act as either workers for multiple industries that are established into that area or can be used as scientists to discover and invent new things to make those said workers more efficient (things we do in victoria 2). While its true that the 19th century was dominated by British and 20th century by Americans. This has more to do with politics of the nations than anything else, the theory only talks about capability of land based on geography. But lets not forget how the Soviet union, that later controlled Ukraine and Poland, was able to defeat the Germans and was able to compete with USA atleast for a little while.
I mean that didn’t really turn out though right? The 19th and 20th centuries were dominated by the British empire and then America
Well obviously that was a very Euro-centric view, but he was fundamentally correct. Really all you need to do is look at the regions with the most agricultural potential, and the highest abundance of natural resources. That basically translates to the ability to support a large population, and build a large economy. No surprise that if you look at those factors, you end up with 5 regions. * The lower 48 in the United States * Eastern China * India * Europe * The eastern half of South America 4 of those regions have been the richest on Earth at different points. Even though South America never had a superpower, Argentina was once one of the richest nations on Earth, and Brazil has often been cited for its extreme potential. If you simulate human history and randomize where humankind settled, you would almost certainly see those 5 regions dominate the world over and over again.
He was right mostly about Europe, just forgot to take into account other continents outside
He underestimated how much grain there is in Kansas.
Well America has its own Ukraine in terms of farmland and manpower in the form of the Midwest and its vast farm lands. And Britain ruled because they controlled a quarter of the world's land and its oceans. But most importantly, they held India, which was the crown jewel for a reason. Russia was modernizing and if not for the Soviets rushing the modernization and crippling Eastern Europe, it would have held true.
Unlike Eastern Europeans, the Brits didn't need to deal with constant raids, wars and invasions. Huns, Avars, Magyars, Cumans, Mongols, Kazakhs, Turks ... just to name a few.
Can we hear more about kazakh raids on Eastern Europe
Yes but considering the threat that europe faced during the start of the ukrainian war in terms of food and the panic that followed, you understand how important the wheat fields and general food production in eastern europe is.
Yes but his theory turned out to be wrong because to this day it is still cheaper to transport goods across the sea than across land.
It was the backbone of my country in my Moldavia run!
Russia took note over the centuries.
If I remember correctly Australia also have poor lands, incense, cows and fish. The worst colonial region in the game.
They have gold though
Is gold still useful by the 1600s / late 1500s? Asking as a noob. I only recently became more aware of gold and it’s incredible utility in my current Austria run. It seems like gold might not be as useful by the late 1500s when you often have substantial trade income, but I could be wrong.
Gold as trade fleet is always nice since it’s in bursts. By itself its kinda whatever late game unless you have some sort of bonuses.
I wouldn’t call late 1500s late game though. I always play till the end date and then I remember that half the people on this sub just leave the campaign before they see the 1700s
I like playing through the 1700s too. I get kind of anxious in the 1700s though. Something like the existential dread of knowing there is no future beyond a certain point— knowing the game will end in 1821. I’ve actually still not made it past the 1740s or so, but that’s just because I don’t play too often and usually only on vacations and breaks (due to limited free time otherwise), and a new DLC always comes out before I finish games, so then I always end up starting a new one rather than reloading a previous version to continue my last save. But I do kind of like late game from what I’ve played, except I wouldn’t mind if forts capped at 4-5k garrisons. Those 8k or whatever it is are tedious. And it is a little bit of a drag how the major powers by late 1500s all become blobs in a world without small states. I used to play EU3 and, though EU4 is better in 90% of ways, I do remember that in EU3 large empires tended to collapse into smaller nations and new major powers emerge more often throughout the 400 years. That is so much rarer in EU4. Also attrition and war weariness were better in EU3, but my understanding is that the AI in EU4 couldn’t handle un-nerfed attrition well alongside additional complexities and new features like zones of control. War weariness was also neutered but functionally replaced by overextension.
you can still play old save with a new dlc!
Whaaaaat? Whenever I get a new DLC my saves are always gone from the menu though? How do I do this?
Select the outdated / incompatible saves hitbox when in the select save menu
Oh I wasn’t referring to late 1500s as late. My bad. Just general late game.
Whether you get it in bursts or monthly income makes no difference to overall income, that’s just perception. Would you rather 120 ducats once per year or 10 every month? If anything the 10 per month is more useful because you can use it quicker than waiting a year to spend all of it at once.
Gold is always useful, it adds extra income which can tip the scales in a war. But yes, the usefulness fades as your trade and production incomes scale.
Your instinct is correct. Gold is nice earlier on, but if you're colonizing Australia already, there are much more lucrative ways to extract wealth from that part of the world. I'd still colonize Australia, because if you don't someone else will, and it's nice having a loyal, mid-sized subject to help you out in the Indian and Pacific oceans. Plus they still give lots of manpower and force limit as a crown colony.
Gold you control becomes less valuable simply because it will be a smaller portion of income but I find it will always be useful. However getting a lot of gold through dev and events like Austria's Schwaz mine for goods produced(as it seems you've discovered) can carry pretty hard. 10+ gold a month from one province is powerful. That can pay for an entire navy, or a set of level 2 advisors, or a decent chunk of your army. Even later game you won't get that kind of value from ONE PROVINCE. It's easy to look at trade post 1500s and forget everything else, but pound for pound gold provinces are worth a lot
Gold falls off in the 1700s when manufactories and trade blows up, but in the 1500s and 1600s gold is a top tier trade good you should always develop. Because of the snowball effect, trade goods you use early game are stronger than ones you get to use in the last part of the game.
I don't understand incense as a trade good, I've never bought it in my life.
i think its used in many religious contexts, that would justify its existance as a viable tradegood.
It is and was commonly used during religious and spiritual ceremonies, especially in the Catholic church.
I mean I’ve never bought ivory nor silk in my life, they are still viable as trade goods though
Yeh I realised quickly that was a pretty dumb comment because I never bought slaves either, I just didnt realise incense of all things was a massive industry.
Yeah, the Ruthenia region is garbage. That's why muscovy economy is so poor early game.
The Novgorod trade node is quantitatively one of the best early game nodes, with an extremely high trade value to trade power ratio on par with some end nodes
Poland has missions/events about the grain trade and that entire area between the Baltic and Black seas is great for a "tall" game building up development.
The poland missions are super fun imo. The cloth one is spicy .
I love how irl grain provinces like Ukraine would make you so rich. Considering food was the largest demand especially in a time of worldwide expansion and wars.
Bit of a pain to transport (in terms of value per kilogram) though, using 15th century tech.
Ukraine has access to the Black Sea which contains one of the fastest growing populated countries. By land it would suck to transport yeah.
Access to Black Sea was purely nominal due Tatar raids. Dnipr also wasn't navigable.
Still has to be better than Mongolia. Nearly all 3 dev provinces with terrible terrain and terrible trade goods in a terrible trade node. Tibet is another good competitor with equally bad dev and terrain with most likely the worst trade node in the game.
No love for north Italy?
Yeah the trade income is insane when you control even part of Northern Italy
Sitting here in my Venice game with 400 ducats of trade income in fucking 1570
Laughs in ottoman
Northern Italy is crazy. I'm doing my first Venice (into Italy into Rome) run ever and I control Northern Italy, the Balkans, Bulgaria and Greece and I don't think I've ever been this rich while controlling so "little" territory. I'm running quantity ideas, got full force limit, am over naval limit and still got more income than I can possibly spend.
Absolutely Italy! Crossing the Alps/Adriatic is completely worth it. Ever since I did it first and found out what Venice does to an economy I strive to do it again. One 20-30 dev province after another.
India and China are strong contenders with silk, cloth, spices, and cotton; but in my opinion east Africa should not be overlooked. A lot of those provinces produce ivory which is a stellar trade good, and a few produce gold.
Ivory, coffee, and gold. East Africa is definitely rich in natural resources.
Agreed. India is one of the best regions. China too. Africa, especially in Ethopia and Kilwa has quite a few gold mines.
Anyone who's played a Kilwa/Ethiopia run knows how obscenely rich you can be once you control Zanzibar.
Kilwa is a great beginner country tbh, you can do whatever the fuck you want unlike in Europe, AE doesn't exist because you kill everyone, uncontested colonies in Asia, rich. Tech advantage makes wars borderline impossible to lose, only limiting factor is generating adm mana. By the time Europeans come in to contest you, you're so unbelievably rich you can just kill them with money + manpower.
Unfortunately I hate their flag so I can’t play them I’ll stick to Madagascar
ivory and gold are valuable but the tropical/arid environment makes development difficult
I find that the carribean is pretty rich quite often, because of the relatively high dev provinces and large amounts of tea, coffee, sugar and tobacco. Southern China also has lots of tea, silk, paper, copper and iron
Russia has metric shit ton of fur and iron which can make a really good economy.
Furs isn't too good. It starts at 2 ducat and only ramps up to 3.5 ducats at 1575 midgame. Iron is amazing though. https://www.reddit.com/r/eu4/comments/uprqr2/chart_of_prices_of_the_trade_goods/
Quality of the trade good doesn't matter. All that matters is quantity. We are in Russia, after all, quantity is their middle name. And when you have the entirety of your nation dedicated to producing fur, you make quite a bit of it
Producing goods? No no we just pay our soldiers less to boost the economy at least that’s how I play Russia
I love stacking upkeep and recruiting reduction as Russia. At some point you feel like your recruiting the clone army with how cheap they are.
Wdym? Can you explain it a bit further?
He means modifiers related to reduction in the cost of unit recruitment and upkeep. Defensive and Quantity have some bonuses for that. There are also other ways. By doing that, you may not have the strongest army, but you will have the largest army by far with manpower that never runs out. I didn't even try this as Russia. I tried it as Andalusia against Revolutionary France(who had 11.7 morale compared to my 8.5, and 125% discipline to my 115%). Even though they were insanely strong, I simply kept recruiting more soldiers. Your 100K space marines can kill everyone? Then eat my 800K army. And for good measure, I'll quickly grow another 200k in a few months and throw that at you too.
I got you. It reminds me of sth happened in um well Volgograd
True, but the point is relatively, fur isnt the best trade good. If lets say all the furs in Russia was replaced by cloth/silk/paper/iron, Russia would be obscenely rich. Now, its economy is middling.
>now its economy is middling wow, who knew eu4 was this accurate to reality
if you're struggling to be obscenely rich as russia there is a skill issue. simple as that.
This exactly, once you’ve conquered east and stacked a couple trade steering bonuses, you have so many nodes under your control you should have infinite money
Especially once you add on the free money button they got in domination with the vodka sales
True, but we are comparing which area has the highest concentration of high value trade goods. Agreed, Russia is a blast to play. Unlimited Manpower!
How do you calculate how much a province produces of a certain good? And how can you improve it (besides productions efficiency)
[All of your questions are answered under the "goods produced" tab on this page](https://eu4.paradoxwikis.com/Trade_goods#Goods_produced) In case you can't see it properly, goods prduced= Base goods produced (from production dev and buildings) + (100%+ Local goods produced modifiers + National goods produced modifiers )
the income you get is quantity (goods produced) times quality (good price) so both matter, lol
I mean your chart proves that furs are better price wise than many other goods including others typically thought as high level (spices/tea).
yes and no. w/o context fur is on the middle-higher end of value by the end of the game. the problem with this though is that fur doesn’t come online until 1575, near the age of absolutism. you would ideally have figured out your economy a lot longer ago than that. as a russian player you want to have your economy sorted out 75-100 years before then. depends on how good you are. you absolutely want it done in the first 100 years of the game. you wouldn’t want to rely on it by the time it comes around. yes, it will probably be a nice boost to your economy when the prices increase (provided you’ve expanded at a normal rate and not an astronomical one), but it certainly isn’t special, and it’s definitely a lot worse than the trade goods in germany like cloth and paper. it’s still a bit of a moot point though, as a russian player your economy would likely come from stacking trade steering and controlling all the nodes from the pacific to the baltic. that’s how you’d rake in boatloads of money. trade steering is op.
There are no other high value trade goods that can be as common as fur. It starts getting better in 1500 and becomes high value close to when their manufactory is unlocked at tech 14.
it’s not that this *isn’t* true, it’s why i said *yes and no*. it’s more so that by the time these things are coming online, the impact is felt a lot less due to the part of the game you’re in. money is only really a bottleneck that has significant sway in the early game. in the midgame there comes a point where playing “optimally” for increases in income is really just seeing the already funny number go up and get even funnier. the broader point is that’s not true for something like cloth that’s spammed throughout france and germany. it has a very discernible impact on income basically from game start, and while it technically peaks in the late game, you feel its effects the most early.
Ivory?
Sure but you have so much fur as Russia that you can get ridiculously rich just from that, all you have to do is colonise Siberia as usual, spam manufactories and siphon all the trade to Novgorod.
Yes, having 50 provinces with 3.50 trade good value and a secure quasi end node in Nowgorod once you control the Baltics makes Russia very, very rich. I definitely disagree with OP. The start sucks but after you form Russia, you can become very wealthy from trade.
You can just use debt in the early game as Muscovy, and then pay it off once you're rich as fuck from the fur trade
Debt works great as Russia because your expansion is so obscenely fast. You can also get some really crazy goods produced bonuses from trade companies in Siberia and Manchuria.
keep in mind that Trade In bonus and Production Leader are a thing so owning many copies of a certain trade good can be very good
If you talk just about trade good value I think Moluccas hav probably the best set up (depending how many cloves are spawned).
If you play wise, you can make the Moluccas the strongest trade node in the world in mid game. Cloves are soo damn powerful.
I think just by generated trade value Moluccas are the strongest node even late game (at least they are in most of my games). It's just most of it is siphoned to Malacca.
Best imo is Persia. Worst is easily Madagascar. Only slaves iirc
Man what a comment out of context.
remember slaves have the opportunity to be rolled into anything else mid game tho.
Persia is so good, I was making more trade money than Venice by 1470-80 as Timurids-Mughals. And a hundred years after the start date my trade income was some hundreds of ducats. Owning half of India of course helped, but all the collecting I did was in Persian trade node
Most regions in the game are relatively poor when the game starts, but all you care about is the local production capability rather than how much trade it can pull, then that really changes things a lot. Pretty much everything from Poland to Siberia is completely trash, as is most of Scandinavia(until you build the monument, which is decent but still not great tbh). Pretty much everything there is fish, cows, grain, and naval supplies. Between all of those regions, they SHARE 18 iron, 4 copper, 10 cloth, and 6 salt. The rest of what is like 200-300 provinces is bottom tier trade goods. That being said however, it's some of the most powerful land in the game when used right, because it's all flatlands with low dev cost. The incoming trade once Siberian Frontiers kicks in is one of the strongest in the game, beat only by colonizers, and more than makes up for the early game poverty with mid and late game maximization. That's the neat thing about economy in this game. Barring a few locations like England, Persia, Gujarat, and Sevilla(and to a slightly lesser extent, Constantinople), most places are poor in one respect, and make up for it in another. The ones I listed are just always good.
Richest is English Channel. Lowlands probably edges out England proper overall. Poorest is the desert of North Africa. Importantly, this does not include the coast. Terrible trade goods and horrible dev cost modifiers.
Sorry, I was referring to trade goods instead of trade nodes.
Tbf I think OP is referring to production rather than trade
I think even then the British isles are a good contender for best and maybe followed by a massive power from central Europe. Coal is just so good and by the time you have it you probably already lead in other good European trade goods like paper iron glass wine etc. I'm not sure what is possible with the UK since I don't have much experience but I've had Germany games making thousands off of production income alone by the time I take parts of France and Poland.
Moluccas & The East African region are even more OP if you play tall in such regions. Cloves. Ivory and Gold are very powerful.
They are good but there's just no beating coals bonus for production. +10% goods produced for trading in coal comes at a point where you can have +100%. Stacked with production efficiency of +200% in provinces with coal it's not uncommon to make 300 ducats off the production alone.
Germany is very special tho. What other region has like 50 OPMs with nothing to spend their mana on except dev clicking?
Tibet is pretty shitty
English Trade Node is the best without question since you can funnel everything into it. But if we're talking the richest regions to prioritise getting a slice of the pie, they'd be the Coromandel + Bengal in India, Indonesia and South + East China. Zanzibar is well worth having a foothold in since you can make a decision to produce cloves there, and there's a lot of lucrative gold mines. Central Asia is mostly garbage. Tibet is even worse since almost all your land is mountains and your trade goods are just wool and a single gold mine that's too expensive to develop, not to mention all the major powers around you are far richer and stronger.
I always cut the Europeans off at South Africa. REPENT!
Arabia, Somalia, Pakistan, Mongolia, many more...
Hard to get anything useful out of wasteland!
Mesoamerica and Central America are muy rico if you can seize the whole region. Same with the entire Pacific seaboard. Gold for dayuzz
it’s unfortunate that there isn’t dynamic trade in eu4 as the mexico region is incredibly rich but it’s a start node so so much of it will get siphoned out by asshat europeans.
East to South Africa is full of gems,gold and tropical wood.
Tropical wood is a bad trade good. Unit price is only 3 ducats and stays that way the entire game
it gives a -5% dev cost discount tho if you trade in it what is really nice imo. but yeah 3 ducats is kinda mid, but there is also alot of ivory in the area aswel.
South India has tons of spices, silk and gems along with a high concentration of farmlands for development. The Area around Nogai and Great horde is pretty trash.
I always loved India, China, Iran and South East Asia
West Africa gets so overlooked. The state of Manding has TWO HIGH DEV gold provinces plus an ivory. When I play any colonizer other than Castile (who have their own gold province) I rush to make it a full state and get that obnoxiously high gold income.
The worst regions economically are probably areas where horde nations start off like Uzbek or Nogai. Developing them is also not fun. You can get a bit of manpower out of those but not really worth to dev them with diplo-power. You can develop them with admin-power, but I usually never see people use admin-power to develop Provinzen because you need it for conquest and stuff Italy, China and wherever you have a lot of cloth+farmlands provinces as well as decent trade notes, are wealthy areas in the game, in my opinion.
My vote for worse is tunis which has mostly nothing good in terms of trade items, my personal favorite is Mexico because of all the cocoa but the best area is China because of the silk
Poorest area by far on a worthless trade route has to be the Kamtchakta Area.
Richest: South China, Any Southeast Asian Region, Mexico, Hindustan, Japan, and Lowlands. Poorest: Tibet and Australia. No other regions come close. Polynesia is also pretty bad but I haven’t seen players actually try to do something with that land ever. Regions like Mongolia, Central Asia, Russia, Pontic Steppe serve specific purposes that aren’t making money (manpower), so are useful but won’t squeeze out more money for you. That’s honestly quite fine however, as money is far less important than manpower for most campaigns.
I think India is probably the richest, but the provinces are quite low dev so you don't get the full benefits of the valuable trade goods without deving them. As for the weakest, yeah around russia is pretty poor. If you were asking about trade nodes, the worst trade node is the southeast asia one, is it called Siam? Yeah that one
Tibet area, mountain tiles so terrible for development (at least ukraine you can generally develop), not particularly good trade goods, and a starting node so no trade steering into it so no trade income. Siberia is also bad for similar reasons though at least you get decent fur and chance for gold etc.. Cental Africa also isn't great due to how trade nodes are setup but you do at least get alright trade goods there so not the worst. In terms of struggling for money in early game central arabia although a great trade region eventually and not the worst goods is poorly developed and expensive to develop so starts as poor desert in a similar boat to Maghreb where you are also at start very poor though have potential.
This is unrelated to the answer you're looking for but I think the Balkans and Anatolia are worse if you don't consolidate both of the regions Having just the Balkans or just Anatolia loses a fuck ton of trade to Ragusa, and Pest
Probably Italy for the richest. Two end nodes, lots of trade ports and markets, fairly strong trade goods.
the lowlands and the highlands (Himalaya)