I just got this game and I love it. I am having a hard time figuring out a few things though, such as the merchants and papal elections.
First, the merchants… What the heck am I supposed to do with them?
As for the papal elections, I can get to the negotiation screen to try to get people to vote for me, but no one is ever interested. What am I doing wrong?
Look on the map for all the little resource icons. There’re dozens of them. Select a merchant and send him to one of the resources. He’ll appear to just be standing next to it, but he’ll be generating a small amount of money every turn while he’s there. Unfortunetly, he won’t last. Another country will send a merchant there sooner or later and take him out. This is so persistent and unavoidable that I just don’t bother with merchants anymore. They’re pretty much broken in the game as currently implemented.
Can’t help you with the elections. I just build as many priests as I possibly can and pack the college with my guys so they swing the election my way.
How can you pack the college?
Build as many priests as you can. There’s a limit based on how many churches you control, and how big they are. The game automatically promotes priests to cardinals based on their piety and the availability of slots in the college. Priests get piety by being built in advanced religious structures (like cathedrals), by being housed in cities with advanced religious structures, or by hunting down witches and heretics. If you keep the number of priests you control as high as possible, you should almost always have enough cardinals to have a candidate in every papal election, and eventually, enough to dominate the college entirely.
In addition to what Miller said…
Merchants - the farther away you send them, the more profit they generate ( assuming a valuable resource ). So if you’re Milan, an excellent source of profits are the silks around Constantinople. But if you’re the Byzantine empire, those silks won’t generate much for you - but the cotton textiles around Milan will.
Generally textiles, wine, ivory, precious metals are all excellent sources of income if you trek far enough. You’ll notice that some “resource deposits” are much more valuable than other seemingly identical deposits. Thus Bordeaux wines are worth more than some other booze producing regions. A particularly rich bonanza of trading income, perfect if you play the Moors, are the trans-Saharan gold, ivory and slave resources scattered around Timbucktu and Arguin.
Merchant guilds and their improvements churn out progressively more experienced merchants. The longer a merchant sits on a single resource the higher his skill will rise. Elminating other merchants also nets you skill advances.
So playing as Byzantium ( recently ) I’d pump three star merchants out of Constantinople with its advanced merchant guild, sit them on a silk resource for twn turns or so to gain another favorable trait and pounce predatorily on any weaker foreign merchant that approaches to further up my skill. Then eventually I’d send them marching off to farm the gold mines in the balkans, the silver mines in Bohemia, the textile emporiums of northern Italy, etc.
I find merchants are more useable post-patch, but the key is aggression. If you see a significantly weaker compeitor ( i.e. better than 50% chance to out compete him ), wipe him out. The stronger your merchants are, the more income they generate ( can be a LOT - multiple hundreds per turn ) and the more resistant they are to foreign predation.
Priests - In addition to building better buildings, parking priests in areas where they will do a ton of converting will cause their skill levels to rise very rapidly. It’s one of the payoffs to crusading. Your priests in the Levant are going to gain piety much quicker than those guys in Germany and thus will start filling up the College of Cardinals. Cardinals cannot be lost to heresy and if you elect the Pope you automatically get perfect relations with the Papacy ( for a time ), which can be very useful to a Catholic faction. Poor relations and Catholic = increased inquisitor activity. Which is bad ( if not as bad as pre-patch ).
That would be “ten”.