14 DAY TRIAL // The life of the trader can sometimes be excruciatingly boring, with no wars, no cover action to destabilize neighbors, no attempts to manufacture causes for conflict and interactions with other powers that are only focused on money, access rights and merchant placement.
Venice is in a good position at the start, although Austria still looms large just above me, and I quickly moved my light ships to support my merchants as they sought to steer more wealth to my shores while working through some of the missions that Europa Universalis IV- Wealth of Nations is generating for me.
I also convinced a couple of Italian minors to basically give me some of their own trade power while trying to decide how to deal with Milan, which seems to be a capable competitor and has a network of alliances that make me a little uneasy.
I also created a series of new light ships, about nine, which were flying the pirate flag and hurting the trade power of Genoa, one of my biggest rivals in this area.
The solid income created by my three traders also allowed me to hire three advisors that boosted my production of monarch points, which should allow me to get ahead when it comes to tech in the coming years.
But I still yearned for a good fight, so I tried to isolate Milan and quickly launch an attack on it for some provinces, fielding mostly mercenaries and some home grown troops.
Unfortunately, Austria decided to intervene very fast and that meant I was forced to give them quite a bit of my gold to settle for peace, which felt like a betrayal of everything that Venice stood for.
I then abandoned all expansionist thoughts from my head and focused on maximizing income via both trade and piracy, developing infrastructure and technology evolution.
Paradox has made it easy to take a look at all the trade interface and see what might increase revenue in the short term and each possible action has a tooltip that pops up when the mouse hovers that offers even more details.
Trade is still not as exciting as war in Europa Universalis IV, but those who appreciate long-term plans and plotting moves over tens of years will appreciate the option of using money to power the evolution of their country even if they never take a new province from a rival.