Is it possible to stop spamming of great merchant from puppet cities?

The question is as i mentioned on title. Sometimes i am trying to spam great engineer or scientist but at the last moment, one of my puppet city is spamming a great merchant which is destroying all my plans. Are there any way to stop this?

tutalya said:

The question is as i mentioned on title. Sometimes i am trying to spam great engineer or scientist but at the last moment, one of my puppet city is spamming a great merchant which is destroying all my plans. Are there any way to stop this?

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Delcare war...


Honestly I think the unpredictability and this type of behaviour from the city states great person gifts makes completing the patronage tree extremely unattractive.

ı mean puppet cities not city states

Well the obvious answer is.... to annex the city?

Short answer is, you cannot stop them from producing Great Merchants whilst they are still annexed.

A fix for this, as previously mentioned, is to annex the city. However, this will increase future policy cost and increase unhappiness until a Courthouse has been built. IMO, it's very rare to upgrade from a puppet to an annexed city in the late game.

Two things I would like to add:

Firstly, if you have a puppet empire spamming multiple Great Merchants, you have already won the game and you shouldn't have to worry about one or two extra Great Scientists/Engineers. If necessary, use the cash boosts wisely for that extra kick towards a win.

Secondly, if you really do want more Great Engineers and Scientists, concentrate on generating faith throughout the game. Generating just 100 FPT from the start of the industrial era will get you multiple Great people by the start of the Information era, meaning you don't need to rely on natural Great person generation.

Hope this helps.

Puppets are not good. Annex or burn, late game aswell.
Puppets will only produce gold and they will cost you science. If you annex, not only can you control build order, but most importantly, growth and specialists.
Policy costs wont be that big of a problem and an empire with up to 10 cities end game will still have plenty of SP to pick if you play it right.

Science is what wins games, whatever victory condition you are pursuing. Fill those unis and schools with people in all cities!

Sell the city to the crappiest AI.

tutalya said:

The question is as i mentioned on title. Sometimes i am trying to spam great engineer or scientist but at the last moment, one of my puppet city is spamming a great merchant which is destroying all my plans. Are there any way to stop this?

Click to expand...

No, but you can reduce it by NOT picking the Commerce policy that increases Great Merchant spawn rate that makes the problem worse.

You can also slightly help by switching most farms in a puppet over to trade posts to limit it's growth so it won't be able to run as many specialists. And in addition switch hills from mines to trade posts so that the puppet wants to work those low food tiles.

Also if you happen to be playing Venice prepare for this by filling Great Scientist slots as soon as you have Universities even if you still want a few more Great Merchants of Venice at that point; it's difficult to stop on a dime when you have a puppet empire.

Great merchants spam automatically so that you can make more money for more warmongering and more cities.
Another possible reason, the puppet wants you to annex already by paying for the courthouse with the great merchant money.

Annexing is simply not a strong enough deterrent to this sort of behavior, you must burn it to the ground sir.

^^You're talking about emperor difficulty sir.