Never Generate A Great Merchant

AiTenshi1 said:

Gold offsets anything except for wonders. For everything else, gold is THE OP element of CiV because anything and everything else can be purchased either directly or indirectly.

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Indirectly is can help with wonders as well. Just as it can help your military strength by allowing you to buy units while cities work on them as well, you could allow your cities to use those "extra" hammers on wonders.

In some roundabout way, gold can be used to help anything you want to do, but it's certainly weakest for getting wonders.

Louis XXIV said:

I think the relations boost with City-States is a good thing, especially since missions can be fairly random. It's the only good way to target the CS you want to be friendly with.

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Election-rigging is the best way to target a CS you want to keep on-side.

Now maybe the bonus should be higher, but it still makes sense if you're going for diplo victory.

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The bonus should definitely be higher, both because it's easier post-G&K to get that 30 influence, and because the GM now becomes unuseable for its primary purpose when playing Sweden, which seems wrong - it's always better to gift a GM than to use its influence boost + trade mission gold. 60 rather than 30 influence (or perhaps granting greater influence with an allied CS) would be better.

How about 50 pts?

Mayan first long count bonus could be quite nice. It's a +6 Gold improvement in a time when Trading Posts are not yet even put into a plan!

One of the issues with GMs is that Commerce isn't, in my opinion, a particularly strong SP tree. It is further weakened by the fact that Freedom and Rationalism are just around the corner. I don't enable policy saving so in most games I just put my points into Piety and/or Patronage until one of the aforementioned becomes available. If I work Patronage to Educated Elite and a CS gifts me a GM then it's a Trade Mission.

Correct me if Im wrong on this one, but lets say you go tradition and your first gp is 100 points. Can you still pop a gm, ga, and a gs all on the same turn?

The techs align pretty nicely to pull that off.

My current game I am English. I went Honor then Patronage then Commerce. Built the Great Lighthouse. The early game was challenge as I had many warmonger neighbors but I managed to get my six city empire to Renn Period without iron thanks to Longbowmen and hilltop cities. I built only Great Merchants and they were pivotal in two key ways: Allowed me to quickly upgrade my military and gave me CS allies with iron.

By the Industrial Age with lightening fast navy of Ships of the Line and Privateers I quickly captured ships at will. I was a runaway civ.

The synergy with Honor and Great Merchants is twofold: instead of beating foes with numbers you must preserve units at all costs. Longbowmen promoted with an extra attack absolutely wreck cities. Retreat and heal. When the GM dumps some cash on you from a trade mission immediately upgrade your units. Double attack Gattling Guns with +1 range allow you to back up your ground push nicely.

It strikes me that the biggest issue with GMs is the neccesity to trek them all the way to the target CS before you can use the mission. What would make me more inclined to use them is if the GPr was used as precedent to give them multiple uses (possibly scaling with era), although that would require a slight nerf to the mission itself.

Agree with OP

You gain a substantial amount of gold from a golden age. If you're a.)Darius, B.)acquire chicken pizza, or c.) have finished Freedom (and these bonuses stack), it's quite conceivable that you'd gain enough gold from a golden age to not only equal the amount of gold a GM would grant, but have enough left over to buy the influence that the GM would grant. As if that wasn't enough, don't forget that every single city in your empire gets a 20% bonus to both culture and production. There's no comparison; GM<GA. GSs and GEs are also more effective in my opinion, but I'll digress as those are more arguable(but really?). GProphets (along with Ggenerals/Gadmirals) develop along a different path, so they don't really compete directly.

What really bothers me about the merchant class is the merchant base yield as well as the customs house base yield. I can see engineers making only 2 hammers vs. arists/scientists having a base yield of 3, but merchants getting only 2 gold is questionable. Same as customs house getting 4 gold whereas academies have DOUBLE the yield in beakers, and landmarks/holy sites have 150% the yield in their respective areas. I guess the point is how does 1 gold compare to 1 culture, 1 beaker, 1 faith or 1 hammer. I feel that 1 gold is slightly less than 1 of each of the other. If this is NOT the case, then dedicating the hammers or gold to produce any building in any city is a questionable move because as buildings cost maintainance, you're basically making a tradeoff between gold surplus and beaker/hammer/culture/faith surplus. This is most directly noticeable with faith as it's a 1:1 ratio with both buildings: a shrine trades 1 surplus gold(paid in maintenance) for 1 faith, and a temple trades 2 surplus gold/turn(2 maintenance) for 2 faith/turn.