To which trade nodes should I send my light ships?
I've read up on the trading topics both here and on eu4wiki, but I'm still a bit puzzled.
Should I only send trade ships to nodes in which one of my merchants is present? Would adding light ships to a downstream node without my merchant improve my steering factor in any way, or would that be wasted?
Best Answer
You ought to send your trade ships to a) the node/s at which you collect and b) the preceding nodes, to make sure that other countries cannot collect or steer trade into their direction from there.
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Answer 2
Sending ships to a node will give you extra trade-power there, so you should ideally send them to nodes where that extra power would make a difference.
It's my understanding that any node that has trading-power will implicitly steer or collect, so sending ships there would have some effect. However, the nodes you'll normally want to send ships to are also the nodes you'd normally want to send a merchant to as well, so I can't think of many situations you'd want to send ships to a node without a merchant.
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