The Complete TRADE GOOD Tier List for Eu4

Grain, fish, cattle, and wine are underrated. Soldiers households are excellent manufactories.

Yes it can be annyoing with inflation. But imo gold is S tier. The sooner the better and gold is amazing in the early game. A 10 production dev gold province alone gives you such a huge boost. You can afford force limit armies and build most buildings you want right away. It has a great snowball effect. And you have access to at least one gold mine in most starting areas.
For cloves you have to reach far and to profit from it most effectively you got to chain many trade centers which requires lots of conquest which further requires time. Giga S tier for an southeast asia start but not from further away.
Coal comes way too late to be S for me. At this time you ll already get heaps of money anyways.
But its just an opinion. Enjoyed listening to your list.

Grain used to be stronger with the old estate system because you could always get 0 autonomy on the force limit for provinces granted to nobles but without that interaction it's far worse early game

Loved the video, have you ever thought of doing a similar tier list style video about country ideas, might take a few hours though

Also can you do a vid on "Max promoted cultures" vid ?

How many can you accepted ?

Fellow Naval supplies hater !

The provincial trade power of cloves is literally useless because they only exist in the spice islands and (through an event) Zanzibar. But each of the relevant trade nodes only has one exit.

Yo i remember when i was really new to the game i played MP game as trier and you were Switzerland i sent you a fuck ton of money through gifts anyway nice to see your channel getting recommended to me, keep up the good work 👍

I would note as well that because coal sits on provinces that already have a separate trade good, its lack of usefulness in the early game is dramatically offset.

At worst, before coal becomes an economy supercharger, it still provides the value of whatever else is on its province in the early game.

Agree with everything except grain. You can build an entire game around grain provinces depending on the country you play. I’d put grain in middle A tier.

Very solid tier list, I agree with everything (might have put things on slightly different tiers, but that more a case of not having an exact criteria to follow, rather than disagreeing with your rating). All the A tier goods are all the ones I always look out for and seeing "instincts" being reflected like that is just A+. There is one exception, but really it's a non-exception exception, cause I let my personal feelings on navies impact how I feel about them in the game. They were just so important in history, just that pdx shafts them in all their games :(. Which is why I still value fish just a tad higher than I should.

In my Austria game I spawned the international book making event in Wein. It seems possible to spawn it on a low trade value good. It has two options either gain two production or trade good becomes paper in the capital.

So where would you rank warpstone in this?

I only ever need naval force limit when I'm fighting Denmark as Russia.

Grain gives force limit and manpower buildings, I would give it an A tier. Livestock and fish deserve a B tier (grain has better trading bonus).

If lemons were a trade good it would be S tier for those juicy lemon cakes

Id honestly put grain in A tier, and livestock/wine/fish in A maybe B tier

After the changes in KoK, Mamluks are likely the best all around users of Cotton!
They get a Colonist for a Privilege as one of their mission rewards, have ample access to central Africa and can often beeline the Spice Isles to use it's benefits.
And chances are, you'll be invading Anatolia as soon as you're able since Otto's are your main threat.

Hm, I largely agree but there are some I'd disagree on, although I mainly do this from a competetive multiplayer perspective:

Gonna defend ma grain right here. Breweries government reform, it's lovely. Grain is all around solid and ofc. it's the go to #1 manpower ressource combined with manpower buildings. I'd bump it up to B atleast, A is debatable since you do trade off income when compared to higher value trade goods, which do let you steamroll earlier and thus faster. The need for that manpower in Sp is also kinda non existent, then again same can be argued about everything else when it comes to SP too as the need to tryhard unless it's a minor with a harsh start doesn't exist.

For similar reasons I'd also argue cows and fish have to be C-Tier due to their manpower buffs to buildings, or this list lacks another rank at the bottom, an E-Tier. Gargabe like Naval supplies, slaves, wool or wood are just abysmally bad. They are on another level bad and it's insulting to cows and fish to be in the same tier as them xD Manpower manufactories are a thing after all ^^

Gold is a no brainer S-tier. It's the go to early game cash cow. By the mid game it's utterly irrelevant but it's untouchable state in the early game justifies this ranking. When playing a horde for example a gold mine is always motivation to expand towards that province asap and there is never a reason not to bump up the dev of gold mine.

Apart from naval supplies, I didn't disagree with anything in particular, and I am probably biased because I love that naval gameplay

Love you sir

Imo grain should be in A tier because of the ludicrous amount of manpower you can stack on it, which is especially important in multiplayer, and as you're probably already overflowing with money by tech 15 if you've done it right, grain would be the preferable trade good in any situation

I would also put cloth in S tier merely because of the -10%dev cost reduction, allowing you to artificially increase the goods value by cheaper development

This comes across like most trade goods are trash and you shouldn't worry about them

Wow these videos are awesome didn't even realize Poland can up the trade value of grain.

Gotta disagree that grain is bad, soldiers households are OP for multiplayer and for playing tall

Could you give us any info on the soundtrack? Great video, BTW!

Finally a good video

Solid tier list. It really frustrates me when people don't explain their tiers and/or the context.

Coal is shit cus it is only available when its already too late. Gems and gold must be s tier

The estate monopoly does make cows a little better. It gives only 80% of the income, but it is so little that the estate loyalty+mercantalism is often worth it. It is still bad, but it is better than fish.

Sometimes I also give the Wool, incense, and sheep monopolies, depending on how much of my income it represents, how badly I need loyalty and how many privilege slots I have left.

Spices give spy offense not defense.

I think livestock actually deserves to be in C tier, although at the bottom of it. There is a lot of it in the Egypt and Arabia, the places where both cav cost and supply limit modifiers are kinda useful and it also quickly becomes 2.5 value, which makes it somewhat not that bad to get both manpower and money from, especially considering how much of it there is. It is still not good compared to actually valuable stuff, but imho you can do a lot worse than livestock - just look at fish, which decreases in price to 2 with Reformation and has absolutely useless bonuses

Please don't use livestock for drilling, that is such a welch thing to do.

i would argue you should rank slaves over the other D tier trade goods just because you might be able to swap out of them later in the campaing

I am pretty sure spices gives 25% spy offense, not spy defense. That makes it quite useful to have, especially if you can get it earlier. Spy networks offer very good bonuses like reduced tech cost if spying on more advanced country (past diplo tech 9) and siege ability, if we don't consider claims for cheaper, faster coring and other espionage actions.

They also reduce AE, but it only reduces AE for the country you're actually building spy network itself, so it's realistically only useful if you're spying on big hostile countries like ottomans for example, since they're hostile to you no matter what, improving relations wouldn't help you go over 50, so reducing the AE they get instead is better.

Pretty much no one plays after 1700 because you either bored or conquered everything. Thats why coal is useless. For it to be useful you must have them way early. So I will switch gold and coal.

Catholic East Slavic theocracies can stack Vodka of the Crown with Monastic Breweries for some pretty crazy grain production modifiers (over triple the value). Either reform also boosts grain value a good deal on its own.

Have to disagree with Tropical Wood being C tier.
It deserves A just for the fact you get -5% dev cost from 'trading in' bonus.
BTW Furs and Livestock are good because they only increase in price. I would move them up a tier each.
I would even say Grain is B tier since 20% land force limit trading in bonus and .5 land force limit per grain province is no joke.
Dyes are also pretty mid since the price stays the same and bonuses they give are really tame.

I really would put grain at top of C tier. If you are a mid size country that managed to unite trade node gold will slowly spot being an issue for a time so this 0.5 force limit can save you a lot on force limit buildings.

Re: cotton, there's a very high chance of finding it in the southeast US region, so any colonizer can probably get the trading in bonus without too much trouble.

I really don't know how you could rank coal above gold, much less be a whole tier apart. Having a gold province will give you a ton of money exactly when that money is going to be most impactful on your game. Gold isn't some lategame investment which will pay itself off over the course of the game, it's a shot in the arm that you pump up to like 15 or 20 dev and use that to fuel your early to midgame, with the idea being that by the time it stops scaling, you're going to have grown well beyond it anyways. Yes it's basically just strictly worse than cloves, but I struggle to imagine how that gets outranked by a good that doesn't spawn in until enlightenment, at which point while it is a decent bonus, is going to represent nowhere near as much of an increase to your already perfectly well off economy as gold is going to represent to your likely struggling early game economy.

I do think taking into account its timing is fair however, because coal is unique compared to every other trade good in the game. If you can have cloves early, you're going to want cloves early, and anyone who does have them early is going to benefit massively from them. That you physically cannot have coal early is what I think makes it fair, there are literally no nations that can benefit from coal pre-enlightenment except england, who gets it slightly earlier, where there are cases of other rare resources that nations can benefit from even if your nation individually is not.

I disagree on gold being A and not S. While it's nowhere near as good of a money maker as coal is and you do have to deal with inflation, a single gold mine early on can completely transform a nation from being trash to being able to field an actual army.

No other trade good in the game does that. While coal and cloves may be objectively better, their relative impact on a playthrough is far less.

Trade good? More like trade bad

I hope you enjoy this one! Modifier stacking isn't gone anywhere, don't worry, but I wanted to do something a touch different.