PUP (Malian) trade is SUPER broken

Game version: 5.0.23770.0 (current PUP beta)

Hello Age of Empires 4 Community! :slight_smile:

First things first. Thanks for this great game that is getting better and better! Season 3 Patch might be the best one yet!

I apprecaite the devs decision to buff trade because, in 1vs1 games, trade was rarely ever an option to go for.
But instead of buffing the trade, it should be fixed first.
There have been 2 major buggs with trading since the beta which were never fixed:

  1. The gold dissapears when you move ur traders.
    Example:
    Your Traders ran trough the map and pick up the gold.
    Now they head back to your main market.
    Sometimes enemies notices that u are trading and u have to:
    -hide
    -stop them
    -tell them to go into a tower
    -just order them to go back
    ANY command you give them will make them lose all their gold.

There was a forum post I saw today (and i bet there are many more) where someone said that there is a bug with JUST the malian traders. As Explained above this bug is not only for malians.
The Dev’s answered to the post with:
“Thank you for reporting this @Playername! The team is working on this one.”

(With this answer you can only hope that its a generic answer. Otherwise this would mean that they
are trying to fix this bug since beta :smiley:
Link to the Post: Malian trader bugs )

  1. Traders trick to START their route with gold.
    Your traders START runnig with full gold if you change their home-market to you second market on the other map side: AOE4 Double market trading exploit | Double trouble - YouTube

->The HUGE Problem with Malians
(Sorry to all the team-gamers using this exploit allready on beta servers. I hope this wont make it onto the live servers.)
This trick is especially broken with the new Malian Outpost and Landmark(Saharan Trade Network), because you instantly recieve tons of gold and food after your first few trader-steps.
This is even more broken on lager team game maps.
But thats not it.
If u are a good player and have the macro and the apm u can redo the strat explained in “2.” on the way back! (If you have another ally/neutral makrket)

Ladys and gentleman, welcome to the great finale:
You can actually combine ALL this problems/bugs:
Video: All 3 bugs combined - 66MB

This cant be the way trade should be played and is has to be fixed. Please dont let this get into live servers where ranked-teamgames will be a thing…

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Throughout the day my brain becomes more mushy and resorts to more generic sounding answers. Yes, this is a problem with all civs. Yes, it has been around a while. Yes, we are actually working on it. It won’t land in the Season 3 Update; probably the one after (or maybe in between).

I realize the above sounds annoyed or snippy, but isn’t meant to :slight_smile:. That is all to say “the team is working on this one.” :laughing:

I believe the Malian trade exploit should be fixed by the time Season 3 launches.

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