Trade Monopolies

Because being the world's banker is not enough, in the next version of Anamnesis you'll also be able to establish trading monopolies.

The trading system will now have another layer of depth, that of competing against other rival licensed traders. You'll be shown in the trade menu how many other traders are currently licensed to trade with any particular family of goods, with strong tendencies tending to be more crowded. These traders take away a tiny part of your profits, so a very crowded market will be less profitable than a relatively empty one, but that's as far as the bad news go.

As tendencies change, perhaps by your own hands pulling the right political strings, traders might either acquire new licenses or allow unprofitable ones to expire. If perchance you happen to find yourself the sole licensed trader of a particular type of good, you'll own a monopoly and make about twice as much profit from ferrying the goods.

At that moment you might want to pull some more strings to raise the tendency again and increase your profits, but those pesky traders will once again want a piece of the cake. Unfortunately for them, from your vantage point, you'll be able to bar new traders from entering your market by spending Merits to cancel the granting of each would-be new license, so as long as you have Merits to spare you'll be able to maintain your monopolies.

This should make trading more interesting and give merchant venturers and business-oriented governors a new background goal to strive for.