You are assuming upgrades and advisers that improve the glory of raiding / exploring, and also assuming an absence of advisers that improve the glory of building or upgrading.
Both assumptions are questionable.
Both assumptions are questionable.
Actually, Scott was assuming no points from advisers or from upgrades to the player board giving extra points. You can easily get an average of more than 2 points per round doing raid or explore in the late game. The trading person in our group got an extra point for the first treasure, the first upgrade, and the first building they made and they were still falling significantly behind me and Scott nearly every game until they switched to trying to do some exploring and raiding of their own. The only times she did not fall behind in points in an individual game was when there was a milestone that had to do with commerce or when she was doing mostly raiding and exploring.
I haven't done a pure trade game in a few, because right now you can raid / explore for 5 points fairly easily, so I've bean hitting that starting on turn 6 or so, but it is my merchent roots that keep me regularly in 2nd place despite everyone else having huge start of game bonuses.
For those raid and explore endeavors that give 4+ points, I could start doing those turn 2-3 and not stop until the game ended. And I wasn't getting no points in those first 2-3 turns either, I was building/raiding for an upgrade and moving out. The only problem I had with exploring those sites was the inconsistency of whether I would get 1 point or 5 for an individual endeavor. I feel that the number of points you got for one of those endeavors varied too much. I think the game should have evened it out a bit. Of course, sometimes the game would just hand me a bunch of resources or money from one of those endeavors as well, which let me get more points there from random blind luck.
Because of upgrades and advisers, starting with a merchant strategy for me if I were to do it would look like this. Activate 2 things at the start of the game that instantly give me 2 glory.
1 - Sail and Raid a mine for some gold. - 3 points.
2 - Buy 4 goods and sail (I need an adviser to do this, but +2 buy is super easy). - 3 Points.
3 - Build and Upgrade - 7 points.
4 - Build and Upgrade - 9-10 points depending on adviser
5 - Sail and Build (or Raid). - 10 - 12 points.
6 - Sail and Build (or Raid). - 11 - 13 points.
Winter - 12 - 14 points.
7 - Build and Upgrade - 14 - 19 points.
1 - Sail and Raid a mine for some gold. - 3 points.
2 - Buy 4 goods and sail (I need an adviser to do this, but +2 buy is super easy). - 3 Points.
3 - Build and Upgrade - 7 points.
4 - Build and Upgrade - 9-10 points depending on adviser
5 - Sail and Build (or Raid). - 10 - 12 points.
6 - Sail and Build (or Raid). - 11 - 13 points.
Winter - 12 - 14 points.
7 - Build and Upgrade - 14 - 19 points.
How does winter give you points? You also make a huge leap in points on turn 7, which seems strange, as I assume you already put upgrades and buildings in the locations that gave extra points. Even with the adviser giving an extra point you should only be getting 3 points from that turn, not 5, unless you are taking one of the late game buildings that gives more points, but those are very easy for a raid player to remove and thereby remove a huge chunk of points from you. They also aren't even worth any points to someone who has done no exploring anyway, or at least raiding of other players for those things. The other method for getting those 5 points would be doing an explore, but it is not guaranteed that you would get 5 points from that.
You seem to be assuming that a raiding player would not target your ships / your province / those things you activated at the beginning of the game in order to take resources from you / destroy buildings / take the activatable things from you. For most of your points you rely heavily on things that can be taken from you or that can be destroyed. They would only really be able to do that once a game, but later on they would be able to do that pretty consistently every game if you did manage to get a decent number of points from builds / upgrades / activatable things. When you have 2 upgrades per ship, and you are buying goods, the raid player would see a huge opportunity to sink one of your ships, remove 2 of your points, and slow you down significantly. If the raid player had the right adviser for it, they wouldn't even need to give you that much enmity to do it either.
At no point do you mention doing anything to get money back, and if you are activating those things at the beginning of the game you should have significantly less money to start with already, so unless you are so far behind the lead person you are getting 30 or more gold from compensation I don't see how you are sustaining constantly buying goods / building / upgrading / grabbing advisers. Even raiding a mine or 2 and then getting the adviser for making buying goods cheaper would not be enough to be able to pump out the buildings and upgrades you are talking about.
Between 1/3 and 1/4 of the games we played ended before the second winter and the others usually didn't last long after. The main issue is, you need to go out and buy goods, then bring them back and use them to build/upgrade. This means you would only get 2 points for 2 turns without advisers helping, and with advisers giving you extra buys you get 4 points for 3 turns. This is all assuming that you have enough money to be able to do nothing but buy goods, upgrades, and buildings without selling any of the goods for money, which would take another turn to sell as well.
This is also assuming that the person that won the game only got the minimum number of points required to trigger game end. A significant percentage of the time the winning player in our group got a few more points than that, and occasionally they would get a good 5-8 points above the game given goal.