Can you make caravans worthwhile?

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rowyerboat

Recruit
Old Guard
Still learning the game, so it's entirely possible I'm doing something wrong, but my one caravan seems utterly useless so far. It's only bringing in a handful of gold over its expenses, which is chump change compared with how easy it is to get gold from fighting in this game. I'm sitting on 220k at the moment with very little to spend it on (although I really should be angling to form my own kingdom...not sure how much cash that would need). As far as I know, it hasn't ever been lost to attack. It now has 88 men in it, which seems like a lot.

The caravan also takes one of my few allotted companions, and I don't seem to have any control over that companion or the troops in the caravan while it's going about its business. All that on top of the initial 15k investment makes it decidedly underwhelming, or even overall detrimental due to the wasted companion slot. Am I missing something?
 
They rake in tons of cash, on bad days, around 400, on good days, over 1k, they pay out the 15k investment within 2 months, so yes, they are worth it.
Also, use that 220k to start up a ton of workshops.
You'll be swimming in cash.
 
I've got 2 caravans and they usually bring in 700-1.5k per day which I think is quite worthwhile. They make back the 15k investment in around 10 days and then after that it's profit. They're generally a great way to help cover your troop wages and pay for food. I wouldn't use them for making big profits due to the fact they use up companion slots, but having a couple is really good for paying off expenses. Then you can use loot and trade money for other stuff.
 
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Affliction said:
I've got 2 caravans raking in a massive 160 denars combined.

Is there a particular strategy for this? I haven't seen them be at all useful
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Maybe you started them from poor towns?
Also the trade skill of the companion leading it surely enters in play, sadly there's not at lot of those
 
rowyerboat said:
Still learning the game, so it's entirely possible I'm doing something wrong, but my one caravan seems utterly useless so far. It's only bringing in a handful of gold over its expenses, which is chump change compared with how easy it is to get gold from fighting in this game. I'm sitting on 220k at the moment with very little to spend it on (although I really should be angling to form my own kingdom...not sure how much cash that would need). As far as I know, it hasn't ever been lost to attack. It now has 88 men in it, which seems like a lot.

The caravan also takes one of my few allotted companions, and I don't seem to have any control over that companion or the troops in the caravan while it's going about its business. All that on top of the initial 15k investment makes it decidedly underwhelming, or even overall detrimental due to the wasted companion slot. Am I missing something?
Click to expand...

On 1.0.10 and now on 1.1 I'm making around 1,5 k from single caravan. It's enough to keep 150 man army wages and food and I'm making profit on prisoners and loot. Before 1.0.10 I used whatever companion I had to run a caravan but I started new game on 1.0.10 and found companion with trade skill. His caravan never goes below 800.
 
Antoine42 said:
Maybe you started them from poor towns?
Also the trade skill of the companion leading it surely enters in play, sadly there's not at lot of those
Click to expand...
It doesn't really matter where you start a caravan, they'll travel the whole map trading anyways. But it never happened to me that once a week or so has passed from the creation of the caravan that they didn't bring in at least 200-300 denar per day at the lowest. They need some time to get going.
 
How can you tell which towns would be profitable? I started a caravan with a 60 trade skill companion and they've been running a loss for me for about 30 days.
 
Ogagon said:
It doesn't really matter where you start a caravan, they'll travel the whole map trading anyways. But it never happened to me that once a week or so has passed from the creation of the caravan that they didn't bring in at least 200-300 denar per day at the lowest. They need some time to get going.
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Yes, but I believe they have a starting location where they buy no? And then go sell elsewhere? Maybe if the town is crap poor, there's nothing to buy at a reasonable price to start with?
I might not have grasped fully how they work yet,I just did one who racks a ton of cash, so didn't bothered
 
rowyerboat said:
which is chump change compared with how easy it is to get gold from fighting in this game
Click to expand...

you are getting tons of money because balance issues. You can loot weapons/etc that can be worth in the thousands. That is not WAI as it breaks the economy. So instead of thinking [how to make caravans worthwhile], you should think [what is broken and needs fixing so I dont have too much money]
 
Antoine42 said:
Yes, but I believe they have a starting location where they buy no? And then go sell elsewhere? Maybe if the town is crap poor, there's nothing to buy at a reasonable price to start with?
I might not have grasped fully how they work yet,I just did one who racks a ton of cash, so didn't bothered
Click to expand...
It might make a difference on how fast or slow they start off, but from what I've seen after a time it doesn't make a difference because what they do is buy at places where there is a low price/overstocked items and sell where there is a shortage. If they start off in a town with a lot to sell at low prices it makes the starting profits go up faster. The only thing that I've seen that can truly change profits is if a lot of towns are getting taken over and the prices are all over the place.
 
Antoine42 said:
Yes, but I believe they have a starting location where they buy no? And then go sell elsewhere? Maybe if the town is crap poor, there's nothing to buy at a reasonable price to start with?
I might not have grasped fully how they work yet,I just did one who racks a ton of cash, so didn't bothered
Click to expand...
It's a living economy. They start from one town, get what's lower than market price there, move to other town, sell, then buy again what's cheap in that town. It just takes time for it to start making a good profit, and I'm guessing it's similar to the way we get trade rumors by visiting towns, so once they visit a few towns, they can have a better grasp on prices, and then start making more profit.

Not sure if that's how it really is, but that's how I perceive to be from what I've seen in game thus far. And all of my caravans so far took like a week to start making 1k profit.
 
Ogagon said:
I'm guessing it's similar to the way we get trade rumors by visiting towns, so once they visit a few towns, they can have a better grasp on prices, and then start making more profit.
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That's what I'm thinking too. A week ago I was telling people the starting town doesn't matter so much and people were all convinced it was a reason to their caravan racking in money or not.
 
Karl_Magnus said:
That's what I'm thinking too. A week ago I was telling people the starting town doesn't matter so much and people were all convinced it was a reason to their caravan racking in money or not.
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Yep, that's what I thought as well. Started caravans in both, peaceful and towns that have been just sacked/occupied to test things out and it still took time for them to start making cash (funnily enough the caravan from a "peaceful town took twice as long to start making profit, around 4-5 ingame weeks, it's anecdotal though and might've been just my luck).
 
Karl_Magnus said:
That's what I'm thinking too. A week ago I was telling people the starting town doesn't matter so much and people were all convinced it was a reason to their caravan racking in money or not.
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Weird. The starting town is literally exactly the same as every other town. None of them matter much. And at the same time, all of them are very important once you start capturing cities. (Villages produce food your cities need to keep productivity up.)
 
Something to consider when picking a home city for caravans: workshops actually produce goods.

I've taken to using ortysia as my home-city (e.g. as a mercenary company) and I've found caravans based there occasionally do very well.

This is likely because ortysia also has an attached silver mine and a silversmith producing Jewellery locally, some of that is immediately consumed by the city itself (ties into the poorly explained prosperity system) but the rest of the jewellery that's produced appears in the trade screen. (You can even watch caravans buy/sell stuff, their trades appear as small popups above the city's name on the world map).

Often my caravans will then resell these units of jewellery elsewhere for huge returns. I've been meaning to try converting all silversmiths (except 1) to something else, to corner the jewellery market and see if that over-inflates prices, giving me "Supernormal" profits.

Now, there are quite a few other factors at play, but I've had quite some sucess by picking my starting city for caravans based on the workshops that work there. Sargot (it's villages make lots of grain, and grain is always cheap) + beer is another good one.
 
An interesting fact - lately I made a caravan of a companion with 0 trade skill and another one with a companion with 100 (or 80?) trade skill. The first one was bringing way more gold every day consistenly. It wasn't a proper test, only my impression - just every time I checked the profits, the first one was by far richer.
 
Pancakelord333 said:
I've been meaning to try converting all silversmiths (except 1) to something else, to corner the jewellery market and see if that over-inflates prices, giving me "Supernormal" profits.
Click to expand...
That's also what I do. I'm less extremist and only just go to towns that aren't so far from my silversmith workshop to see if I can just buy out other workshops producing jewelry to turn them into other profitable shops type.
 
Havada said:
An interesting fact - lately I made a caravan of a companion with 0 trade skill and another one with a companion with 100 (or 80?) trade skill. The first one was bringing way more gold every day consistenly. It wasn't a proper test, only my impression - just every time I checked the profits, the first one was by far richer.
Click to expand...
Same, my first caravan was with someone without any trade points and the two next ones had 100 in their trade skill and I really can't see a proper difference.

Something that might influence their profit can also be their speed. So if they gather a huge party for no reason, and don't have enough horses for the soldiers to ride, if their riding skill isn't developped... probably enters in the equation too.
 
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