StefanTheAlmostGreat 说:
I'm happy with my blues; now I've got a core of infantry up to the high levels they do all right in a scrap.
I've just been granted my first castle. Took me ages to find it; far side of the green empire in the snowy hills. Surrounded by 3 enemy castles full of 600 men.
Ahh well. Do love a challenge. Now I need to find a good method of making cash so I can raise a decent army.
I'm playing blue too
As for making money, looting is pretty good. And selling 20 prisoners gets you 1000 denars. Also, trading goods for profit is pretty darn good too. The different sectors of the map tend to have certain goods cheap, and they tend to get more expensive as you move away from that point. There's a little trick to see what a particular good is "worth" if you don't know the prices that well. Just buy one of the item. Then talk to one of your companions and ask to look at his equipment. Look at the "value" of the good in question, and that is approximately how much the good will sell for in another area of the map.
Note, the selling price for weapons/armor will always be much lower than the value you see in this method... But you'll probably pay that much if you were buying the armor/weapons... Unless maybe your trade skill is very high, I suppose, but I've never had it that high, so don't know.
Anyway, you'll usually find some villages with some very low prices, like 60 denars for oil in some blue villages, which can be worth 400 something and even goes for 200 usually right in the blue towns if you don't feel like hanging onto it and traveling. You could probably sell for 300 in a neighboring faction (a friendly one, if you don't want to try to sneak in) if you don't want to travel across the whole map. Though sometimes the towns have those super low prices too.
I always visit all the villages/towns in the area on my travels. I invest some points in inventory management. If I see good deals in villages, I'll buy up it all. Then at the nearest town, I'll sell a few of the goods I had from other parts of the world that are selling decently high, always keeping a decent amount of spare room available for loot. So I'm kinda like a traveling war caravan

Other low priced things in the blue area besides oil are wine, cheese, sometimes pottery (but better pottery deals down SW in the purple area). Velvet is supposed to be cheap there too, but it's usually so rare that it stays kinda expensive. If you go clockwise around the map, you can pick up, in roughly this order, pottery, wheat, salt, spices (sometimes), iron, wool, furs, fish, linen, and you'll be back to the blue area. Tools are cheap somewhere I think... maybe between in the center in brown, near to yellow.
Also, beef often makes for easy quick profit. Many villages can be found selling cattle (talk to the village elder) for 22 denars each. You can slaughter the cows and you'll get 2 beef from each one (basically 11 denars for each). Most towns are paying around 90 for them (unless you keep flooding them with beef). So if you slaughter 10 cows for an average of 30 denars each, that's 20 beef for 300 denars. Sell for an average of 80 denars for 1600 total. Total profit, 1300. Just be sure to sell with a day or 2, or your beef will spoil and become mostly worthless.
Oh, and having a few horses in your inventory keeps you moving at full speed, or otherwise all those heavy goods will slow you down.