I think manually storing raw input ingredients
does increase profits. My olive press went above 600 per day after I stocked it with olives.
I
think.
If Yoshioki is correct, maybe my profits were still heading upwards anyways, as it may take upwards of an in-game year to ramp up the monopoly profits
Off topic:
I have done the Everything Has a Price before. My last game before the new patch, in fact, I only ever bought fiefs and never offensively sieged. It was fun playing defensive siege after defensive siege (using the siege engine destroying ambush mechanic) and never using cavalry on open field battles. It was rather sad to watch 1000+ man armies murder my villagers, but fun to watch them helplessly crash onto my walls
I had beaten back the entire Vlandian and Battanian armies with only my single clan in my one little town at first. Pretty hilarious. (I made all the $$$ with smithing, not trade.)
Having used that perk twice now has got me wondering: what does the game do with absurdly rich AI clans? They
never naturally have anything close to the 8-11 million I leave them with, and they
always seem to be struggling when they have a ton of cash but no fiefs. The first game I used it (took over the whole map with that one
) the first town I bought was Provend, followed by the castle from the same clan, and within weeks I found the fief-less clan leader I purchased it from with a party of 15 troops wandering around sadly. I was
easily able to convince him to be the first clan to join my brand new kingdom and get his castle back. He never seemed to do anything with the huge pile of cash.
Maybe I was just to impatient to notice what he did with it over the years compared to all of my other vassals...
Back on topic:
I have also added a silversmith, storing the output in the warehouse. I get a little bit of trade XP when storing the goods, but they are not marked as "bought" so I receive no XP when manually selling them elsewhere.
The purchasing merchants look at it, see my personal company stamp on the bottom, still assume I murdered someone for it and give me no trade XP
Here I was imagining the skill gains would be huge if the "purchase price" was recorded as the cost of the raw input ingredients. Silly me.