300 trading

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holy f man it takes a long time... used all day yesterday and this morning and only 220 in skill and now its just around to get capped at 230ish.... 8 in social and 5/5 in trade..

Guess i am forced into quick leveling from smithing to get some more gold/levels going fast even though i really wanted a trade playthrough... Just...cant...withstand it

Whats your guys secrets for getting to 300 trading?!
 
You need 10 points in social, and I didn’t actively seek to grind other skills. I gained points in charm and stewardship passively, and points in combat skills through tournaments.
 
Make the most of the early boost. It's easier to level up early on so get every trade point you can in character creation, then load up the focus points on trade early and head straight for the Askar horses. Your first couple of big horse runs can net you 20 or 30 points. That takes the edge off.
 
Guess i am forced into quick leveling from smithing to get some more gold/levels going fast even though i really wanted a trade playthrough... Just...cant...withstand if

Stop smithing, each level you gain (character, not in skills) reduces your overall learning rate. Of you increase your level via smithing you are just slowing yourself.
 
The last 10 from 290-300 is a real pain. Was able to do the 1st 290 in 600 odd days, it took over 100 for the last 10 pts. Good luck!
 
I have been lobbying TW to help with it, with 10 points I average about 1250 and with 8 pints around 2400 days. I think the big deal is the 275 perks, they are a waste really unless for a governors, so I gave them a few suggestions, but the problem is people that care about trading in general don't come together in one thread to really show TW that while trading is niche a bit it still have a loyal fan base. So they are not that concerned about it without us coming together and showing them we really care.
 
holy f man it takes a long time... used all day yesterday and this morning and only 220 in skill and now its just around to get capped at 230ish.... 8 in social and 5/5 in trade..

Guess i am forced into quick leveling from smithing to get some more gold/levels going fast even though i really wanted a trade playthrough... Just...cant...withstand it

Whats your guys secrets for getting to 300 trading?!
If you smith (or do anything else other than trade) to get 'quick levels', you slow down skill gain towards trade (i.e. learning rate falls slightly every time you level up). The quickest way to learn any one skill is to do it with the minimum number of level ups.

To really maximise gain on any focus area(s), you should do as much of those activities as possible, and as little of any other activities as possible. So for example you could employ a scout, quartermaster, medic to make sure they, not you, are gaining experience from those functions. Even if you don't put focus points into those skills, raw experience (not modified by learning rate) is earned and that's what contributes towards levelling and thus declining learning rate.
 
Whats your guys secrets for getting to 300 trading?!
Ok 1st the most important perk for me to do a trading run is the 175 riding perk Riding Horde which Decreases campaign speed herding penalty by 50%. This is huge it means you can have as many animals as you want for a less than 2 speed penalty, combined with a small cavalry only unit you can get to respectable 5.8 speed with any amount of cargo as long as it is within capacity. Also the faster you travel the more trading you can do.
This lets you choose when to sell. You level up based on profit made so I never sell anything unless I can sell it for twice what I bought it for. I therefore work out a buy price for each item and only buy it up to around that price and then only sell it again when I can sell it for at least double that. This means messing around for the right market more, but pack animals are cheap and with riding horde it doesn't slow you down so you can always buy and carry anything that is sold cheap and hold it until you find somewhere you can get your desired price on it. Good things to do this on are Olives, Fish, Furs, Grapes, Dates, Grain & Flax. Bar the furs individually they aren't worth much, but you can often buy for single figures and sell for double and you can shift large volumes of them in many towns so they all add up and give you something to do on most stops.
Other than that always buy cheap horses and look out for when to sell them. Lastly get old work horses from villagers and sell for meat (thank you Flesson for that one), which in of itself gives you no trade XP as you didn't buy the meat, but if you slaughter the horses at a place where meat is being sold cheap and then buy a few units of cheap meat it seems to give you XP for selling all of the meat in the stack based on the price you paid for it those few units (at least based on the green numbers). Even if it that doesn't help with trade XP it's a good way of making money to buy more stock to sell for a profit that counts.
Lastly pick minor factions to fight and go attack some bandits as it makes the game a lot less dull if you have a few scraps along the way (and it helps level riding). The loot is good to earn a bit more money to keep a healthy cash flow going as if you are aiming for the 300 perk you will need millions to buy a decent town.
When you get the 300 perk, the price of places seems mainly based on prosperity so unless you have loads of money look for places that change hands a lot and so have low prosperity, Amprela being my favourite, as you can get them fairly cheap 700-900k. One of the best uses I've found for the perk is using it to buy contested castles with 0 prosperity for 200-300k and then using said castles to bribe clans without fiefs (especially recent dispossessed clans) to join my kingdom. If you bought the castle you are free to hand it out as you see fit without offending other clans.
 
If you smith (or do anything else other than trade) to get 'quick levels', you slow down skill gain towards trade (i.e. learning rate falls slightly every time you level up). The quickest way to learn any one skill is to do it with the minimum number of level ups.

To really maximise gain on any focus area(s), you should do as much of those activities as possible, and as little of any other activities as possible. So for example you could employ a scout, quartermaster, medic to make sure they, not you, are gaining experience from those functions. Even if you don't put focus points into those skills, raw experience (not modified by learning rate) is earned and that's what contributes towards levelling and thus declining learning rate.
Wish i had known that :sad: am at 175 scout now
 
Wish i had known that :sad: am at 175 scout now
Doesn't mean it's wrong - I focus on several skills, including scouting and trade, to be decent at several rather than brilliant at one. But if you really want to prioritise one over all others, it means both Focus points and a 'soft focus', i.e. what you actually do in game. If you do lots of things, they all count towards levelling up, and then slow down learning rate.

And of course some of the scouting perks are quite useful to a trader and may help with it in the long run (making it quicker and more profitable, easier to spot and avoid enemies, etc). The above is purely about skill progression.
 
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Wohaa just tried to do market manipulation and it actually WORKS!!! this is vital news!

My example now.

I use Askar and Sanala - I buy every shop there that is not a brewer and make them all brewing as they got tons and tons of grain. Also making sure there is no tanner nearby - This way the prices on horses drop so i can buy them cheaper. After the brewer workshops starts to make money i sell them to 1/2 price BUT this is the interesting part - They stay Brewers

Next i go to Ortysia -> Lageta -> Marunath .> Seanon -> Car Benseth -> Dunglanys -> Pen Cannoc -> Sargot . Here i buy the brewer workshops and turn them into tannery - Also making sure each tow got atleast 1 tanner - This will increse the demand for Horses and remove any competition from Beer trading :eek: After workshops makes money i sell them - They stay what i choose

This is the holy grail of trading - You get to manipulate the market to make the leveling of trading much more effecient :grin: good evening all
 
The last 10 from 290-300 is a real pain. Was able to do the 1st 290 in 600 odd days, it took over 100 for the last 10 pts. Good luck!
If I work at it assiduously, I can get 300 before Nertze's folly expires just be trading horses and mules. But sometimes, I wander off and do other things, like conquer a town that's ripe for plunder. That slows me down.

One time saver if you have tons of denars and are trying to get those last excrutiatingly slow levels -- Load up on as many sumpter horses and mules as you can get for around 50 denars. Head up north to where towns are paying over 100 for those. Find a village offering a nice price (115 or better) and sell them all in one fell swoop. In villages, price does not decrease with volumn, so you can sell 500 mules for 115 each and price won't go down. With that kind of volume, Trade goes up 5 or so points.

You do lose out on cash because villages only have 1000 denars available, but you still get the Trade credit even if you do not get the cash.
 
Wish i had known that :sad: am at 175 scout now

It is a bad mechanic. The skill growth curve should be independent of the character growth curve. It shouldn't matter if you started on a skill day 1 or day 1000 nor should it be dependent on the number of skills you already have. I mean knowledge on how to use a sword has no bearing on knowledge on how to buy and sell a sword so why should having 200 in one handed weapons having a bearing on how fast you can learn to buy and sell swords?
 
It is a bad mechanic. The skill growth curve should be independent of the character growth curve. It shouldn't matter if you started on a skill day 1 or day 1000 nor should it be dependent on the number of skills you already have. I mean knowledge on how to use a sword has no bearing on knowledge on how to buy and sell a sword so why should having 200 in one handed weapons having a bearing on how fast you can learn to buy and sell swords?
It doesn't. The fact that you are level X (total raw xp across all skills; what you've actually been doing in game, not what you've allocated attributes and focus points to) has a bearing on how fast you learn. Whether that's good or bad is another matter, but the criticism should be accurate.
 
I have been lobbying TW to help with it, with 10 points I average about 1250 and with 8 pints around 2400 days. I think the big deal is the 275 perks, they are a waste really unless for a governors, so I gave them a few suggestions, but the problem is people that care about trading in general don't come together in one thread to really show TW that while trading is niche a bit it still have a loyal fan base. So they are not that concerned about it without us coming together and showing them we really care.

To be fair, there seem to be quite a few of us who in this thread want major changes to trade to make it more viable.

Right now the game kind of forces either a combat focused way of play, or alternatively, a "smithing" centric way of play, although that is also
supplemented by warfare too.

There are a number of changes I think are urgently needed:

  1. Buffing heavier armor so that combat is more realistic
  2. Reducing the effectiveness of arrows (this has only been partially done)
  3. Improving trade to make it a viable way to play
  4. More "late game" focused quests and content

There are other balancing issues and some other fixes that will need to be addressed (the siege AI I think is one big one).
 
To be fair, there seem to be quite a few of us who in this thread want major changes to trade to make it more viable.

Right now the game kind of forces either a combat focused way of play, or alternatively, a "smithing" centric way of play, although that is also
supplemented by warfare too.

There are a number of changes I think are urgently needed:

  1. Buffing heavier armor so that combat is more realistic
  2. Reducing the effectiveness of arrows (this has only been partially done)
  3. Improving trade to make it a viable way to play
  4. More "late game" focused quests and content

There are other balancing issues and some other fixes that will need to be addressed (the siege AI I think is one big one).
Trade is already a viable way to play. In fact with the aforementioned 300 trading and the ability to barter for fiefs, you technically could just buy a kingdom and eventually just buy the entire world without ever having to fight a battle.

I say this because I use a mod called Autotrader to trade and make millions from it. All the mod does is automate buying low and sell high which you could do just with time and a spreadsheet the old fashion way if you think Autotrader is cheating. You get tons of trading XP, very quickly from trading, in fact I think trading tends to be the faster XP gain in the game especially if you place everything into Int and trading early until you max it. Between workshops, caravans and trading yourself, you will make plenty of money for everything you want/need and there is no reason why you couldn't become a Merchant King who couldn't fight himself out of a paper bag.
 
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