Did some testing myself, very early game.
I love the way you can see fairly easily where the shots miss and thus adjust your aim appropriately instead of just guessing.
Money is scarce - items still costs thousands for decent weapon and the most basic of actual armor. I haven't found any new ways of making money quickly, so it seems excessive looting and maybe slavery is necessary to get the 5k+ items such as wheelock muskets and breastplates.
Caravans and trade: I tried some basic stuff, buying velvet in Kiev and trying to reselling it - and probably made almost nothing after checking maybe 10 towns and castles for it.
Caravans seems to be cheaper, but I'm not sure how much you can make early on, since base cost and guards are too expensive and without spending several hundreds it will be raided within 20 seconds of leaving town. To my surprise though selling foodstuff can net you some profit (got 50-80 for meat and flour, while paying 6 for fish in reval), but even this will be small cash compared to earlier exploits. All in all it seems looting and selling expensive weapons and maybe prisoners is the way to go early-mid game.
There is still too much of an economic gap between cheap clothing that is essentially useless for protection (costing 50-300) and actual armor costing 4k-30k. How many hours of grinding, farming, trading and whatnot are deemed necessary to get basic weapons and armor? In M&B and Warband you could at least update gradually.
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