For Caravan Companions: Trade or Tactics?

[SirSpiffington]

Speaking in absolutes is a bad idea.

???? That picture shows a guy with LVL 1 trade. Sorry, am I missing something?

 

[ShaunTheMad]

So I ran a little experiment to test how much of an impact the trade skill had on caravan profits. I deployed one companion with 100 trade skill and no tactics, and another with 80 tactics and no trade skill and tracked their daily revenue for 26 day. I gave both parties the same standard guards and did not modify their troops. What I found was that characters with high trade make more profits than those without. My spicevendor companion with 100 trade had an average revenue 196 higher than the falcon with no trade skill. That said on the 26th day I had to end the test because her caravan got destroyed by bandits.

A last point on all assigning your own troops to a caravan by finding them on the overland map and asking to inspect their troops. You can make make a Carvan much more resilient by assigning high tier troops, however, this will cut heavily into the caravan's profit margin though. All cavalry caravans will be much more survivable since they are able to avoid bandits and enemy armies, but that also means they will spend much more of their time running away from bandits than doing actual trading, which again cuts into your profits.

 

[brasidas2000]

A last point on all assigning your own troops to a caravan by finding them on the overland map and asking to inspect their troops. You can make make a Carvan much more resilient by assigning high tier troops, however, this will cut heavily into the caravan's profit margin though. All cavalry caravans will be much more survivable since they are able to avoid bandits and enemy armies, but that also means they will spend much more of their time running away from bandits than doing actual trading, which again cuts into your profits.

Your observation assumes the bandit AI does not know it can't outrun the caravan, even then if running, it is successfully evading instead of being intercepted and incurring casualties or even being defeated.

Also, since the all cavalry caravan has a higher speed, usually between 1.5 to 2.0 faster, it can complete trade routes between 30% to 40% faster on average, thereby making up to some degree for higher overhead with increased trade completion rate revenue and the fact that it most likely will not be intercepted (attritonal advantage) which would completely wipe out the initial 15k investment.

One may also use lower tier cavalry to get the same caravan speed effect for less economic impact on overhead of the caravan.

Additionally, all cavalry caravans should be higher capacity parties overall, therefore should be able to carry more capacity between trades, about 180 KG more compared to the conventional caravan structure using 18 infantry troops.

 

[Darkon76]

Replacing the infantry for cavalry sounds like the best thing to do because in theory they move a lot faster so they can trade more and you win more money.