Let's talk Trade?

[Syrus127]

In my latest run I've been trying to not do the basic old smithing strategy for making money and instead rely on trading.

In the runs before I've already noticed shortcoming with it, but I wanted to see it to the fullest extend. It is not an enjoyable experience.
The main issues I see with trading is that supply and demand are way too low, even with a small caravan I can easily outdo the demand for all but low-paying goods, usually food. Often times any profit is gone after selling two or three items, at best netting a profit of maybe 500 when you get a really low buy and high sell price.
Not to mention the high weight limiting the profit. One could go and make gold off of selling grain, for which a higher demand exists compared to, for example, leather, but the high weight makes it tedious at best.

Besides supply and demand and the carriable amounts being too low due to the high weight, the trade rumors finish the trade system off for good.
Often times I would see a good rumor and go for it, and by the time I get there the price has imploded to a tenth of what the rumor said, or I would see rumors for a town I just had been to, which foretold of great profits, despite just having sold those exact goods there and knowing that the price is not what the rumor claims it to be. This is much exacerbated due to the low demand, as, as stated before, the price implodes by just selling often less than half a dozen items, so if even a single caravan got there before you, tough luck. I've seen rumors say something I bought would sell for 500+ gold, but when I got there it is down to 80 gold.

By now I'm running a mod which allows me to see the profit I could make as well as doing away with the trade rumors and actually showing me how much I will make in all towns (around) for a trade good and even with all that, trade is not a very worthwhile or enjoyable option, compared to the much more predictable and steadier income of smithing (or taking out enemy parties and selling the loot).

Distances also don't matter as much, as trade goods are spread all over the place, not breaking the map into regions where such trade goods are produced. Regions should not produce all kinds of different trade goods but have more specific products instead, so that trade between these regions is more worthwhile. Maybe more trade goods would also be helpful for this.
(Not to mention trade caravans and workshops being horribly unprofitable as well, in most cases.)

 

[anoddhermit]

My biggest trades of like 50k+ in one sale (of just trade goods, not weapons/armor) mostly come from stocking up 100+ of every good and as much grain as you can reasonably carry and then selling right after a town is sieged when they're generally short on most things but especially food, and then right after the besiegers buy most/all of the food up often and you can do a second big sale too.

Knowing what areas will be starved of certain trade goods during wars can help too. I think some people think of the game world as an overly static one and try to find specific trade routes, which is not only boring but relatively ineffective compared to opportunistically adjusting to the impact that conflicts between factions has on the world economy.

That said, trade is still by far the worst way to make money and one of the most painful skills to level. I think it needs substantial improvements. Making money without smithing is way too slow in the mid game unless you just relentlessly hunt lords and sell loot, making money with smithing is way too fast and trivializes that aspect of the game.

 

[monoolho]

Knowing what areas will be starved of certain trade goods during wars can help too. I think some people think of the game world as an overly static one and try to find specific trade routes, which is not only boring but relatively ineffective compared to opportunistically adjusting to the impact that conflicts between factions has on the world economy

This.

But i do agree, smitging can make far too much money, whereas trade takes too long for minor profits.

 

[Ichon]

Trade pretty much works best for small parties that can travel quickly and do not have a large payroll of upkeep and combining it with tournaments. If you catch a trade rumor for a town that is fairly close which is common and it is a mid to high value good like tools or silver ore that can be bought in the 30-50 and sold at 150-200 and you have 2-4 goods in rotation, each town should bring in 500 on average and it takes 1-2 days to travel to the nearest town + occasional 5-15k for tournament win, you can save up to 100k in a few weeks, even faster if you start taking out sea raiders or small minor parties on your travels.

Traveling with a party size above 30 rarely will make sense, especially early in a campaign as value of trade vs battles as no single town can absorb more than 20-30 worth of weight in trade goods.Out traveling you can also find the occasional good quest and build up relations etc and it is not as boring as smithing, by realtime it does take a bit longer to trade vs smith but that narrows down to almost nothing after you add tournaments and a few selective battles.

With high skills into perks you can trade and make good money forever but what is the point? In the same amount of time it takes to level up those perks you can already have several towns captured and more income than trade alone.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

It's pretty much worthless as you can do basically anything else in the game and get money + more additional benefits. I predict TW changes it to let you gain skill from selling loot and does nothing else to it.

 

[Lesbosisles]

Trading is terrible without using mods or exploits to level it up. You buy stuff, you go to the city which is said to have the high demand for it, you come to it - and there are already stacks of it. So you run around, click-click-click-click, nothing interesting happens at all. I am not sure, if you can affect the demand somehow aside from buying everything you see.

You can't compete with someone, because there are no competitors at all. You buy workshops and forget about them, because they live and work on their own and either bring profits or not. Progression is terribly slow, and really feels terrible trying to level up trading.

They devs made some changes in economy and trading (dramatic changes, as they claim), yet I don't feel anything's been changed at all - trading was and still a terrible thing to level up, and being a trader the most boring and unrewarding playstyle in Bannerlord at current.

 

[Cullam]

Trading? Doesn´t make sense.

 

[swally0ne]

trade route is from north to south. tools, furs, leather, and so on from north to south. food the other way round (dates).

 

[ZeroDate]

My trade caravans usually make 4-800 denar a day if they have scouting, trading, and riding and rarely get taken unless I'm at war. Get Battanian to lead them and focus map movespeed perks.
Workshops can be free income if you monopolize an industry by changing all of the other workshops to breweries. Ai don't change them after since they almost always make some money.
If you want to do max trading efficiency just get around 50 tier 2 units early and the riding perk to halve herding penalty. With a 275 scout you could travel around with every horse on the map and all the trade goods since infinite storage from horses.
Party leader with merc pay perk + crossbow 250 perk to lowerer ranged upkeep+ high level steward in party with merc upkeep reduction makes mercenary crossbowmen negative upkeep.

 

[ZeroDate]

My trade caravans usually make 4-800 denar a day if they have scouting, trading, and riding and rarely get taken unless I'm at war. Get Battanian to lead them and focus map movespeed perks.
Workshops can be free income if you monopolize an industry by changing all of the other workshops to breweries. Ai don't change them after since they almost always make some money.
If you want to do max trading efficiency just get around 50 tier 2 units early and the riding perk to halve herding penalty. With a 275 scout you could travel around with every horse on the map and all the trade goods since infinite storage from horses. After year one I can make around 2-3k profit and restock every town if I only focus high prosperity towns.
Party leader with merc pay perk + crossbow 250 perk to lowerer ranged upkeep+ high level steward in party with merc upkeep reduction makes mercenary crossbowmen negative upkeep.

 

[Syrus127]

Actually making money is not the problem, I just use smithing for that. Save and easy income, smith one thing, run an empire with the profits.
It's just that I'm disappointed with how bad trade is, and one of the main problems, in my opinion, is the low supply and demand of towns.

For example, I went around trading with a fast, small caravan of 7 people plus pack animals (using a mod that shows me the profits without the rumor-system) and made less than a quarter of the gold I'd make with one good smithing order in about 100x the time it takes me to finish that order. And with a bigger caravan I would not make any more profit, because I was already buying up/selling enough that the profit would go towards 0 for the last items sold.

If the overall amount of goods in trade were increased, it would allow for bigger caravans to transport more good for more profit.

 

[Bluko88]

By now I'm running a mod which allows me to see the profit I could make as well as doing away with the trade rumors and actually showing me how much I will make in all towns (around) for a trade good and even with all that, trade is not a very worthwhile or enjoyable option, compared to the much more predictable and steadier income of smithing (or taking out enemy parties and selling the loot).

Distances also don't matter as much, as trade goods are spread all over the place, not breaking the map into regions where such trade goods are produced. Regions should not produce all kinds of different trade goods but have more specific products instead, so that trade between these regions is more worthwhile. Maybe more trade goods would also be helpful for this.
(Not to mention trade caravans and workshops being horribly unprofitable as well, in most cases.)

Yeah if you try to level up Trade in vanilla to 300 without mods, you probably need to be committed to a ward. It's absolutely unbearable especially since horse trading (used to be profitable) is now extremely volatile and I don't understand how Noble mount value is determined.

Everything has a Price really isn't worth it either. You need several million denars to even hope to buy a Town. Though if a Lord has a lot of Castles you might be able to get 1 for like 500K. I supposed the prices are reasonable since you're effectively buying land here, but it's sooo much easier to take a Town/Castle by force.

You can make pretty decent money by remaining independent trading and simply running all caravans:

Some days I've gotten nearly 8K, so that ain't bad. Still think it's more profitable to just kill people, take their stuff, and level up Roguery though.

But I wouldn't even attempt a dedicated Trader without this mod now:

Caravans and Workshops give Exp

Grants the player daily Trade and/or Steward Exp (configurable) for Workshops and Caravans

www.nexusmods.com

Absolutely no reason why Caravans shouldn't at least give you Trade XP, since the freaking description in-game says it does.

Workshops are sort of okay since they are quite literally passive income. I'm not sure if making them like 25K was warranted though since profits are usually only about 150 a day. Silversmiths and Breweries seem to be way to go. All other workshops seem to inevitably run into supply issues, though I think Wool Weaveries do well. Caravan A.I. seems to eat up lots of some resources, but others it seems to ignore.

Regions should not produce all kinds of different trade goods but have more specific products instead, so that trade between these regions is more worthwhile.

Absolutely 100% agree. There's a couple goods that are region specific, but there's way too many crops grown all over the place. Every Kingdom should have a few resources that are unique to them. Only universal trade goods should be like Wheat/Fish, and even those should be more scarce in certain regions.

Also why is there no Bread in this game, and why do several goods have no Workshop Output? Think the game would be better if every trade good had at least one kind of Workshop Output so there's something besides Towns that can consume them and you can have a little more fun manipulating the markets.

 

[Syrus127]

Reminds me that having more control over workshops, like having an input supply that can be filled by the player, would also be a great addition.
Or being able to limit where your caravans trade, so they don't run into enemy territory...

In my current campaign I reverted to smithing for money. Trading is just too slow, workshops too unreliable, and I don't much like caravans.

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

The problem with trade is that it's just pure exchange using infinite fiat currency and no limits on anything. It's more capitalist than the modern world.

Trade should be extremely profitable, far more than anything else in the game, but the opportunities should be fairly uncommon. Factions should initiate trade deals for specific goods, trading anything else should be contraband. That would also give the gangs something to do, where smuggling is like the criminal equivalent to trading and the only way to sell off weapons for example.

The lack of a limit to currency is also really dumb. A completely unproductive city can imports goods infinitely because they just mine cryptodenars on the blockchain. Even something as simple as decrease in tax income or inflation if too much is imported would prevent the free trade bonanza that the game is currently. Ideally i would like to see coins an an actual item and not just a number on your screen.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

The problem with trade is that it's just pure exchange using infinite fiat currency and no limits on anything. It's more capitalist than the modern world.

Trade should be extremely profitable, far more than anything else in the game, but the opportunities should be fairly uncommon. Factions should initiate trade deals for specific goods, trading anything else should be contraband. That would also give the gangs something to do, where smuggling is like the criminal equivalent to trading and the only way to sell off weapons for example.

The lack of a limit to currency is also really dumb. A completely unproductive city can imports goods infinitely because they just mine cryptodenars on the blockchain. Even something as simple as decrease in tax income or inflation if too much is imported would prevent the free trade bonanza that the game is currently. Ideally i would like to see coins an an actual item and not just a number on your screen.

Imagine having almost all the gold in the game world and halting all trade and food supply movements and preventing wage payments for all the npc clans

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

Mansa Musa Moment

 

[Rabies]

Ideally i would like to see coins an an actual item and not just a number on your screen.

I would love to see this as well, but it would open a massive, massive can of worms as to how the game (and the player) would handle it.

If money is a physical thing that you have to carry around with you, then it has to have 'weight', just like any other item. That means there's a limit to how much you can carry at once, and a big risk involved in doing so (lose a battle: lose all your money).

From that follows a much greater need for the game to allow you to have a 'base' - somewhere to stash your money and other items, so that you're not carrying everything you own around with you at all times. That's fine if you're a landed Lord: you put it in your castle keep. But what if you're not? The game could give you the ability to buy property in a town - a house or a workshop - so that you could keep a stash/inventory there. It could also give you the ability to build a hideout? But then do you have to leave guards there to defend it? Does the game allow your stash to be robbed if it's not in a castle (or even if it is)? If so, how does that work?

Then you've got the issue of paying for things. Say you buy a workshop: when you first set it up, it might be losing money for a little while. So you have to leave enough coin there in order to keep it running while you're away - otherwise it'd just stop working. And if it's making a profit, you'd have to keep going back to it in order to collect the money so that you could then go and spend it elsewhere. And how do you pay party wages, or garrison wages? You'd have to carry enough coin with you (or goods that you could regularly cash in at market) in order to keep paying soldiers for every day that you're out on the road. You'd probably have to change a lot of the mechanics around this in order to make it work in a way that wasn't a massive pain the in arse to micro-manage.

Personally, I think it'd be a big improvement to the gameplay - give you lots of extra stuff to do. But it would change the face of the gameplay quite significantly, and presumably be a pretty big undertaking to implement? Might well not be to everyone's taste?

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

I don't think you have to add all that. The real issue I'm trying to tackle is that the game is obsessed with money, and you can buy or sell anything with cash, which turns the entire campaign into a slip'n'slide of infinite money with no material limits. I don't think levy recruitment, buildings or even troop upkeep should be paid using money at all. I think workshops are stupid too, they make no sense (hi i am buying your business, now pay me all your profits despite me never visiting).

Pretty much the only monetary flow I think makes sense in a game like this is personal purchases, trade, tribute and mercenaries. Everything else should be based on your social status. You would be unlikely to come into contact with large amounts of money without being a prolific trader or issuing tariffs on some lucrative trade route, and the main thing to spend that on would be mercenaries, diplomacy, or goods for trade or supply. That basically means only a King is going to have enough money to put in a treasury. I even think the game would be better without taxes as the default mode of power accumulation.

Currently you can make money without even thinking in so many different ways. It's so stupid that they implemented the worst tendency of all modern open world games by just making it a NYC homeless guy simulator where you collect junk to pawn en masse to undiscriminating shopkeepers. Even Fallout 4, by all means a game with similar jank to warband, had currency as an actual item which meant shopkeepers would easily run out, and it contributed to your carry weight. Just adding this as-is without any other supporting features would already make the game a bit more interesting.

 

[Rabies]

I don't think you have to add all that.

I think you do.

If money has a carry weight, then there is a hard cap on how much you can have. In the early game, that cap is going to be very low? How do you accumulate wealth beyond your carry capacity if you can't stash it somewhere? How does the game balance/limit your ability to recruit, maintain and upgrade troops if that process isn't based on money? What reward do you get from completing quests, if it's not money?

I agree that this change would make the game much more interesting, but wouldn't it also break lots of things unless you added a lot of additional mechanics to support it?

 

[Kentucky 『 ＨＥＩＧＵＩ 』 James]

If money has a carry weight, then there is a hard cap on how much you can have. In the early game, that cap is going to be very low? How do you accumulate wealth beyond your carry capacity if you can't stash it somewhere?

The early game shouldn't be about ammassing wealth is my point. Having a hard cap on how much money you can carry shouldn't really affect the early game at all, since even in the base game you barely ever spend more than a few hundred denars at a time.

I agree that this change would make the game much more interesting, but wouldn't it also break lots of things unless you added a lot of additional mechanics to support it?

The game will basically have to be broken in order to fix it. There is no way for taleworlds to tweak and balance their way out of the current game mechanics.