NOT Happy >:(

[imgran]

Oh and -- for a rapid infusion of horseflesh at a (usually) reasonable price, find a village that farms Grain, follow its villagers to town, and talk to them before they gets there. They'll usually sell grain at a below market price and they'll also often sell the horses they were using to carry the grain to market. We're talking between 50 and 100 units of Grain and somewhere around 9-15 horses at a time. My personal favorite city to do this on is Phyacon, which has 2 grain villages and thus can often boast ludicrously low grain prices. In fact I often start my trade runs at Phyacon for that exact reason, grain is a great low cost high volume good to get started with if you know where to sell it. Which if you're buying in Phyacon, is usually Poros, at least until you've saturated the market.

There's a nice salt route near there too from Vostrum and a good balanced variety of food in the nearby cities to get your Stewardship up. No reason not to start you r trade runs ar Phyacon really, but that's just IMHO..

 

[HeisenbergAoE]

I do wonder if the commodity prices in the markets are reported to be cheaper or costlier than average means some hard coded average or takes into account the fluctuating (and indeed inflating) market prices.

I noticed that at the beginning of the game you can find stuff to buy and sell between towns that are somewhat far away from each other, but as the game progresses most items become marked as above the average price - which doesn't mean that you can't make profit, but you'd have to work harder.

Another more concerning issue for you as a player is that you're competing with caravans, including your own. The more traversal of goods there is, the faster prices of goods become universally fixed and there's less money to be had by buying and selling. In a real world market that would be good news for manufacturing (workshops) since there's always access to buyers and sellers (consumers and raw materials) and so the market would respond with more and more production (hence economic growth) which would require more and more traders to be moving around.

Alas, the game cannot simulate a real world economy that way since there are too many complex variables to consider and to simulate. One issue in particular is that it's unclear whether or not the world Denars has a fixed source or is it generated dynamically with no "sinks" - that also results in inflation (hence the problem with fiat currency). It would have been nice for instance to tie Denars to silver ore - basically towns take silver ore from the market and dump Denars back into it and thus the production of currency does not arbitrarily grow. Still... other aspects of the game's currency remain fixed like wages, cost of setting up things, item prices which again causes issues for the player (money becomes either too available or too inaccessible).

To make a real trading sim would probably require far more than what's reasonable in a sandbox medieval war game.

 

[Gernia]

They changed the income you get from looter bands. Earlier you earned 200 +/- for bands of 9+. Now you earn 50+ for >10, 100 +/- for 20 and maybe 200 for 30 to 50. Take the number with a grain of salt, as they vary.

The grind is insane, so you should keep your daily expenses around 80 if you want to make it. Army speed is also a must, get a horse for every infantry you have plus some packmules. That is just for keeping you afloat, to actually have some surplus after a week, you need to constantly do quests.

Trading at this point can get you going, but it is the worst grind out of all of them to make it work, and you need pre-learned traderoutes.

 

[Odione]

Biggest problem is they daily cost of the army. When you do a quest that gives you 400 gold for example it's just pointless. It cost you more to travel to the waypoint. But hey thats great right? No need to patch that! It's pointless to raid... so many quests are pointless with the daily cost right now...

 

[Schoulayer]

I feel you, OP. I don't know why they want making a profit to be so difficult. They nerfed workshops into oblivion. Caravans can be decent when they really get going, but it's a long grind to buy them, and even then, it just doesn't seem like enough. When I assign one of my companions to create a second army, I start losing money fast. Why is that? If I can manage the cost of my own army, then my companion should be able to manage the cost of their own army -- or at least not go hundreds into the negative! It's like everything I want to do is severely restricted by denars, and that is just not fun.

They give us a lot of difficulty options so that we can play the way we want. They have different difficulty settings for combat and movement speed. They allow players to decide whether their companions can be killed or not. Yet when it comes to denars, there is only one difficulty setting - maximum. Why is that?

I am the type that would want to play on the hardest difficulty setting when it comes to combat - but when it comes to grinding denars, I'll take the "easy" path. In Warband we were able to acquire money much faster and sustaining an army was not this difficult. I don't want to be a merchant. I don't want 99% of my time to revolve around denars. I want to engage in army vs army battles and sieges. This endless grind for denars is getting in the way of that.

 

[Gernia]

Yeah, you need to do the right quests. Army of poachers, I need help with random bandits. Gang leader needs weapons and the find my daughter quests.

 

[Madthorn]

This is going to sound crazy but it's also going to save your run.

Your overhead is killing you. You're going to have to downsize.

Cut your band in half, dismissing your most experienced units. Until you're ready to play mercenary there's no reason to have more than about 25 soldiers.

Then when you're able to move a bit faster, capture Mountain Bandits and hire the horse riding bandits from those parties, Highwaymen and Raiders IIRC, to replace your soldiers 1-2 at a time. Those things are ridiculous, they're very fast on the overmap and fight like horse archers so they'll literally run rings around Looters. and having a force of them will guarantee that you can outrun anything you can't outgun. Your band will be puny, it'll take a lot of hard work to get even 10-15 together, but you'll see the difference in overmap speed almost immediately.

Even if you don't dare dismiss everything but the Highwaymen they'll still bring your average party speed up just by existing. It's weird but it works. If you're very careful that'll get you to a place where you can start filling your ranks with Khuzaits. A Khuzait based caravan build is frankly OP, if you don't bother with the infantry. Expensive to equip, but OP

Best part is that the non horse riding Mountain Bandits, Hillmen and Brigands, can be trained up into horse archers without the Disciplinarian perk. Until I'm ready to go big, I nearly always recruit my caravans from Mountain Bandits. Even better, their early level Hideouts aren't that difficult to take, yielding tasty recruitable horse archers without having to knock them off a horse first

Thank you for your post. Good stuff. I'll try some of that.
I did downsize and started to make a come back. Its meager and not as much fun as my first two play throughs, but I can live at least. Can't upgrade equipement or anything, but maybe if i keep grinding. Ill look for Mountain Bandits now. Appreciate the advice.

 

[Madthorn]

Oh and -- for a rapid infusion of horseflesh at a (usually) reasonable price, find a village that farms Grain, follow its villagers to town, and talk to them before they gets there. They'll usually sell grain at a below market price and they'll also often sell the horses they were using to carry the grain to market. We're talking between 50 and 100 units of Grain and somewhere around 9-15 horses at a time. My personal favorite city to do this on is Phyacon, which has 2 grain villages and thus can often boast ludicrously low grain prices. In fact I often start my trade runs at Phyacon for that exact reason, grain is a great low cost high volume good to get started with if you know where to sell it. Which if you're buying in Phyacon, is usually Poros, at least until you've saturated the market.

There's a nice salt route near there too from Vostrum and a good balanced variety of food in the nearby cities to get your Stewardship up. No reason not to start you r trade runs ar Phyacon really, but that's just IMHO..

Nice! thanks again

 

[Madthorn]

I feel you, OP. I don't know why they want making a profit to be so difficult. They nerfed workshops into oblivion. Caravans can be decent when they really get going, but it's a long grind to buy them, and even then, it just doesn't seem like enough. When I assign one of my companions to create a second army, I start losing money fast. Why is that? If I can manage the cost of my own army, then my companion should be able to manage the cost of their own army -- or at least not go hundreds into the negative! It's like everything I want to do is severely restricted by denars, and that is just not fun.

They give us a lot of difficulty options so that we can play the way we want. They have different difficulty settings for combat and movement speed. They allow players to decide whether their companions can be killed or not. Yet when it comes to denars, there is only one difficulty setting - maximum. Why is that?

I am the type that would want to play on the hardest difficulty setting when it comes to combat - but when it comes to grinding denars, I'll take the "easy" path. In Warband we were able to acquire money much faster and sustaining an army was not this difficult. I don't want to be a merchant. I don't want 99% of my time to revolve around denars. I want to engage in army vs army battles and sieges. This endless grind for denars is getting in the way of that.

Agreed

 

[Askorti]

Step 1: Buy lots of grain and fish for less than 11-12 denar each. If you don't know how, use your brain.
Step 2: Find a city that is being besieged/recently changed hands and check how much food it has.
Step 3: ????
Step 4: Profit.

This is literally all it takes to make some super easy money. Is it the fastest way? Probably not. But it's easy, it's simple, and it doesn't require a particularly big investment.

 

[mangalore]

Since last patch, I cannot for the life of me gain enough money to sustain my small troop (42) ....

Are your troops all high tier? Because in my current game I am scratching 70 and beside some speed issue because most are imperial infantry make plenty money on trade runs, have all the wages covered by workshops and catch the occasional bandit group (only bother with 25+) despite not having optimized for speed, yet. Most of my troops are trained up as well, just not elite. My main focus being that the infantry at least gets a shield to not be easy prey against arrows.

Yes, it is slower than before, but not really that much.

 

[danEN]

Attack a minor faction, gain money and horses from killing them.

 

[Jhaerik]

Bannerlord in a nutshell.
Run around with 18-20 un-upgraded troops at most in the early game and some horses/camels for trading until you get enough money to marry a rich chick. Think it's like 4-5k. Marry her, sell her armor for a few hundred thousand and stick her somewhere you never look at again because she's pointless as children are pointless. Use that money to buy companions/caravans/troops or some workshops if you want.

Bam you never care about money again. Trading is useless after that first bit of money. You'll make more money sitting in a town watching Youtube grinding smithing than you will trading at that point.

Again, as I've said many times now, it's a boring gameplay loop.

 

[Schmutz]

12 horses for a 42 heads band? Sounds to me like you just manage well.

But I'll take your words for it; I'll start a new game.

What are you guys even doing? I had literally hundreds upon hundreds of horses after a few hours. I guess slaughtering the vlandian scum pays off, or maybe it was bugged in the beginning...

 

[Jhaerik]

What are you guys even doing? I had literally hundreds upon hundreds of horses after a few hours. I guess slaughtering the vlandian scum pays off, or maybe it was bugged in the beginning...

They reduced the amount of horses you get by like 2/3 or 3/4 or something a patch or two ago.

 

[Schmutz]

They reduced the amount of horses you get by like 2/3 or 3/4 or something a patch or two ago.

Aaaah, ok. Good change, makes sense.

 

[Ananda_The_Destroyer]

I just get 1 companion and murder and smelt until I have 20k and get caravan, then I start building a force once the daily profit kick in. I surplus steepe horse when they're cheap to make mounted dudes later.
I do feel somethings up with speed though. Some steppe bandits with a bigger party then me where running around at 7.9 speed in the snow.
I hadn't seen steppes be faster then me unless I was significantly bigger then them before. My parties all mounted too with Mongolian heritage bonus (that probably isn't really in the game files... but whatever).

 

[Dabos37]

I had a lot of difficulties to get money until I made an Excel tablet with a lot of products to know how much I should pay at maximum and how much I should get when selling. For example, I do not pay more than 15 for Olives while I do not sell It by less than 25 (sometimes you can do exceptions). Plus I know the places where I should buy some products a good price while where I can sell them.

Now I have 300k, 2 workshops and 2 caravans and getting 1500-2000 gold per day.

 

[High chief Kieran]

i have one save i had from the beginning and a smaller new save with every patch. so i restarted a few times now.
usually i gather an small force of 20 men, i use those men to protect me while i trade. i get hardwood in the north and sell it in the south. the most important thing to remember is that the price changes after you sell a few, so you should sell everything of one item in one go, do not use the small arrow to sell.
on my way from north to south i stop at every city to play baghchal (or however you write it) and tablut. and attack as much looters as i can to get prisoners and loot to sell.
i do this untill i have enough for a workshop.

 

[Ragemaster9999]

They buffed the mercenary payouts in the last patch or so. The natural progression is indepedant, join as merc oin as vassal and finally create kingdom.