I suppose most of you already know about this but you know how you can run down Villagers and buy out their products, right? Can make a fair profit that way over time, and if you do, you tend to accumulate a lot of Old Work Horses, which are the cargo option of the peasantry and the only thing they carry when going home from the market. If you camp out near Phycaon, right next to your spawn point, you can easily kickstart your trader career by picking up your first cargo of super cheap Grain for not a lot of money, and also enough pack horses to get you on your feet as a trader. So I like Old Work Horses, they're generally the only cargo animal you'll wind up needing for a given campaign and they're very easy to source.
So let's talk about a situation I was in in my most recent run where I'd been doing this for awhile, but i'd let my army creep up in size and experience and the cost of wages for my troops were starting to eat me alive. So I decided to create a caravan, but I was a few hundred thousand denars short of actually being able to afford a stronger caravan, which at the time was 22k. So I could take the risk or I could do something "clever" to find a few extra hundred before my wages burned my reserves away.
There being no quests of any particular profit nearby I decided to look at my inventory and see what I could sell, but all I really had was my backup weapons and some pack horses. Not nearly enough to get the job done unless I sold my Cataphract Mace, which was not happening. The packhorses were worth like no money so even though I had a squillion of them, they wouldn't do either.
But wait.... what about...
I quickly dropped into the trade menu of the city where I'd stopped to build the caravan, checked the prices,did some math, and then went on a HORSE MURDERING SPREE. Blood flowed in the streets, the rivers ran red, it was like the plagues of egypt, and when I was done, and the blood of whole generations of faithful working beasts was on my hands, I had thousands of units of Meat, which I sold for not just the money I needed but a few extra K to cover possible shortfalls while the caravan got started.
Which kind of got me thinking.
Mostly it got me thinking about how animals should probably never be that much cheaper than the meat you can make out of them. And it also got me thinking that there was probably a secondary meat market from the Old Work Horses that I had been leaving untapped up to that point out of sheer inertia, and that it would probably have been even more profitable if I hadn't dumped all the meat on one market.
So there ya go. Like I said, it's a minor exploit, but it's there, it exists, and though the souls of millions of horses cry out in terror and are suddenly silenced, my purse is a bit fatter for it so I suppose it's all good.
So let's talk about a situation I was in in my most recent run where I'd been doing this for awhile, but i'd let my army creep up in size and experience and the cost of wages for my troops were starting to eat me alive. So I decided to create a caravan, but I was a few hundred thousand denars short of actually being able to afford a stronger caravan, which at the time was 22k. So I could take the risk or I could do something "clever" to find a few extra hundred before my wages burned my reserves away.
There being no quests of any particular profit nearby I decided to look at my inventory and see what I could sell, but all I really had was my backup weapons and some pack horses. Not nearly enough to get the job done unless I sold my Cataphract Mace, which was not happening. The packhorses were worth like no money so even though I had a squillion of them, they wouldn't do either.
But wait.... what about...
I quickly dropped into the trade menu of the city where I'd stopped to build the caravan, checked the prices,did some math, and then went on a HORSE MURDERING SPREE. Blood flowed in the streets, the rivers ran red, it was like the plagues of egypt, and when I was done, and the blood of whole generations of faithful working beasts was on my hands, I had thousands of units of Meat, which I sold for not just the money I needed but a few extra K to cover possible shortfalls while the caravan got started.
Which kind of got me thinking.
Mostly it got me thinking about how animals should probably never be that much cheaper than the meat you can make out of them. And it also got me thinking that there was probably a secondary meat market from the Old Work Horses that I had been leaving untapped up to that point out of sheer inertia, and that it would probably have been even more profitable if I hadn't dumped all the meat on one market.
So there ya go. Like I said, it's a minor exploit, but it's there, it exists, and though the souls of millions of horses cry out in terror and are suddenly silenced, my purse is a bit fatter for it so I suppose it's all good.
