After a ten in game year run as a caravaner, I am now confident that I understand how raising the trade skill and its mechanics work. Using this guide, I believe it’s possible to get your first settlement without the need to join an existing kingdom, or risk going at war with a minor faction, just to get your first settlement.
There’s an important distinction that needs to be made between trading for profit, and trading for skill gain.
Trading for profit, is something you’re likely already doing, buy low sell high.
Trading for skill, is using the mechanics of the game, for the trade skill, specifically to increase the skill.
I’ll be breaking this information into sections.
- General Tips for Trading
- Tips on trading for profit.
- Tips on trading for skill gain.
- Building your trade for profit.
- Starting your trade for skill.
- Ending trade for skill (AKA BUY ALL THE THINGS!).
I’d also like to note that this is not a guide that includes any exploits (that I’m aware of), this is pure game mechanics as of this posting.
General Tips for Trading.
- BEFORE purchasing goods from a city, make sure you purchase from the villages tied to the city. (Hover the mouse over the city to see the list) This is because if you purchase all of a single good from a city first, it drives up the purchase price of the surrounding villages. Thus lowering your total profit.
- ALWAYS buy mules. The only exception is early on in your early caravanning (see before you have 100k-200k set aside).
- NEVER sell mules. For the last section of this walk through you will need EVERY POSSIBLE mule. Just trust me for now.
- In this, “goods” will refer to any consumable you can purchase. This includes horses, mules, foods, “craftable” items (wood, iron, silver, wool…etc), jewelry and livestock.
- In this, “purchase table” just refers to how the game tracks the purchase price of a good in your current session. Mainly because I don’t know what it’s actually called and I just made something up that sounds good. K? K.
- Set your character to the quartermaster of the clan. This will raise your steward skill while you’re running around the world trading. Really all you need is a variety of food and livestock in your inventory and to fight small time NPCs occasionally. (It gives a boost to moral, which helps with skill gain.)
- Get a spouse early on. Helps with the main quest, also gives you SPAWNLINGS.
- Gather your companions and a caravan going when you can afford it. I’d suggest having around 20k-30k saved before you send one out as it can take some time for the money to generate funds to equalize your daily income.
- WATCH YOUR CARAVAN(s)! I went from 300k down to ~50k in a short time because my caravan was captured and I didn’t catch it, despite trading for profit. You CAN lose it all if you don’t make sure your caravan(s) are at lease turning a ‘0’ profit every day. No change is better than losing funds, and even a small loss is acceptable in some cases.
- Starting out you should have around 20 troops, any kind it really doesn’t matter.
- As your income grows (and your daily income as well) you should seek to shift to 50 troops, all calvery (for map travel speed). In my play through, there were several areas at the edges of the map that were riddled with large numbers and groups of bandits. I found that if you get enough 10-15 groups of any bandit NPC in a close enough proximity to you, they will think they can take you if you have below 50 troops.
General Tips on Trading for Profit.
- Maintain a list of the prices that you were able to find a good at its lowest price. There are a lot of goods, and a lot of time you may forget just what a good price for, let’s say, velvet is.
- When able, try to keep your selling price around double your purchase price. (This doesn’t apply so much in the last section, and can vary when first starting out based on your funds.)
- FISH! There are a lot of places that want fish, and not many that sell it. I’ve seen fish sell between 10-18 in one area, but most places will want to buy it from 20 -30 each.
- Generally speaking, I don’t trade with caravans. There are a scant few who will give the trade option to buy individual items (as opposed to just buying all the things at once), and I didn’t see that buying from them was profitable.
General Tips on Trading for Skill.
- As a reminder, the skill mechanic (at least as of the time of this writing) resets your recent purchase table when you load any save. So to get the best out of trading for skill, you either need to have already been trading during the active session of play (make sure to track your purchase prices for goods), or start working on building the purchase table.
- In this portion, trading skill profit trumps actual profit. You should have 100k-300k saved up. There are conditions where buying higher than normal can work in your favor later. This is covered later.
- When any good is sold for profit that count towards skill gain, in your inventory the sale number will be a BRIGHT green. I would suggest sticking to selling for x2 your purchase price, but some profit is better than no profit.
- From what I can tell, the mechanic for trade skill works like this. Let’s say you buy 100 hardwood for 13 each. You sell all of that hardwood for 40 each. Unless I’m bad at math (very possible) that should mean you have a profit of 2,700 toward the trade skill.
- (Sell Price – Buy price X # Of Goods = trade skill increase)
- THIS ONLY COUNTS IF THE BUY PRICE IS ON YOUR CURRENT PLAY SESSION.
- Maintain a list of the prices of the goods you’ve purchased during THIS SESSION. If building your purchase table after loading, you can reference the trading for profit table you’ve built to make sure that you’re not buying something way overpriced.
- Let’s assume you have 3k grain that you’ve purchased at 10 each previously. If you find grain that is selling for 8, buy it even if it’s only 1. Purchasing any amount of a good at <price> resets the profit price for all of the goods you currently have.
- If you sell all of a single good that’s on your list for the purchase table, I suggest removing your noted price on the current session list. You’re not often going to find grain for sale at 8, for example. So if you sell all of your grain, then find it somewhere else at 11, buy it. You will likely find it for 10 later.
- Trading for Skill includes (when you have above about 100k) buying a new good for an over marked price. Jewelry is a good example. I’ve seen jewelry sell from 400 to 600. If you’re (re?)building your purchase table, you could buy something like 10 jewelry well overpriced, find a place that sells 1 for 300. This sets your purchase table for all of your jewelry to 300. Later you can find somewhere that is buying for 900, netting you 600 in profit that goes towards your skill gain.
- When buying from a village, instead of paying with coin, you can trade goods (reference your purchase table) that the village wants. Try to stick with the x2 buy to sale ratio when you can, but less is acceptable. The benefit is twofold here. 1: you can get all of the coin that the village has. 2: trading this way counts towards raising your trade skill.
- This trading method works great, until you start getting around 170-200 (kind of a guess on my part as I didn’t realize myself until 205) level in the trade skill. You’ll start seeing your skill gains become less frequent (because you need have a higher amount of total profit to reach the next level). And then…..
BUY ALL THE THINGS™!
BEFORE you proceed into this section, make sure that you have the following. You will need
ALL of it.
-400-500k in coins
-Every donkey possible (
you can’t have enough, I had around 1.5k and still maxed my inventory)
-One working caravan (
read, at LEAST one)
The problem when you reach around 170-200 in trading skill, is that the profit margin needed to reach the next level starts to creep over 10k. At this point, at least for me, this became a burden AND most of the regional economy was stable. AKA, there were a lot of even prices for goods in several regions, and not many places to make a profit. So there is one solution to help improve the amount of skill gained to accommodate the new gap in experienced needed for the higher levels.
BUY
ALL
THE
THINGS
The concept is simple, purchase all the things (
see GOODS) from a cities (
or castles) villages, then buy everything from the city. Remember that buying from a city raises the prices in the village, so buy from the villages first.
Buy all of the goods. Literally. Your goal is to crash the economy of an area by having everything. With around 1.5k donkies I had near 200k storage capacity, and it STILL WASN’T ENOUGH. (
Mind, I didn’t start buying all of the donkies until AFTER I lost all of my coin the first time, so you can possibly get way more goods than I. I stand by my statement, however.)
Once you’re at your max capacity, go to a CITY you haven’t followed the BUY ALL THE THINGS™ method, and sell everything you that’s marked as a profit. Remember, profit towards the trade skill of goods in your inventory the sale number will be a
BRIGHT green.
Earlier I mentioned trying to keep a x2 buy to sell profit margin. FORGET IT. As long as your sale is bright green, it counts.
Repeat until you have the trade skill required to purchase a settlement. Which I believe is 225, but I could miss remember.
With your trade skill ready, buy a settlement (
from anyone with the right amount of coin, so take your pick), then finish the banner quest in any way you see fit. I’d suggest stowing a good portion of your goods into the settlements stash. If nothing else it gives you room to buy more things later.
At this point you should have:
- A lot of monies
- A lot of donkies
- A lot of horses
- A lot of food stuffs (good for sieging later in the game)
- A spouse and around TEN MILLION children
- 50-ish calvery (possible at max rank)
- Your own kingdom and your own settlement
- NOT at war with any faction
- The rest of your dynasty and the game to handle.
