You can still make a decent income, but the initial capital required is a lot higher (you need a greater volume per run to make a good profit for the time spent, which means you need more gold to not only buy the higher initial quantity of goods, but also more pack animals).
So you are saying exactly what my point was. 10-20 hours of playing just to make the money to get the pack animals now so you can buy more in higher quantity. Then selling This quantity was nerfed as well. So now you are selling to 3-4 towns to turn a smaller profit which means 3-4 times the time for sales. This also means even more time because the profit is now 30% less overall even with the extra invested time.
I am in agreement that being able to make stupid amounts of money quickly after a certain point was a bit off. However what I am saying is that to slow the snowball effects of the late game, they nerfed the early part of the game. Instead of fixing the snowball they simply added grind to achieve it. Grinding is never fun.
They needed to use a scalpel. they used a nuke.
In the end it is not the developer or programmers job to stop someone from exploiting every flaw in a single player game. As a player you are only hurting yourself and ruining your own enjoyment when you do this. However providing a fun game that is reasonably balanced is the answer and let the modders take it from there.
This is not an easy goal. However I do have faith eventually they will crack it.
Raising the prices of cities was needed a bit. Let us look at it this way.
15k for a workshop. return 10-200 per day.
15k for caravan. return 500-2k per day with risk of 0 at any time.
1.5 million for a castle. return of 4-6k per day - garrison expenses averaging out to 1-2k profit
3 million for city. return of 6-8k per day - garrison averaging out to 1.5-4k per day.
Looking at the above numbers, return on investment is horrid for workshops. 50% of caravan profit tiered for trade skill of person running it would be logical. Castle and city income is not making sense. If it were to be changed to 10% of current incomes and the prices were changed to 1/2 of what they now are it would be much more logically in line with caravan and workshop numbers. Troop costs as well would need a roughly 50% reduction in per day costs.
For balance and coding reasons I understand the current system. But paying troops and receiving taxes done on a weekly or monthly basis would be considerably more logical. Gaining profit from caravan would make more sense if say one day per week your caravan reported to you to meet them at the city in which you started it to collect your profits or pay the bills. Workshops hold the money until you check in on them. They give you a report as to what resources cost and why they made said profit or loss. All of this was done in warband in the simpler form of weekly budget reports.