Hello and welcome back to another Strat Gaming video guide. In this episode of The Ultimate Guide to Bannerlord, we are going take an in-depth look at the Trade skill: from how it works, to how we gain XP and finally how we can efficiently level it. And if you stick around until the end of the video, I’ll show you my favorite trading strategy for bringing down any town – the hostile trader! I’m your host Strat and I make Mount & Blade 2 Bannerlord guides for YouTube so if you like that sort of content, I highly recommend subscribing so you don’t miss any future guides.
I’ve broken this video up into several chapters so if you’re following along you’ll be able to easily navigate through relevant segments. Check down in the description below for the time stamps. With all that being said, I hope you enjoy this guide and let’s get started!
Money can’t buy happiness, they say. But it can buy me an army, feed them and expand my kingdom – which actually makes me quite happy. And of all the ways we can earn money in Bannerlord, Trade is one of the most consistent. The premise is simple – buy low, sell high. However, like any economy in real life, the economy of Calradia is surprisingly complex.
When we buy or sell anything from a town or village, denars are exchanged for the item PLUS a trade penalty. How much this penalty is is determined by several factors: our trade level, what category of item we are trading and if we have any perks that modify it. The only way to gain XP for trade that I could find was to buy an item and then sell it for more: 1XP for every 2 denars profit. *penalty reduction didn’t effect this, so it’s the BASE profit before modifiers.
If we go by only what’s on the character screen, we can see that each level of trade earns us a trade penalty reduction of 0.2% per level. At level 100, the reduction is 20% and all the way up to 60% at 300. However, there’s a lot more going on behind the scenes that determines how these reductions actually translate in the game. I ran several tests to determine how the math works and it seems the TaleWorlds Blackbox is stronger than ever with Trade!
To start, I took the most expensive item I could get and compared the buy & sell price of that item at different levels. At level 1, selling the armor to the town would earn us 99542 Denars and if we bought it right back it would cost us 269759. This means that these greedy bastards hit us with a 171% markup on equipment at level 1. At level 300, the prices changed to 128869 & 264063 respectively. The markup is now reduced to 105%. Taking the difference, our 60% trade reduction reduces the markup from 171 down to 105, or a drop of 66 points. Keep in mind, this number represents both the buy and sell side as well as the shop’s profit margin. I repeated the same process with another armor piece and it produced the exact same percent difference. I then took one item from several different categories to compare. For trade goods, the markup at level 1 was 31.4% and 26% at 300. For mounts, 14.3% at level 1 and 9.48% at 300. Livestock is lumped together with goods, so their markup is the same.
So how can we use this information to our benefit? The markup for equipment is massive, so buying gear from one town to sell in another is not a viable strategy. Trading in goods is viable with a reasonable markup, but mounts have the lowest markup overall and as we will see later, they are the most profitable to trade with.
I wasn’t quite satisfied after collecting the previous data, so I decided to look closer at each side of the transaction.
Using the same helmet from the previous test, we looked at the buy and sell side separately. For the buying side: at level 1 the cost was 12254 which went down to 11995 at level 300. We can see a MASSIVE discount in the purchase price of 2.11%. [laugh track] I ran the same test with velvet, a horse and livestock which produced very similar results: everything was around the same 2% discount range. Next I repeated the process, but for the selling side of the transaction. Equipment was drastically different, with a nearly 30% increase in sell price between level 1 and 300. However, all of the other items were again in the 2% range. On face value, it would seem that leveling trade wouldn’t be worth our time – but let’s double check to make sure.
Let’s say we buy grapes for 10 denars in one town and sell it for 15 denars in another, earning a gross profit of 5 denars. Let’s start at level 1 with 1M denars to invest. We can buy 100,000 grapes for 1M and sell them for 1.5M, earning a profit of 500,000 denars. At level 300, we are able to get a 2% discount on the purchase, or 9.8 each, allowing us to buy an extra 2,040 grapes. When we go to sell, we get an extra 2% more from the level 1 price, which would come to 15.3 each, for a grand total of 1,561,212 denars. This translates to a 12.2% increase in profit for the same transaction. And because these are percentage based, they will move with the sliding price scale when we trade in huge quantities.
Finally, I ran a few more tests to see if some of the perks made any appreciable difference. Using all of the same items as before, we can see the level 25 trade perk Appraiser gives an 8% increase in the sell price at level 300. The level 25 trade perk Whole Seller gives a 0.55% increase in sell price at level 300. (Quick note here, at lower levels, this increase was greater, which means TaleWorlds does NOT apply the reduction additively. Some buffs are, some aren’t – it all seems very haphazard!) When deciding between which perk to take, consider this – In order to benefit more from Whole Seller, you would need to sell 16x more volume of trade goods than equipment to reach the break even point. Also remember that trade reduction to equipment sales is 30% and only 2% for trade goods. The choice is yours. [picture of shitty car & best car]. The level 75 riding perk Filled to Brim reduced the buying price by 0.34% and selling price by 0.37% for mounts at level 300. The level 75 trade perk Local Connection increased the selling price of livestock by 3.62% at level 300.
There was a ton of info there, so let’s look at the key take-aways:
- You can expect a 12% increase in net profit for non-equipment trade goods from level 1 to level 300.
- You can expect a 30% increase in net profit from selling equipment loot from battles from level 1 to 300.
- Of the non-equipment trade goods in the game, mounts will provide the highest margin.
- Most perks are inconsequential – but don’t ever take Whole Seller unless you plan to avoid ALL fighting in your playthrough.
Now that we have some idea of how the trade skill functions, let’s look at how the wider economy of Calradia works so that we might exploit it to our advantage.
To be able to purchase trade goods, they must first be produced. All trade goods are either made in a village or a town. There are 17 different basic trade goods that can only be generated in villages. Everything else is produced in the workshops of a town. Once these good are produced, they are delivered to the nearest town of that owner’s kingdom. The buy & sell price of each good will fluctuate depending on the volume of that good in the town. If there is a large stock, the price will be very low to buy & sell. If they have a small stock, the price will be very high to either buy or sell. Merchant caravans travel the map and move goods from high density areas to lower density areas for a profit. However, there are only so many caravans going around and they can’t be everywhere they are needed, leaving plenty of room for us to swoop in. Let’s identify parts of the map that produce a certain good in excess and then move it to another part of the map that doesn’t have any production of that good.
I’ve catalogued the production of each village into a database so we can quickly and easily determine where our best opportunities for profit will come from. Let’s take grapes as an example: We can see that Grapes are only produced in 3 factions – Vlandia, Battania & the western Empire. They are all located in the north and west of the map, so it’s safe to say the south east of the map should more often than not be lacking in these good. This won’t always be the case because caravans do deliver from time to time, but if we average the number of times a town is depleted of Grapes, it’s much more frequent in Aserai and Khuzait lands since they are the furthest away. Some other examples of this are: Fur being produced in the north by Sturgia, Vlandia & Battania but nowhere else. Olives being produced in Aserai, Vlandia & western Empire and nowhere else. Cows produced in Sturgia, Northern empire and Khuzait but nowhere else. The best of all, Dates: 8 villages in Aserai and only 1 in the Western Empire, but nowhere else. For items that are produced in a workshop, the same logic applies – wine will be cheapest where grapes are present, beer where grain is plentiful and so on.
Mounts are unique in that every factions produces their own type and each trades within a different price range. They can be broken up into 3 categories: pack animals, tier 1 mounts and tier 2 mounts. The pricing is determined by the stock of the category as a whole, as opposed to the individual horse. If we have 3 kinds of tier 1 horses and try to sell them, the sell price of ALL tier 1 horses will decrease regardless of which one we are selling. I traveled to each city on the map and tracked the min buy price and max sell price of each animal to get a range of what each would sell for. Looking at the data, there are some interesting points to make:
- Battania has the cheapest horses at 109, so buy from there for cavalry upgrades and campaign map speed increase for mounted infantry.
- Empire has the cheapest Tier 2 horses at 279, so buy from there for higher tier cavalry upgrades.
- Pack animals are nearly identical, so buy whatever is cheapest.
- When buying mounts to sell for profit, it’s best to buy the one with the widest profit margin – which would be the desert horse and aserai horse.
- Also keep in mind that pricing will fluctuate in each playthrough, so my listed prices will most likely differ from yours. The prices relative to each other should hold constant though – Desert horses and Aserai horses will always be more expensive than the others, etc.
One final note about the economy as a whole – since scarcity drives prices up and abundance down, it would make sense that the more rare an item is the easier it will be to find a profit by selling it. Looking at all villages combined, we can see that Grain is the most produced item in the game at 44 villages while Hogs are the least at 8. This is not to say that you can’t make money trading grain, but that the opportunities will be less plentiful because there is so much of it around the map. To drive home this point, I let the game run for 1 full year and then went to every settlement on the map without unpausing and bought every single trading good available. Here are the stats from that:
- Rough cost to buy everything – 1.7M Denars
- Grain is nearly 3x more plentiful than anything else on the map.
- Beer is the most produced workshop good and firmly in the top 6 of everything.
- You can trade more volume with raw goods, especially food.
- You will earn a higher net margin per item with workshop produced goods, but much less volume.
In order to put the knowledge to good use, I ran many different experiments to see what method would work the best. Each run lasted 21 days:
I bought only the cheapest grapes I could find and sold them in the south for the most profit, making a measly 7731.
I did the same thing with sheep, making close to double at 12511.
With fur, I got it up to 16241.
I tried all the different horses, but most were a flop – except of course the desert and Aserai horses, which yielded anywhere from 57k to 71k depending on where I sold them.
I then went town to town buying only the items I could get for 50% below average or less and selling them until it turned green – bringing in 55k on average.
However, the best results came from combining each of these strategies together – focusing on horses from Aserai lands as the backbone, buying and selling goods at each town along the way and targeting areas that have either high production of one specific item or a complete lack of production of that item. By doing this, profits for that same 21-day period could nearly be doubled.
In the early game, trading can be very rough because you have no troops, no money and no inventory capacity. We could try to grind our way up by trading workshop goods like jewelry or velvet, but my personal opinion is that there are far better ways to get established. A couple of my favorite are smithing, tournaments or completing high value missions. I’ve gone over these in previous guides, so I will leave links in the description if you’re interested in seeing how they work. Once we have a full party and about 8-10k denars saved up we are ready for the next stage.
We start off the mid game by going to the nearest town. My personal process is to look at horses first and then trade goods next. If sumpter horses or mules are around 40, we will buy them up until we start getting a herd penalty. If we are in Aserai lands then we can look at desert horses if they are around 200 or less and Aserai horses for 750 or less. Next, we look at the trade goods starting from the bottom of the list and work our way up. The reason we do this is because there is higher margin per item on the workshop goods. We are looking for anything at 50% or less than the average price. Don’t be afraid to go a little over weight capacity as the penalty isn’t very much until you start getting way overburdened. If we are not in Aserai lands, then we head to the next town that is on the way there. If we are already in Aserai, then either continue to fill up on horses or start working out way up to Vlandia, stopping at every town along the way. The next town we stop in, we repeat the same process buying all the cheapest goods. Next, we look at our own inventory and sell off anything that can earn at least an average sale price or higher. Red is best, yellow is acceptable, green is when we stop. The premise here is that we buy for 50% less than average and sell for at least average, maintaining close to a 50% gross margin. Finally for the horses, I like to get at least 100 for sumpter and mules, 300 for desert horses and 1300 for Aserai horses.
Late game starts when you get so bored doing trading runs that you want to start a new playthrough. Joking aside, if you want to continue and hit the final perk allowing you to buy settlements, more power to you. If you plan on having a normal playthrough, then I suggest transitioning out of the mid game when you have level 125 trade artisan community so you can pile up the renown quickly. For the late game, I like to use about half of the inventory for cheap food and the rest for other goods. The food is great to have for several reasons: You can focus on leading your army rather than starving your troops, recently conquered towns need a ton of resources so it’s an easy way to make money and level up and finally if other troops in your army run out of food, you can donate to them earning a fair bit of influence. You can keep an eye out for towns under siege and rush there, but my preferred method is to take the siege to the town – that way we expand our empire AND level up trade at the same time.
We are nearing the end of the video and as promised, I’m going to show you one of my favorite strategies for weakening any town in Calradia: the Hostile Trader. To start, we will need a significant amount of money – usually in the 1.5M to 2M range should be sufficient. We can target any town, but my preference is to target cities that are on the edge of a conflict zone and their attached villages are being raided. Our goal is to starve the city out by constantly buying all trade goods, so if the food production of the city is already hampered due to raiding and recent sieges then it speeds the process up significantly. Go to town, wait for a full day and carefully watch when the numbers of the town at the top of the screen update, usually twice per day. Next, we wait in town until just before those times and pause, buy everything on the goods page and then wait again. Repeat this process until the town is at 0 food and a daily deficit. This will not only harm the prosperity of the town, but can reduce the garrison and militia. I’ve gotten towns down from 400+ troops to less than 200 before using this method, making for an easy target to quickly siege. If you need to level your trade skill, you can sell back all green items to the city and rebuy them. On average, I was able to sell 25k worth of goods, which I immediately bought back for 27k and earned 2579XP for trade. It’s time consuming, but so is running around the map trading. At least with this method you can take the town easily when you’re done!
I want to thank you all for watching another Strat Gaming video guide. If you like this video please give it a like and subscribe. The likes really help out the video with the YouTube algorithm and a small channel like this one needs all the help it can get! Let me know in the comment section below what kind of guide you would like to see in the future. Up next we will be doing a complete guide on the intelligence skills, so stay tuned! Thanks again for watching and as always… I’ll see you… on the next one. Take care!
