Help:Trade
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Basics
The trade system rests on two pillars: Warehouses and Caravans. In its
basics, it is incredibly simple: Warehouses store goods in a region,
Caravans allow goods to be moved anywhere.
Caravans
Caravans are a paraphernalia, but don't require soldiers to operate (they
bring their own men). As such, it is absolutely feasable to be a peaceful
trader with no unit attached.
Owning at least one caravan will allow you to buy and sell goods. Trading
itself is easy: Buy a few caravans, buy some goods somewhere, travel
somewhere else, sell goods, repeat. Of course, profitable trading
is much more difficult.
Once you own at least one caravan, you can go to the Actions page to do
some trading.
Warehouses
The other part of the trading system are warehouses. Each region has a
warehouse where the various goods are stored. Of course, in most regions
this will not really be a single physical building, but a multitude of
grain stores, warehouses, storages, etc.
The warehouse is what traders deal with. They buy and sell at the local
warehouses, which are controlled by the realm rulers and/or region
commanders, who set the buy and sell prices. There are realm-wide default
prices set by the ruler, but individual regions can have different
prices.
Warehouses have unlimited storage capacity, but require a bit of upkeep to
keep running, and this upkeep depends on the total amount of goods stored
and will be substracted from the regions tax income. Therefore, it does
not make economic sense to store too much of a surplus.
Each warehouse also has ox carts that it usually uses to move goods to and
from the markets, or from the production places (mines, fields, etc.) into
the warehouse proper. These ox carts can also be used to move goods to
neighbouring regions (only if they belong to the same realm) if thus
instructed by the realm ruler or region commander. However, this transport
is slow, taking about twice as long as a trade with his caravans would.