Viking conquest, best enterprise

[The CEO of Based]

what are the enterptises that work best, and where?

[FourGreenFields]

Depending on the city either brewery, wool weavery, or ironworks iIrc. Just check which of those brings the most profit in that town, you want one in every town anyway.
The other weavery usually won't bring any profit (because reasons), and mill only abour 200-300 peningas which is a good bit less than what the other farmsteads give.

[White Knight]

Honestly, I am pretty much convinced that there is little to no point in wasting any amount of money on businesses in Viking Conquest. Given the enormous costs and the paltry returns, it would probably take you about six months before you see any profits.

That is six months (or more) of game time...for nothing...so you can start getting 253 pennings a week, or so?

[FourGreenFields]

Originally posted by White Knight:

Honestly, I am pretty much convinced that there is little to no point in wasting any amount of money on businesses in Viking Conquest. Given the enormous costs and the paltry returns, it would probably take you about six months before you see any profits.

That is six months (or more) of game time...for nothing...so you can start getting 253 pennings a week, or so?

Six months isn't that much time if you plan on building a kindom.
And it's about 500-800 peningas usually.

[Tuidjy]

Originally posted by FourGreenFields:

Originally posted by White Knight:

That is six months (or more) of game time...for nothing...so you can start getting 253 pennings a week, or so?

Six months isn't that much time if you plan on building a kindom. And it's about 500-800 peningas usually.

With a little bit of effort, it's even more than that.

When you buy an enterprise, do not just look at the weekly income. See how much money is needed to buy the materials, and remember that wool can be found for 40-100 and iron for 100-160 in villages and sometimes stone quarries.

As you travel the map, stop and check villages. You can make an easy 200-300 coins per village just buying the cheap food and reselling it, but by buying wool and iron and using that in your enterprises, you get 1000-1600 weekly income. You do not have to do it all that often - just gather the materials in a chest in the city, and when your enterprise income goes down in the budget report, go to the city, and dump all your saved materials in the master smith/weaver's inventory.

Here is an old budget of mine. Quite a few of the enterprises are working off materials supplied by the player character.

[Atomicbean]

Another main reason for enterprises is that they can generally cover your wages before you get any fiefs. As someone that often plays the early-game for far longer than is really needed, you can generally afford a rather large "mercenary" army (not actual mercenaries, just a army not belonging to a faction.) just off 4-5 enterprises, so all the loot/quest rewards/etc. get to be banked for gear upgrades or future funds. I'll generally get mid-tier gear for my comps and close to top tier gear for myself and bank at least 100k before I join a faction, so the free wages is really useful. also lets you spend a larger % of your money, since you don't have to keep the wages on you. (being able to spend all 30k you have instead of only 20-25k because you have to keep a week or 2 of wages can make a huge difference when it comes to buying more expensive gear, buying more enterprises, etc.)

Basically I look at enterprises as paying my troop's wages 6 months in advance and then having free upkeep from there on for X amount of troops, rather than as actual potential for profit. (this is for native, VC, etc. - mods like perisno, where there's more ways to make money and more valuable enterprises, I usually see as straight up profit.)

[White Knight]

It seems I am confused. I was under the impression that it was you, Tuidgy, who provided the cost breakdowns for Warband. Given the massive increases in upfront costs and the dramatically decreased incomes, I figured those old arguments for Warband being questionably profitable were compelling for VC.

Wool was how I funded all of my previous playthroughs but in my last game, I never saw any cheap stuff for sale. The Frisians seemed to stay mad at me forever as well, which is why I didn't bother going to Dorestad until the endgame.

High profit-margins on Iron is something I hadn't noticed but I'll check it out next time.

Trading and investments were always a highlight for me in Mount & Blade but with VC, it seems very clear that the devs disapprove of business ventures and appear to consider that "un-Viking-like" behaviour...despite the fact that archaeology shows us exactly the opposite was true.

Balance-scales, chop-silver and molds for making Thor pendants alongside Christian crosses, come to mind. In my way of thinking, I don't believe that the ancient Vikings made much of a distinction between commerce and combat - they were both legitimate methods for getting more silver.

No matter how you slice it, VC has nerfed the economy brutally, making it quite different from the Warband experience. It changed enough for this player to go from having a business in every town to finishing the game with two bakeries and a brewery, because that was all that I could afford. I also never built any ships or bought any high-end gear from the merchants...just a few upgrades from the smiths. I was still wearing Orm's Lorica at the end.

[Tuidjy]

I remember writing posts about how to make money in Warband, but it was a long time ago. As I played different mods in between Warband and Viking Conquest, I was not thinking of one as I played the other. If I said anything then, I surely meant it... but I meant what I said about Viking Conquest as well.

In Warband, you can be a wealthy trader by just sticking to cities - spice, velvet, iron, etc... have wildly different prices, depending on where you buy them. Viking Conquest allows trading runs, but they are not cost effective if you trade only with the cities. The best deals are in the villages.

Even a very poor player can make some money by buying cheap fish, honey, chicken, etc... in villages and reselling them in cities. But this is time consuming, and not all that profitable. I do it still, but only because I check the villages anyway - to kick bandits out, to improve relations, and most importantly, to look for wool and iron.

Iron and wool, together with silver and furs, seem to have a much greater profit margin, and can bring a few hundred each by being resold. And you can make even more money, if you use the iron to build tools and the wool to weave cloth.

The reason Viking Conquest's enterprises are more profitable is that basic materials are more easily found in villages, that players get storage chests in almost every city (as opposed to only three secret chests in Warband) and that the price at which farmsteads buy is higher than the price merchants give you for your loot.

In three months, a smithy more than pays for itself, because you can get the dozen pallets of iron for 1000-2000 from villages. I do not bother with getting an enterprise in every city, because I do not have a problem making cash flow. In my first (and only real one so far) play through Viking Conquest, I got a few enterprises, but the story line led three of them under sequestration. I stopped buying any, but then I started swimming in money, and noticed the cheap iron in stone quarries, so I bought farmsteads in the cities under my own control.

But enterprises are more about peace of mind than about efficiency. 9 companions can make 40-50K per week killing bandits. In Viking Conquest, money comes from loot... just like it comes from land leases in Floris, caravan taxation in Gekokujo, and improvements in Prophecy of Pendor. Every mod is different.

[MikiTheBerserkr]

Originally posted by Tuidjy:

Originally posted by FourGreenFields:

Six months isn't that much time if you plan on building a kindom. And it's about 500-800 peningas usually.

With a little bit of effort, it's even more than that.

When you buy an enterprise, do not just look at the weekly income. See how much money is needed to buy the materials, and remember that wool can be found for 40-100 and iron for 100-160 in villages and sometimes stone quarries.

It's just like trading...
You don't need enterprises to do that, so profit from it shouldn't be counted as profit from enterprise...

Anyway enterprises don't give you much money, and take long time before you start getting back invested money...
If you were about to live in Viking Conquest, be there for years - it would be smart to buy enterprises.
But noone plays this game for so long (or at least most players don't), so they are better off just keeping these tens of thousands of peningas, and earning more the same way they did earlier.