Basic Trading in the Mediterranean

The Mediterranean is full of interesting cities, people and produce. As a merchant, keeping tabs on the current prices of goods in cities is a must.

Profitable trading has two advantages. First, it gives you money which you can use to buy more goods, better equipment, a larger ship, etc. Second, it gives you experience in the form of ship experience (Structure Level) and personal experience (Eloquence).

Structure will allow access to new and better merchant ships at Levels 11, 21, 31, ...

Eloquence will allow you to purchase more valuable goods (Purchasing), bribe away pirate attacks for less silver (Negotiation) or vend more goods at your stall (Vendition [sic]).

Doing merchant quests at lower levels will give you much money as well as experience. Many of these involve fetch-me-something-type missions.

For example, the Merchant Guild in Genoa may ask you to fetch 75 glassware. Glassware is produced in Athens so you'll need to sail there to get it. Also, glassware is heavy. Depending on your ship, you will need to shuttle between Athens and Genoa a few times to get to the required number. You can also buy goods in Genoa that you can sell in Athens. That would make the mission more profitable--xp-wise and silver-wise. You can equip your ship with a water-based figurehead in order to increase its cargo capacity.

Don't forget not to get overloaded because it slows you down a lot. This limit is actually 70% of your total cargo capacity.

You can either choose to use a full crew or a minimum crew. Using a full crew will enable you to become more flexible--ride out storms, fend off pirates, do a little exploring on sparkling areas (sailors may get unhealthy or maybe even die when exploring)--without getting the speed penalty for having less than minimum healthy crew members. However, crew cost provisions and provisions cost cargo space. Having a minimum crew will allow you to carry more goods for trading. But make sure you bring a fat purse to bribe attacking pirates.