Trade Value
The answer
Formula
Quantity × base price at this patch; perks and demand shift real prices.
Trade is how a settlement pays for everything it cannot produce. It also punishes breadth harder than any other system. This calculator prices a shipment at the current patch's base rates; the prose below is about why that number is only half the decision.
Sell few things in volume
Sell two or three goods heavily per region rather than six or seven lightly. A trading post spread across many goods becomes hopelessly inefficient. The workers spend their time cycling between products instead of moving any one of them at scale. Worse, every new export route costs coin to open, and the price climbs the more routes you already run, so the seventh route is dramatically more expensive than the first.
An early treasury cannot absorb that, which is why opening trade routes in your first year is usually a mistake regardless of how attractive the prices look.
Process before you sell
Raw resources are worth a fraction of their finished form. Ore sells for roughly a third of what the tools made from it fetch, so exporting raw ore is barely worth the cart. The same logic runs through the whole economy: wool is worth more as clothing, grain is worth more as bread, hides are worth more as leather.
It also decides which finished good to make. Sidearms are a better use of iron than mail armour, because they cost half the slabs for a comparable price. The calculator's per-unit figures are the right place to check that comparison before committing a workshop.
One clean trick if you hold the same rich resource in two regions: sell it raw in one and finished in the other. You capture both markets without either post spreading itself thin.
Importing food is how treasuries die
With exactly one exception. Buying wheat cheaply, baking it into bread and selling the bread on turns a real profit, and always has. Everything else on the food side is a slow bleed. Imports are for one-off needs like stone for a church or iron for an armoury, never for monthly survival.
Bartering is a different tool, not a cheaper one
Pack stations sidestep trading posts altogether, which is useful, but they have no send limits. Never barter anything critical: honey, wax, pelts and hides are safe because running them to zero costs you nothing, whereas an empty food stock is a starving town. If you must barter food, mass-produce it first and build redundancy.
Throttle with ratios, not trust. A bread-for-iron trade at 1:5 drains fast. Swapping the bread side to wheat or flour changes the ratio and slows the drain to something you can watch. Empire-wide barter networks reliably fail: one side floods while the other starves. Treat every region as self-supplying for vegetables, meat, fruit, barley, wool and hides.
Perks that move these numbers
Two are worth planning around. Better Deals is the money perk, because it cuts import prices across the board. Trade Logistics caps a new trade route at 25 gold, which turns the escalating route cost above from a hard ceiling into a rounding error.
