elcome Wealthy Investor!

We here at the Treasury House are honoured that you have entrusted us with the management of your extensive assets. Our expertise in this area will enable you to make the most out of your holdings and it will be held in complete safety in the most secure vault in all of Skyrim. All of Markarths guards are vigilantly at work protecting your riches in the famously secure City of Stone!

ervices

Weekly Updates - Each Fredas we draw up a report of the exact rate of return from each of our trading routes based on the previous weeks performance. On the same day, we also update a daily and annual chart of historic performance for each of the routes.

Personalised Reports - Each Fredas we draw up a report for you with exact figures on how much profit or loss you have made on each of your routes, and update personalised graphs showing you your previous months and years performance.

Full Control - At any time you may withdraw all your investments and interest accrued to date.

You Decide - Tell us where you want to invest! A new account is invested equally in all of our trade routes - at any given time some of these will be profitable and some will be generating a loss. Divide your invested gold up between these routes as you please - speak to our staff in the treasury house, or dispatch a scribe to us with instructions from anywhere in Skyrim! For more details on hiring personal scribes, see our extra services.

Interest - Interest is paid into your account each Fredas.

Fees - Returns shown to you in our books already have all fees pre-deducted from them for your convenience.

xtras

Our Insights - The rate of return on a route will rise or fall depending on the trading conditions on the route. Instead of scouring all of Skyrim yourself asking traders about conditions, for a fee, we will provide you with all we know about the current weeks trading conditions. Just ask at the counter. It is our long built up relationships with traders from all over Skyrim that let us provide this information to you.

Your own personal scribe - For a once off fee, we will provide you with the means to call for one of our personal scribes anywhere in Skyrim. Your scribe will deliver your reports to you anywhere in Skyrim. Once a day you may call for a personal scribe who will deliver your reports and return with your updated instructions on how you want your investments dispersed, and will carry back any gold you want invested along with any valuables you want safely stored in the Treasury House.

We strongly recommend that you hire guards to escort the scribe if you send more than a small amount of gold back with him! Shipments that cross regions experiencing unsafe trading conditions will be attacked more often, and by larger groups of bandits. Larger shipments of gold to the Treasury House will attract the attention of more powerful bandits - the underworld has a way of finding out about these things.

Open an Account Today!

Speak to Rhiada in the Markarth Treasury House and ask about opening up one of our special accounts.

After opening an account, you can view your reports and update your instructions to us using the ledger on the counter (or by hiring a personal scribe from us!).

You can lodge cash for investing and store valuables for safekeeping in the deposit box located to the left on the wall of the main vault. Note although we will keep any items you wish for you for safekeeping in our deposit box, only lodged gold will be invested. You may also send us gold and items for investing or safekeeping by using one of our personal scribes. Do not lose your key - you will need it to access your deposits.

Advice for the New Investor
You will notice some routes are much more volatile than others as their security situation is more changeable. Higher profits may be made on these routes during a good week, but if not watched closely, you may lose a lot of money in a bad week. Some routes are less volatile, and will almost always return a small profit, but the price for this lack of risk is you may be missing out on larger profits elsewhere. Some routes are seasonal, and may stay unchanged for many weeks at a time only to rapidly change from making a profit to a loss when pirate ships return for their hunting season...

Talk to traders! When you are out and about, talk to traders and shopkeepers. They will often have knowledge of the trading conditions in their area. This will let you know if returns for that route will rise or fall that week. Of course, you can always buy this information in the Treasury House, but this is knowledge you can find yourself for free with a little legwork.

Get a feel for how a route is behaving by looking at its annual and monthly graphs and finding the trading conditions on the route. The annual graph shows you how the route behaves in the long term, and the monthly graph shows you how it behaved day to day up to the last Fredas - whether it was currently rising or falling at the time. Note that the graphs are only updated once a week, so the longer it has been since the last Fredas and the nearer you draw to the next Fredas payday, the more uncertainty there will be about the rate of return on the route - unless, of course, you have been paying attention to the trading conditions!

Help with security! Bandits, forsworn and dangerous creatures that prey on travellers all reduce security in an area and drive down profits. If a lot of them have been killed in an area, you will see the trading conditions in the area improve, and profits along with them. Needless to say, if merchants, traders, guards or carriage drivers in an area are killed, this will have a bad affect on the trading conditions and reduce profits on a route.

Reading the graphs
The graphs have numbers on them on the left showing the percent rate of return of the route, and a vertical bar is drawn for each day that passes (or week, depending on the graph), showing the rate of return that day. For example, in this graph



You can see a fairly stable route - over the previous year the rate of return on the Whiterun route fell from 6.4% to a loss of -7.2%, before rising to 14%, falling back to 4.6%, briefly stabilising before falling to -5.1%, rising back to 14% and is again currently falling, giving a current return of 4.6%

Battle Reports
If you do engage the use of our personal scribes, it is strongly recommended that you hire guards for them when shipping more than one hundred gold or so. Guards are better fighters than all but the strongest bandits, and are better trained than all of them, using better tactics when in a group - guards will protect injured members of their party where possible, allowing them to survive to recover and fight again in the next hold. Pay attention to the trading conditions of the holds your caravan will have to cross. If they are all Perfect, the scribe will be able to travel in complete safety. If they are all perilous, you should hire a strong escort.

When one of your caravans arrives at the Treasury house, a caravan report will be sent to you.





For the player - how caravan battles work
Caravans travel from where you are through each hold until they pass through The Reach and get to the Treasury House in Markarth.

A hold with poor trading conditions is more likely to generate an attack, and the number of bandits is a random number that depends on the trading conditions. For example, if a route is "Perilous", it may generate an attack by 6 bandits, if it is "Bad" up to 4 may show up. Each individual bandits strength is also random, depending on how much gold you are shipping. Larger gold shipments allow more dangerous bandits to show up - up to the most powerful Bandit Marauders.

The guards and bandits are arranged in two straight lines of up to 6 people facing each other. Each NPC can attack one of the three NPCs directly in front of them, and will attack the weakest character they can reach. Guards and bandits attack simultaneously, and multiple rounds of combat are calculated until either all the guards or bandits are dead. As NPCs are killed, the guards and bandits move to close gaps in their lines and so the lines shrink.

Guards are better trained and have a higher chance of scoring a critical hit, though high level bandits have more health and also can do critical damage. Guards also have a small chance of deflecting a bandit attack entirely due to their better armour. Guards in large groups are also more tactical - if a guard cannot reach an opponent and has higher health than a companion, he will swap positions with the companion allowing them to avoid getting more damaged. This means if you send six guards against a group of 3 bandits it is extremely unlikely they will be able to kill any guards as the most injured guards will be able to move out of reach of the bandits. However the ability of guards is variable - luck plays a part when hiring your guards for a delivery and some of them may be weaker or stronger than usual.

Surviving guards will take the opportunity to heal up before travelling on to the next hold where they may be attacked again.

If you enable your papyrus logs, a round by round battle report is logged to them showing the positions and strength of all guards and bandits at the end of each round.

For the player - how trade routes work
The source code is included in the mod for those who are interested or who want to tinker with it.
Each route has a maximum rate of profit and loss, and behaves differently according to several factors called complacency, caution, sensitivity, volatility and sentiment.
Sentiment - these are the trading conditions. Good trading conditions will lead to a rising rate of return, poor trading conditions a falling rate.
Caution is how a route reacts to current trading conditions. If conditions are good, a more cautious route expects conditions to get worse, but a less cautious route may expect them to continue improving.
Complacency is similar, it controls whether an upward trending route will continue in that direction or trend back towards a downward direction.
Sensitivity is the likelyhood that trading conditions worsen as returns get better.
Volatility is how rapidly the returns change.