How to Earn Easy Gold in Total War: Warhammer III

Managing your economy in Total War: Warhammer III is very important to having a smooth and successful campaign. The game has a tendency of throwing lots of enemies at you, and you can sometimes end up feeling limited by a lack of income, especially on the higher difficulties. 

There is a helpful trick you can do to get decent amounts of bonus loot, however. 

There is a new mechanic that was introduced to Total War: Warhammer III at launch, and it is present in both the Realms of Chaos and Immortal Empires campaign: The Ivory Road Caravans of Grand Cathay. 

If you are playing as any faction in the Old World, from the Mountains of Mourn to Marienburg, you will probably have noticed these caravans routinely passing through your land. 

If you haven't played as a Cathayan faction then you might not know how they work - they are dispatched by Cathayan factions to various notable settlements throughout the old world, such as Altdorf, Marienburg, Karaz-a-Karak, and several others. Cathay pays a fee when they dispatch the caravan, and if it reaches its destination they earn a big profit. The armies that guard the caravan tend to be fairly small and fairly weak... you can probably see where I am going with this. 

Playing as pretty much any faction, you can attack these caravans. If you defeat them, you will steal the profit that would have gone to the faction who sent it. The money is pretty good too, ranging from around 10,000 gold in the early game, to potentially closer to 100,000 in the late game. And that's just from one battle. 

Doing this obviously means war with the owner of the caravan, but if you are fairly distant to Cathay then you probably won't have to worry about any real repercussions. Cathay tend to have their hands full with Ogres, Skaven, Lizardmen, and Vampires, not to mention the constant risk of Chaos incursions through the Great Bastion, so even with the anti-player bias that is present in the campaign AI's behavior, they are unlikely to send forces halfway across the continent to enact revenge on you for raiding their caravan. 

It's hard to predict exactly when and where the caravans will show up, but you can get a better idea by starting a campaign as Grand Cathay and opening the Ivory Road menu. This contains a map which shows all of the caravan destinations, as well as the locations that they will stop off at over the course of their journey. 

So you could try to farm the caravans by keeping an army hanging around these locations, or alternatively take a more laid back approach and only attack caravans that stray too close to an army that you already have on the campaign map. 

However you choose to go about it, quite a lot of players don't know about the huge rewards you can earn from defeating caravans in Total War: Warhammer III, so hopefully you found this article useful.