Hello, ACKS mercantile system defender anon here, back to address your concerns from last thread.

>>96950565
>>96950667
>most villages were MUCH closer than 24 miles to the place they traded their grain with
Sure, but it's not even a necessary assumption for the village to be further than 24 miles from the city to make a profit from trading, it's just a quick way to increase it. Let's instead calculate the profits from a village that's exactly 24 miles away: Travel time is 4 days, supply cost is about 9,14 GP. City and village are 2 points closer in demand, meaning we sell only at 4 steps in our favor, so gross income is reduced to 25.6 GP. Everything else stays constant, so our expected profit is about 2.54 GP for the 28 day trip. That's only enough for a wretched life style, so you might want to improve that by negotiating for better prices. Fortunately, I was curious about what we stand to gain by doing this, so I quickly calculated it as well. In short, it will increase our expected profits to 6.12 GP in this case.
This assumes that our travelling trader is a typical merchant, so that any modifiers to the negotiation roll cancel each other out, and that we try to get better prices both when purchasing and selling. It also carries an approximate 10% risk to offend one of the other parties and we won't get to sell any grain that month.

>>96950667
>Hell, there is LITERALLY a map included in that section, and I don't think there's even a spot on the map where a village would be outside of another market's influence range
That map is actually full of examples of what I'm suggesting. On page 200 it says "all of the forts have villages with 75 – 160 families and market class VI", so locations like Andrastem, Sarotem, Kruantem, Mityatem and Luseatem have no other market in their range.