The benefit is twofold here. 1: you can get all of the coin that the village has. 2: trading this way counts towards raising your trade skill. This trading method works great, until you start getting around 160-200 (kind of a guess on my part as I didn’t realize myself until I was around 205) level in the trade skill.
The way to level smithing is to smith. Smith big ol' two-handers. The bigger and shinier the better. Convert all your crappy bandit loot to raw materials and smith them into better stuff. Buy pugios and smelt them down into raws. Parts are random.
Edit: For leveling companions, set up controlled encounters. For example, say you want your companions to level bow. Find some forest bandits and make a shield wall. Place your companions slightly behind and offset. Then the shield wall will soak up the bandits' arrows while your companions gain XP. Desert bandit hideouts work best for this.
Give them crossbows instead of bows (especially Ymira), bows are murderers when properly leveled up but crossbows are more effective at low levels, and good if you don't want to sink many points into powerdraw/horse-archery. 3. Give them horses, it will increase their survivability a lot. Also don't worry, leveling companions probably isn't
It seems that best way to use companion parties is to keep them in your army 100% of the time. Which keeps them safe and levels your leadership(the only way!). So quartermaster and medicine mostly. Maybe engineering too, since non-army-leader parties can level it, they probably contribute too.
The only problem is, they're kinda slow to level. So given the way leveling works, I'm wondering if there's an ideal set of skills to level up with a new build. Right now, I'm thinking of this combination; - Polearm and 2-handed: these fit together really well, you're leveling 2 skills simultaneously here.
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mount and blade bannerlord best way to level up trade
