Hey guys.
I recently bought this game for cheap from my local game store, and have been having a blast. The only problem I have is that I always seem to be low on money (Denars) and gaining enough to pay for some decent equipment seems like an impossible feat. So, where did I go wrong?

I could really use any tips you guys have for this game. So far I've made my living off hunting down bandits and looting their hideouts, along with a side order of selling off prisoners and slaughtering deserters.

Also I pretty much gave up on my first character after being caught looting a village, being caught by a count's party, glitching which forced me to lose money for being captured TWICE, and then escaping with nothing left to my name D:

in order to be rich, you must be a bitch too. Ally some nation, plunder enemy nation's villages, leave nation, repeat process killing everyone on your way there.
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Oh, prisioners give some nice booty, make sure to have your prisioner management skill to 5 or something.

Doing exactly that is what lead to me being captured in the first place :/

If you can't afford a high level army, use only companions in the beggining and put them all on horses. If some big enemy comes to attack you, you can run away easily.

Put 3-4 points in looting and kill sea raiders repeatedly. The smaller your party is, the more loot you get (or so I think).

Ok, this is how to get a huge army that's a good level.

Go to villages and recruit the peasants. Keep a low amount and get a new one everytime some die. So probably like 10-20 depending on how fast you want them to level up. They're cheap and you'll be doing a lot of the work in fights but that's fine, just attack small groups of bandits. Find which people are at war and try to join one of them this will get you money. Kill the enemy's merchants and loot their villages then sell the shit. Be sure to keep moral up and eventually your army will be like 60 people soon enough if you keep getting more peasants it'll still be pretty cheap too, once they're all grown up they cost more but at that point you should have a decent amount of money. IF you want you can start buying the mercanary people. So yada yada once you have a ton of people you can defeat the enemy's army that attacks you most of the time. If you lose, reload the game and don't fight them lolol. After a lot of wars and doing quests for the king people you can get a castle. This is about as far as I got but it's a lot of work keeping a castle when you're at war with like every country because they jelly of all the land I caught. OH YEAH, that reminds me, once you have a large strong army you can start attacking the enemy's castles that are weak and capturing them. The king will reward you money.

Alright thanks.
So far i've been taking Odlov's and Sid's advice and have been slaughtering sea raiders (easy enough, just had my recruits and companions without horses stay back while I circled them with my horse gradually cutting them down 1 by 1), so I have a decent amount of money. I've been spending it on mercs and horses since I got some decent armor and weapons from the raiders.
I've joined the Kherjit Khanate since they seem to always be at war with someone, but they haven't been paying me too well (120 denars a week ) and I keep getting caught looting villages. I had great fun when one village tried to stand up against me though! So many dead farmers...

In my oppinion you shouldn't waste money on mercs until you're already rich and have money to blow. Better off just using a ton of peasants and leveling them up. Kill the merchants to get expensive loot, btw.

Real Gs manually block in multiplayer. THAT IS ALL YOU NEED TO KNOW.
( Also, if you want to improve the gameplay, there's some mods that really improve on the core game at http://forums.taleworlds.com/ )

Reviving thread for new question:

How do you start a LAN game?
I've noticed there's an option in multiplayer to search your Local Area Network for games when you're on the "join" screen, but in the "host" screen I don't see any option for specifying the game as a LAN one. Either it doesn't exist or i'm blind.
My best guess is that you just host a game as normal and then others just search it up under LAN in the join menu?
Also I want the game to be offline.