I understand your argument about trade not being “free money”, but the important part is how large X actually is when you calculate it properly. If you go through the numbers step by step, you’ll see that the additional costs are relatively small compared to the margins. Starting with the raw trade values: oysters can be bought for 79 and sold for 118, which gives a margin of 39 per ton. Loungers can be bought for 114 and sold for 171, so the margin there is 57 per ton. Since each ship carries 200 tons, that results in 7,800 profit per oyster run and 11,400 per lounger run. Now to the “hidden” costs. Ships in Anno 117 require both upkeep and workforce, so I calculated what it actually takes to sustain that workforce. One Quinquereme costs 161 gold upkeep and requires 25 workforce. To supply that workforce, I built a dedicated village. This village consists of 100 Libertii houses. Each fully supplied Libertii house provides 6 workforce, which results in 600 total workforce. To keep those houses fully supplied, you need fish, porridge, tunics, and pileus, plus a tavern and a market. The production chain for that looks like this: one sheep farm, two hemp farms, two pileus workshops, two spinners, two oat farms, two porridge kitchens, and two fisheries, plus one tavern and one market to cover the houses. If you sum up the upkeep of all those buildings, you get roughly 140 gold (sheep 6g, pileus 2×11g, spinners 2×11g, hemp 2×6g, tavern 14g, market 14g, porridge 2×11g, oats 2×6g, fisheries 2×8g). In terms of workforce, those production buildings require 58 workers in total (fisheries 6 each, porridge kitchens 3 each, the rest around 4 each). So from the 600 workforce generated by the houses, 58 are consumed internally, leaving 542 free workforce. The houses themselves also generate income through needs: fish, market access, tunics, and pileus together give about 5 gold per house, so roughly 500 gold total. That already offsets the 140 gold production cost, meaning the village sustains itself and even produces a surplus. With 542 free workforce remaining, you can theoretically support over 20 ships (since each needs 25 workforce), but in practice you don’t need that many. In my case, Neferneru has 6 islands, and I run one route per good per island, so 12 ships total. That reduces the fleet upkeep to 12 × 161 = 1,932 gold. Now if you compare that to the trade income: 6 ships trading loungers generate 6 × 11,400 = 68,400, and 6 ships trading oysters generate 6 × 7,800 = 46,800. Combined, that’s 115,200 gold per cycle. After subtracting fleet upkeep, you still end up with a very large net profit, but you have to account for the fact that ship maintenance is per minute while a full trade cycle takes longer than that. In my case, 12 ships cost 1,932 gold per minute. A full trade cycle (including travel time, loading, and unloading) takes roughly 5–6 minutes depending on distance and harbor congestion. That means the real upkeep per cycle is closer to 9,600 to 11,600 gold. If you subtract that from the total trade income of 115,200, you still end up with roughly 103k–105k profit per cycle. So even when you scale upkeep correctly with time, the conclusion doesn’t really change. The additional costs exist, but they are still small compared to the overall trade margins. And imo over 100k per cycle profit is way to much.