First of all, big thanks to all people that gave additional tips! With that help and the latest gameplay experience I finally update this guide - which I wanted to do earlier but you know, life does not always leave enough time for gaming. Now let's see what's new!

Money makes the world go around and so it does in Wartales, too.

You need it for:
- repairing your equipment (don't try to fight completely damaged)
- healing your party (injuries come with a lot of disadvantages and make fight hard to impossible)
- pay wages and keep the party from leaving

So, how to get money? If you haven't figured out how to win all the fights - which is fairly hard at first - fighting and selling loot does not really cut it. But there's an intriguing steady way of income: prisoners! I'll mention trade later on.

East of the first city, there's a prison. Buy at least 3 shackles there. They cost 20 Krowns each - to get that first money, you can gather resources and sell them. An easy - however limited - way of making some quick money is getting some iron ore (there's a mine east of Stromkapp and it's out in the open in the mountains), crafting lockpicks and selling them.

In a fight, you need one of your units to engage an enemy and damage his health until below 50%. Another unit can approach and then capture the enemy (shown as a new skill when capture is possible). The lower the health, the higher the capture chance, so best damage them bad enough before you waste the action point of a unit - I usually try to capture when the chance is higher than 70%. An attempt to capture uses one basic action point, meaning one unit can only use the main strike OR attempt to capture in one round. However, you can use a special action like heavy strike and attempt to capture during the same turn, which I use a lot! You can capture humans with shackles and animals with ropes. However, you can only turn in captured outlaws at the prison for money, so that does not work with merchants, soldiers or refugees!

Bonus tip: if you accept a mission to get rid of an outlaw squad, fight them and capture three of their members while doing so. That leads to a double reward, firstly the mission reward and secondly the reward when doing the following:

Go to the prison (best before the day is over so you don't need to feed three more mouths) and click 'hand-over a prisoner'. You can turn in up to 3 prisoners every 24 hours, your reward depends now on their level (~60 Krowns for level 3 and 70 for level 4). Like that I went from bankrupcy to a decent amount of money, could upgrade my gear and enlarge my party so now I'm gaining money with a mix of quests and prisoners.

Now about trading!

As many have mentioned correctly before, trading is an easy way of income. In my opion, that applies for mid-game due to the following reasons but I'm completely open to suggestions how to use it in early game!

For trading, you need access to at least two cities, so you need to cross at least one border. Crossing the border requires either a border pass for which you need to finish the five main missions of a region (and that takes some time) or pay 200 Krowns - for which you need to gain some money first. Trade goods are the costly goods sold by the central trader at the meat markets, they cost around 50 Krowns but sell with a nice additional margin where there's demand for that.

At this point I'd be very grately for tips from the hive mind!

I know that once you have access to several regions trade missions pop up, telling you where to sell which goods. After having these sold, hovering the cursor over the city on a map tells you what you've sold there so that record helps you to develop your own trade routes. But is there a way to know cities trade demands before doing that so you could directly pick up some goods and go there?

You can bypass the border control by using two pitons (craft rope + iron ore): climb the hill South of the border Tiltren/Arthes and place a piton where the rope leads to the left side of the border. Et voilà, border crossed without paying!
That works for Vertruse and the region bordering North-East to Vertruse as well but only when you come from that other region as you can only climb the hill from one side.

Hope that helps, have fun with this great game! :) And if you'd like to do some coop, feel free to text me or send a friend request!