That happened to me, too. Maybe it's scripted? It did thin out the opposition a little, though, so I was fine about it.
Not scripted, no. My little excursion to the island went perfectly, nobody ever knew i was there. Except me, obviously, and the person who paid me to be there.
I know they said i could kill the guards if i wanted to, but that would have made the mission nothing more than another dungeon crawl or generic go here-KILL-collect macguffin quest so i did it all sneaky sneaky to make it interesting.
The thing with vendors having limited funds is the same as Morrowind. The easiest way to work around it (or at least it worked in Morrowind, not tried it in Skyrim yet) is to sell as much as you can, then wait a day (press T once out of the vendor UI), and repeat.
Thing is, in Morrowind most traders had like 2k gold, max, same as SKyrim. But there were a couple who had 50k+ (or whatever). Whereas Skyrim seems not to have that. That sell-wait-sell-wait-sell-wait-buy-sell method becomes a bit impractical when you have 10 million gold's worth of stuff to sell and the trader has 1k of gold.
Having said that, there's fuck all worth paying for in this game so it's not worth it anyway. You can buy a house in every town just from the gold you get directly from chests/quests. Unlike in Morrowind where getting a full set of gear enchanted would cost a few million.
Skyrim needs a Mudcrab Merchant (nod)
Aye, or a scamp. Or a mod :Y
You say that, but I had to buy a new bow yesterday after going up against a Draugr (or whatever they're called) that shouted at me and made me drop my bow. I couldn't find it after the fight, and I tend not to use enchanted bows for everyday fighting, so I had to buy a glass bow from an NPC.
That's what I mean. weapons and armour are not going to cost you more than 20k or so which is pocket change after a few quests/dungeons. Whereas in Morrowind it was more like 2 million.
Well, I won't be making one. It stretched my modding limits just making SuperScamp for Morrowind.